Fear & Loathing

is when it begins. Why else would it right? There's butterflies, late night, staying up talking, a sense of belonging, desire and comfort, having that one person to plan life with who's just desperate to have you around all the time.

worked in a different department, so we didn't speak. We didn't have anything to do with each other at work. But one day one of my girlfriends said to me, when we're having lunch, oh, I dare you to add him on Facebook? And so goes the world of social media. These days, you can just find someone and add them on Facebook, and it's this avenue, this way into somebody's life.

And so I did. I added him and at five oho two that night, I was driving home and he had messaged me straightaway as soon as work had finished. Oh I don't think we've formally met, is what I think, he said to me. And we spoke a little bit on and off for a couple of weeks, but nothing too intense. Bit of banter back and forth on your direct messager at work, a bit of talking a coffee here and there, but nothing really that was escalating until that point that he said, let's go for dinner, let's

do something outside of work. And I had arranged for my auntie to look after my daughter so that I could go and see him, and then I'd had to go down south that day and i'd come back and I wasn't feeling very well. So instead of going out for dinner like he had planned, I said, I'll just come over and see you if you like, rather than going out for this dinner, because I'm really not feeling out. The kids have been crazy all day, and I just need to chill. But I still want to take the

opportunity to see you. So I went to his house. We just ordered pizza. We were just watching I think we watched Focus, which is my favorite movie, and I ordered a supreme pizza. I remember it coming with anchovies, and I hate anthobies, but I ate them anyway, because I didn't just seem like I was pulling ingredients off of my pizza. I went home at a fairly reasonable time, about eleven o'clock. Nothing crazy happened. We kissed, but that

was really it. But we were basically inseparable from there. Nearly every night we would spend it together, either he would come to my house or I would go there, and it just kind of blossomed from there. He is four years older than me. He is big, musty, bit of a body builder. He's got a gorgeous face, he has really beautiful eyes. He was just magnetic in his personality, and the way that he was drawn to me almost

made me reciprocate that towards him. He was very sort of connected to me and put a lot of effort into building that in the early days, and seemed very mature and very invested, not like other people that I

had experienced previously. I hadn't really had a serious relationship since my ex partner that I had separated with two or three years prior, and I just sort of dated here and there, but everyone seemed very immature, very lacking in comparison to this man who really seemed to have his life together and the reflection of someone that you would want to build a future with rather than just someone for the here and now to kind of give that dopamine boost. We fell in love, as people do.

We would spend every weekend taking the dogs to the beach with my daughter. We would go to the gym together, we would go to work together. Because we had that connection and that ease of just being able to go everywhere together. It was really it just fit. It fit together so well. My lease then came up on my property about four months in and we made the decision that rather than me getting another rental, I would move

in with him. So at that time, my daughter and I both moved into his house with him and his two dogs and my one dog and his two cats, and we had somewhat of a farm going on down there at the time. It was a big deal. I think it was more of a big deal for me because it wasn't someone moving into my house. I was moving into his space and it would still be his and it was his home and his house, and he owned it, so he had all of the control over

that situation. And that did scare me a little bit, just with the what ifs of relationships, but I was willing to do it, thought, why not, We'll take a leap of faith, we'll see what happens and hope the best. And it wasn't long after I moved in that COVID

actually hit. So it turned out to be this blessing that I had moved in with him, because others we probably wouldn't have been able to see each other, and that would have been really, really hard after the six months we'd had by that point when COVID did hit, So we probably would have moved in together at that point anyway, just to get around all the rules.

were really amazing. Bonnie developed a really strong relationship with his dad, and his dad would come and take her for walks with the dogs and take her to the shops and they would get lollies and chocolates and do all those sneaky things that grandparents do, and that was a really really beautiful relationship to see blossom. She really loved him and he was always very open and accepting

of her, similar to his mum. His mum was really good with Bonnie in the early days and always made room for her in their life, so yeah, it felt good. We didn't have long before we found out that I was actually pregnant. COVID happened, and you're spending a lot more time together and TV shows start to diminish, And in February twenty twenty, we found out that I was

pregnant with our daughter, so that was really exciting. James's sister was also pregnant at the same time and had told us two days earlier before we found out, and she also had a little girl the same as us, and they are two weeks apart. It was amazing. Our relationship through the pregnancy was really good. We were sort of forced to be quite close and liveing in each other's pockets, and that's what James really liked. He liked to be very close, always know what I was doing,

and always be right there. He loved it. He loved me, he loved the belly, he loved the idea of becoming a dad and having a little girl. And throughout the pregnancy, I think we were sort of focused on having to move to a bigger house because we didn't have enough room for a baby as well as all of these animals, so we eventually moved to a rental and he rented his house out and we set up the rental and we had all this room and we had room for a baby, and things got really excited. I do remember

when I found out I was pregnant. I had thought, something's not quite right in my body. I don't know what's going on. And I had done a pregnancy test and there was this faintest possible line that it was positive. So I'd waited for him to get home and I kept this little test in my hand. He was wrapped. He was so excited. I remember him calling his mom straight away after me, thinking, oh, we'll just wait and we'll go and get an ultra sound before we tell anybody.

But he couldn't help himself. He called his mom, he called his sister. He was so excited to have this baby, and yeah, it was beautiful. Leah arrived just before Christmas in December, and she was born prematurely. She just needed to be monitored for things like jaundice. So I stayed in the hospital for about five days, and after those five days, I was very ready to come home, very ready to bring her back into the family and have

ever run meet her. And get lots of time at home with her, but I did go back to work when Leah was four days old. In the time leading up to Leah being born, James was very adamant that my investment property was my responsibility and if I needed to maintain that property that I would need to get the money to be able to do that. And I was on a maximum term contract at work at the time,

so I didn't get paid parntal leave. I was allowed to take parental leave and keep my job, but I wouldn't be paid, and to be able to maintain that investment property and pay for our expenses, I just I had to go back to work. They were very supportive. They allowed me to work from home, they allowed me some really flexible hours, and it wasn't until Leah was about five nearly six months, that I started going back

to the office only part time. Generally it would be one day a week and James's mum would look after Leah, and then we eventually had to enroll her in daycare when I started going back to work two and three days a week after she was about six months. James loved her, but he didn't know how to be a dad and it became very apparent that the restriction of a very small baby was really overwhelming for him. James

has ADHD and noises really set him off. Leah was a very unsettled baby, and the crying would grind at him, and you could just see that he was always so uncomfortable at home and he really didn't know how to react to when she would cry. And it was always very much my responsibility to stop her from crying and to give her everything that she needed. I had never left James with Leah when she was a baby. I never started leaving them together until she was much much

older walking could talk, those sorts of things. It wasn't it just wasn't an option. His mum would come and help look after her if I needed to go for whatever reason, but most of the time it was just I would look after her and I would take her with me if I needed to go somewhere. It was really hard having to feel that level of anxiousness if you needed to ask for help or ask for support.

So me as a person, I feel like at the time I just needed to absorb everything and do everything and try and be everything for everyone, because no one else was going to do it, and if I didn't do it, it just wouldn't get done. It was very trying, especially when you're working full time as well.

of other things that I was accepting of. It comes with steroids and spending a lot of time at the gym and a lot of time researching and focusing on that sort of thing. And given the ADHD, James would often become hyper fixated on certain things to do with bodybuilding and diet and it was difficult sometimes but we made it work. That was part of human I accepted that and we just moved forward. So he decided to

do this bodybuilding competition. And there's something called a prep which leads you up to this bodybuilding competition where you have to eat a certain way, train a certain way.

And it was during this time that James had had his work a proof for him to take parental leave, paid parental leave, as you're allowed to take it as a second partner, and he was taking it at fifty percent, so he would have two and a half days a week where he would effectively not be working, and then the other two and a half he would And I can remember during this time thinking, great, we won't have to worry about daycare because his mum had looked after

our daughter and James's sister's daughter two days a week

at this time for both of us to work. So I remember thinking, okay, well, Thursday and Friday she'll be able to do that, and Monday and Tuesday James will be able to look after Leah, and therefore we won't have this daycare expense, which will be brilliant beneath to me that he had, you know, laterally decided that Leah would stay in daycare on Monday and Tuesday, and then the Wednesday that I worked from home would also be his half day, so I would be at home anyway.

And then the Thursday Friday that his mom would look after the girls, they would be his days off. And therefore he wasn't really spending parental leave looking after Leah. He was just spending parental leave sleeping and doing the things that he wanted to do as a break for himself. He would call it. And I really didn't think that that was fair, given that I hadn't had the opportunity to have parental leave when I had just had a baby and was breastfeeding and getting up every night in

the nighttime with Leah. But I just let it happen, because sometimes you just don't have a say in these things, and you just try and work it out for the better. So in April, he did this bodybuilding competition and he was really disappointed with the results. Afterwards, he had said to me, would you mind if I smoked meth once today? I've done it before, would you care. I'm really disappointed in the results. Could you just let me have this.

I didn't know that he had done it before. I just sort of put it down to boys doing things, trying things, and I didn't think much of it. To be fair, I at the time sort of thought, Okay, if you want to do it one time. Yeah, you've just been through this really difficult prep for this competition. You're very disappointed with the result. Maybe if you just do this one time, you have a good night, you'll feel better Tomorrow we'll go back to our normal life.

The next day came and he sort of went out with his friends and didn't come home for a really long time, and when he did come home, I could tell that he was high again. I was not concerned at this point. Even I thought, oh, okay, he's just disappointed with the results. And since we'd been together, he'd

never done drugs, he'd never drank, he didn't drink. I thought that he was mature enough to be able to monitor and manage that and have a couple of days where he did whatever it was that he wanted to do, and he would come back to his normal life. He would come home and he would things would go back to normal.

then they would go out. His eyes were just starting everywhere, and he was talking crazy, wouldn't stop speaking, would walk around the house, would scratch himself like his fingers a lot, and that got progressively worse, and he was just very unsettled and couldn't sit down, was moving around a lot, decided he was going to clean out the garage, went into the garage and started tinkering around with all of

these things and just sort of stayed in there. And I had two kids to look after at this point. I was not in a position to be following him around and babying him and wondering what he was doing, so I just I left him to it. I remember bathing Lea, putting Lee into bed, and getting into bed myself and just thinking he'll come in when he's ready, and he did. He eventually went to sleep, and Monday started as Monday does. But by Tuesday he was very down. He was on this come down cycle, and he would

just take it out on me. It would be my fault that anything bad had happened. And there's one incident that my older daughter, Bonnie remembers explicitly, and he had made rice and he had put this rice on the bench in the rice cooker, and I had cooked and put food away, and I hadn't put the rice that was in the rice cooker on the bench away, and he'd fallen asleep on the couch, woke up from sleeping and came into my room and it must have been in about three or four am, and just started screaming

at me that this rice hadn't been put in the fridge, and he woke up the whole house and it was just my fault. And I was so uncaring, and I didn't love him, and he was going to leave me, and he hated me, and I was a disgusting excuse of a human and just all these really awful profanities that you could anything that you could imagine, and he was just yelling at me that I hadn't put this rice away, and I just remember thinking, rice is about ten dollars. Why don't we just cook some more rice.

It's not the end of the world. But this rice was specific, and he needed to eat his meal at five am because of his diet, because of his bodybuilding, and I had compromised that, and that was very confronting. There were lots of instances like that in the weeks that followed. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to confront him. He didn't listen to anything that I would say. He didn't care about how it made me feel. He really didn't care about my opinion

at all. He had just sort of started to spiral into this place where he was the most righteous, important person in the world and nobody else mattered. And every time I would bring it up, I would be met with this complete shock, as though what I was asking was for him to chop his leg off rather than for him to stop abusing methamphetamines. Kid was born very prematurely. He was born at thirty four weeks in December twenty twenty three, but he was a trooper. He was two

point four kilos. He came out screaming he was ready to just be in the world. So by the time we got to that point, James and I were in a reasonable place. He was still doing a lot of drugs. He was still going out every weekend, but I had

numbed myself to it. When Cad was born, he had to stay nick you and I was able to stay at the hospital for the first night, but because there was nothing wrong with me, I then was discharged from the hospital the next day, and I had to go back and forth in the following days to be there for him and be at home for the kids and cook dinners and do shopping and do all of those things.

So I would be at the hospital for about eight hours, which would enable me to do two feeds and the nappy change in the bath, and then I would come home for three and a half hours, and then I would go back for eight hours. It was Christmas Eve and James was at home with his friends, and I had been to the hospital. I was there with cad.

I was waiting for an eleven PM feed so that I could come home and finish off what I needed to get ready for Christmas Day the next day, so that I could go to the hospital, feed Caid, come back and be there for the girls in the morning.

And I got this message from James telling me that he thought that he was overdosing and he didn't know what he was going to say to his mom, and his mum was going to be so devastated on Christmas Day because he was dying and he was outside on the road, and I just remember thinking, oh, well, if that's the end of the story, then that's the end of the story. And his friends were at the house, but he had said that he was out the front and he was walking up and down the street. He'd

done too much drugs, he wasn't overdosing. And one of his friends that happened to be there that day, he is an AMT for work, so I had called him despite James asking me not to, and I had asked him to go and check on James and tell me whether an ambulance needed to be called, tell me what the situation was. And his heart rate was slightly elevated, but he was fine. He just needed to calm down, drink some water, and go back inside. So James's friend took him back inside and kept me updated for the

next couple of hours, and I didn't go home. I waited to do the feed at the hospital, and I went home afterwards. And I remember sitting next to him that night and saying, it's enough. You've had your fun. We have a baby that's going to be coming back to this house in the next few days who needs my attention. I don't have time for you to be behaving like you're an eighteen year old juvenile. It's ridiculous. James was thirty two at this point, he had been a dad for a few years. He had a new son.

He needed to let go of the drugs and take our relationship in our family life more seriously. Boxing day came. I went to the hospital, I picked Caate up, I got the all good from the doctors, and then there's me walking out of the hospital with this premature baby, car set in one arm, three bags in the other hand, this little baby, and about to drive him home all by myself. I got home and Leah and Bonnie saw

him and they were besotted by him. But he missed all of that because he was in bed for two days on a come down, sleeping. He barely came out of the bedroom. During that time. I was by myself figuring out how to look after this baby that I just brought home, who was sick. We were supposed to have visiting midwife services when we were discharged, and no one ever contacted us. So I really was alone in this situation, looking after an older daughter, my younger daughter,

and then this little baby with no support. So I took ten weeks off and that was it. Because I got ten weeks off paid and during that time, I was expected to care for him, fully look after the other two children, fully run the house, do all of the things that I was meant to do because I was on maternity leave and that was my job. Despite the fact that when James had previously been on prin

to leave, that was time for him. So that didn't go down too well with me, and I think that I probably became a little bit more distant at this time, and I was deliberately distancing myself from what he was doing because the drug use didn't stop, it just kept getting worse. There would be people at my house on Sunday nights, Monday nights when I'm trying to keep the kids in a good routine. Sunday night, his friends are

coming over. They're doing god knows what. They would send me the randomest emails at one and two am that I would wake up to the next day about gym programs they were writing, or business ventures that they're going to go on. You get this sense of grandeur when you take math and you think you're suddenly invincible, and that is exactly what he felt. He was invincible and no one was going to stop him, and he could do whatever he wanted, and he was untouchable.

this other house that we want to build. So we had started looking at replacing things like the carpets and getting it painted just so it was a bit fresh for when our family moved back in. And I was calculating square meterage of the carpet to do with the quotes and stuff that I had received, And I picked up James's work phone and I went to calculate one of the rooms and I remember seeing the Snapchat app. Now our whole relationship of until this point, I was

under the impression that James did not use Snapchat. I had been made to delete my Snapchat account quite early on because he didn't trust Snapchat. He thought, you don't have Snapchat unless you're doing things that you shouldn't do on Snapchat because the messages disappear. And I thought it was so strange that this app would even be on

his phone when he didn't have an account. So I clicked on the app and his account was just logged in, and I started going through it, and much to my dismay, there were hundreds of messages to girls that went back over one hundred weeks, so that nearly two years. There were photos being exchanged. There were things like him saying, well, I have a seven and a half inch cock and I know how to use it to women wherever they were,

and I was really confronted. There were videos of people having sex, him having sex with this other woman, and I just remember looking at all of these and thinking, Wow, I've really missed this. I've had the wool pulled over

my eyes. He would often be quite abrasive towards me and accused me of cheating on him, despite the fact that I was at home with all of these kids and this baby, and I was always the one doing the wrong thing, and I didn't confront James about these images or what I had found straight away, because I was too scared of his reaction. I was scared of what he would do to me, how he would treat me, What would happen if he found out that I had

seen this on his phone. I knew that he would blame me and make it my fault that I had found it, rather than his fault that he had done it. I called my best friend and I said to her, this has happened. This is what I found. I took photos of it all on my phone from his phone, and I sent it all to her and I just said, what do I do? And her reaction was, well, you're right.

You're not safe if you tell him or you confront him, and nobody else is there, so you need to make sure that you're in a safe environment when he finds out that you know. So, given this new job, he used to go away for work quite often, so I knew that he would be going down south sometime in the next few weeks. Now it was my birthday during this time, and he pretended like nothing was wrong, but I knew the whole time what was going on, what he was doing when he was on his phone, and

it was honestly grating. You just feel as though you could explode at any second. So I just I waited. I held it together. I remember sitting in my office at work and I sent him this message, and the message said, I know this is how I know, this is what I saw. How could you do this to me and our family? Those typical disappointing statements that you throw out there as like I just can't possibly understand.

And his response to it was really quite vulgar. It was almost, why are you doing this to me when you know that I'm at work? And okay, well I'll just stay down here until you figure your head out. And no apology. There was no I'm so sorries, There was no let me beg for your forgiveness, There was no explanation. It was just, oh, well, you know now, so you figure out what you want to do and let me know. Then, over the course of that night, he spent it trying to manipulate me into believing that

it was my fault. I was the reason why he had done this. I wasn't giving him enough attention. I wasn't enough, and therefore he was doing this with other women. He convinced me that he'd never seen any of these women in person, that it was just a few images

here and there. He had stated that he hadn't engaged in any sort of intercourse with the one woman that I found these videos off of, and that I could contact her if I wanted to, And I really did think about contacting her, but I didn't think that he meant it, and I felt like if I did contact her, he would leave me anyway, because that was what he said. He said, you can contact her if you want to, but if we do and you don't believe me, whereover.

And I remember being so terrified of this concept of having to have these three children on my own, one of which was super high needs. I just I couldn't even fathom it. I loved him. I thought that he was my home and my family, and we had been together for so long that that comfort was a really hard thing to just walk away from. I didn't feel as though I could walk away and not impact my children, and that was the one thing that I never wanted

wanted to happen. I never wanted to leave him and my children be so heavily impacted by that decision, and so I just ended up staying and we sat down and we had this conversation. I had arranged for his mom to look after Cade for a couple of hours, and we had this conversation about our relationship and what he wanted and what I wanted, and I suppose he persuaded me in a way to thinking that it would be okay if our relationship was more of an open

style relationship. And that was never something that I had thought about. But he brought up these ideas of this ethical, non monogamous style relationship and his views on things that he would like to do in a sexual nature that I hadn't previously been open to or he had never discussed anything like this with me before. So this person that was talking to me and saying I want to do all of these things didn't really sound like him or like the person that I'd fallen in love with.

But I didn't want to lose him, so reluctantly I agreed to him having this site that he already had. It's big in the swinging community, it's big amongst people who do engage in these ethical, non monogamous situations. And I consented to him using some photos of us on there for a period. Now he gave me access to this account and I was able to see what he was saying, but I wouldn't participate. I wouldn't talk on there, I wouldn't engage in looking through it. I was more

of a silent observer at times. But it consumed him. All he wanted to do was be on this site and talk to these people and find someone and have a threesome or him to have sex with somebody else, and I was open to that at the time. I sort of thought, Oh, well, if that's what's going to make you happy, and I'm not able to give you that right now because of our son, maybe that will fix our relationship. Maybe that will make things better, Maybe

that will recenter us. Or you might do that and then realize that you have everything that you need here. Really was what was going on in the back of my head. And I had never really been big on the whole sending photos or anything like that before this time. I wasn't someone who would create a lot of intimate

content of myself. I didn't really have that level of self confidence, and I suppose going through this he would always pump me up and make me feel better about myself so that I would get the confidence to create this intimate content for him to be able to use in whatever way he wanted to. I was just desperate for him to be happy so that things would be better, even if it was just for a little while.

to them. You are, but you're very liberal with just giving this to people, and I'm I want a career, I have aspirations outside of this, and it seems to be all consuming few at the moment, and I just I don't want to participate anymore. And I even said to him at that point, look, I'm happy if you want to send content of yourself, as long as you leave me with the login so that I can see

what you're saying to these people, that's fine. He fought me for a lot on this, and I ended up just giving in and feeling like I didn't really have a voice, and I just let him keep using it and under the same username or whatever it was that he was doing, and I just wouldn't talk on it. I wouldn't talk about it, We wouldn't. It just became an annoying thing that he was doing and I just had to live with it, kind of like the drug use.

days would be hell. I would be anxious for the three days where he wasn't doing drugs rather than looking forward to them. And I remember one day being at work and him calling me about my friend who had sometimes helped with Kate on Tuesdays, and he had asked me what her last name was, and I thought, Oh, that's really weird. And he said, what's Sally's last name? Tell me right now, and he's yelling at me down the phone, and I could tell that he was really frustrated.

And I told him what her last name was, and he said, that's it. We've got a problem. He had said, she's posted this on a Facebook page that is associated to my work and said that she knows me and

that I'm no better than the previous CEO. It really wasn't career ending, but because of the psychosis that comes with drug addiction, he had taken it upon that I had coerced her into doing it, or I had been complicit in what had happened, and I knew it was going to happen, and I was trying to take his career down by having her post these things that really seemed insignificant at the time, but the phone calls that

ensued and the abuse. He told me he was going to drive to my mother's house and cut her tongue out and that would be his revenge. He was adamant that he would need to ruin my career in return by sending intimate images that he had gained through this process that he had requested to explore to my CEO or my boss. And he sent me an image followed by their email addresses, which were the correct emails. They're not difficult to find, and said, I will ruin you.

I'll end your career, bitch. Maybe you'll have some empathy when your career is on the line. And I was terrified. I thought, well, I'm the only one supporting these children right now. All of your money is going to just like a little bit of rent and whatever you want it to for drugs and computers and clothes for work, and I'm paying for basically everything else. And now you're going to put my career at risk. How am I

going to pay for these kids? How am I ever going to get away from you when I have no money? And James is a really smart person, So the way that he can manipulate things and the way that he understands the system and how to get what he wants out of things is quite confronting, and when that is put on you in a positive way, it makes you feel on top of the world and you get that joint sense of security when you're with him and he

wants the best for you. But similarly, when he wants the opposite and you go against him, and you go against what he wants, it makes you feel terrified and like you have no control and whatever will happen to you will happen to you, and you have no choice. It's just it's what he wants. And so I went home, I got my kids all into bed, and then I remember he just wanted to have sex with me after all of this that he had just been doing and the way he had been treating me, and just to

stop him from yelling, I did it. And I don't know if you can call that non consenting, but I would definitely say that from then on, there were a lot of times where that would just happen to shut him up, just to stop him from escalating, to stop him from waking the kids up, to stop him from yelling. There was no way around it.

packed everything up. We were moving to my house. It was maybe a couple of weeks after this that he had decided that he was keeping the rental property that we had together, but he was keeping as an office, so some of our furniture would stay there and that would be his office where he would work from because he couldn't be around the kids without crying all the time,

but he could work from home without crying. And I knew he also couldn't go into the office because he was always high, so when he would go into the office, they would start to notice these things, and he obviously

knew that as well. So he needed somewhere else to work, so he had decided to keep our rental property, and I, despite saying that's a very terrible financial decision, given we decided to move to save money, I was met with, well, I am a CEO, and I can afford it because I earned this amount of money, and don't tell me what to spend my money on. So I lost that

argument as well. And the hot water unit went out at the rental property, which was of course my responsibility to resolve, and I wasn't able to get in one day and I couldn't get in contact with him, and he kept saying, I'm at work, I'm at work, stop calling me, and then sending me these really abusive emails saying that I'm the reason why the real estate's so difficult to deal with, and it's because I'm a bitch,

and I don't respond to them. Eventually, I just went there and when I went inside, his work laptop was there, so I thought, I'm going to look at it. I know you shouldn't do that. I know you should trust your partner, but by this point it was gone. I wanted to look and I was going to, so I did. I opened the computer and it was a Mac and therefore all of his text messages were on this computer

and there was another woman. I went through reams and reams of text messages between him and another woman who I later found to be Amanda. Amanda had a daughter very similar age to Bonnie, and they had been away together. They were both bodybuilders, so they shared this common interest, and he would say things to her along the lines of I can't wait for you to meet Leah. She's gone to love you. She's going to adore you because I adore you, and she's a mini me. And these

messages were heartbreaking to me. James is talking to this other woman about my children and how much my children are going to love her, and she meets them as though they're going to be this happy family and I'm just going to walk away and out of the picture, and I didn't know what to do. I called his mom, and I was beside myself by this point. I don't even know if she could understand what I was saying. It was through tears. I felt like I was suffocating

because I couldn't get breath in between the crying. It was real devastation that this had happened. So his mom got there and she said, what do you mean, what is going on? I don't think he would do that to you. He loves you off the bat. It was already defending him before she'd even heard or scene or come to terms with what had happened. So I just sat her down with the screenshots and said, you go through them and tell me if you think that they're

just friends. And then my friend had arrived and she has a daughter the same age as Leah, so that was good because they could go off and play and it gave me a little bit of time while she looked after Kate and I was talking to his mum. But even so, his mum would just say things like, well, I need to know how this is going to affect my relationship with my grandchildren, and I need to know what you're planning on doing. I don't think he would

have meant it, and you can figure it out. That just isn't what you need to hear when you've just found out that this person who you've been so flexible with, who you've allowed to do things that stray so far from your natural moral compass, has then gone further outside that and tested the boundaries and to the point where he's gotten in to this other relationship and you just think, and you're telling me that all I should be worried about is your relationship with my children. How am I

going to support these children? How am I going to look after these kids by myself? And what are you going to do to support me through that? I couldn't say any of that at the time. And I then called him and I said I know about Amanda, and he lost it. He snapped. He said he was going to beat me to my house and run through it, and I wouldn't own anything that wasn't broken, and how dare I go through his computer anyway. The days after this, it turned into me begging for him back, as you

do when you're the ex that's been cheated on. You feel so disheartened, you feel like nothing, your self confidence is an all time low, and you just you get fomo, for want of a better word, you feel like you're missing out on this really amazing person. And I'd forgotten all of the bad things. I wanted him to come back and be part of our lives and have that life and our kids. And I come from a broken family and I didn't want that. I just wanted him to be there and for us to repair what we had.

So it was weeks and weeks of me begging for him back, doing whatever he wanted to try and make him believe that I was better than her, and I would constantly compare myself to her. And I was in a real downward spiral depression. Wasn't eating anything, I was not performing at work. I was very short tempered all the time. The only thing I would do is really

look after my kids and then go home. I didn't have anything else to cling onto, and all I would think about was him and her and what they were doing while I was just sat there with these kids. And his birthday wasn't long after I discovered all of this, It was a matter of days, and on his birthday I still went there. I took the kids there. We had a really beautiful day, and I thought maybe this

would be a turning point. That afternoon, he came to my house and we had talked and he had sort of said, I'm really sorry, I'll end it with her and we can try. We'll see what happens. I barely heard from James all weekend, and that to me was normally an indicator that he was with a Manda or somebody else. He was preoccupied, distracted, he didn't need to talk to me, and I barely spoke to him. And then Monday came around and it was like nothing had happened,

and he wanted to talk again. Because he was away. I would speak to him, but I put a lot of distance between us, and I would say that I was working, and I was working, but normally I would just sit there and text him all day, ferociously responding to his copious amount of text message. His abused his accusations that I was sleeping with people at work. It was just out of control. But at this point I started to stop responding to that, and when he came back,

he knew straightaway that something had changed in me. He said, you're distant, you don't want anything to do with me, and he even said, I can tell that you're getting better, and I said, yeah, I am getting better. I'm starting to accept who you are and that I can't change you. But that means that I need to make decisions about what I want. And I think that really hit home for him, that he couldn't just control me anymore.

okay because it was character building. And he wanted me to choose which of these scenarios was going to go ahead. He then started saying, well, I'm going to smash your house. I'm going to ruin everything you own. And I remember thinking he sounds quite serious this time, and he'd always threatened suicide, and I'm going to hurt you, and I'm going to hurt the people that you love. He never sounded this serious. I got home, my garage door was open. I went into my house and sure enough, he had

broken in. He had broken all of my sliding doors to the point where the glass was out of the frame and there were gaps between the frame and the door, but he couldn't get the locks undone, so he then proceeded to smash my side window of my house to get you to the house. Now, he had taken our dog, and he had taken his meth pipe, and he had taken my wedding ring. I didn't speak to him. I called my friend. She drove straight to my house. She

stayed there with me that night. And the next day James's dad came over and he cleaned up all the window. He tried to help put the doors back in, and I just wouldn't respond to him. And we're talking hundreds of text messages, thirty something miss phone calls, and he just wouldn't stop. He was irate his dad had gone there and gotten the dog back. He wouldn't stop messaging me. He kept threatening suicide. He kept saying that, well, if I didn't care anymore, there was no point in living,

and this is what he was going to do. And eventually, as I always did, I started to feel guilty and I responded to him and I talked him off the ledge. He agreed to change, and we just had less and less contact. It was just a weaning process for me

to try and get him away from me. It was Monday evening that I had come home from work and he was really angry at me because I had asked him where he was that day, and he said that he had to go to the doctors, and that Amanda had gone to the doctors with him because he needed somebody to go. He couldn't go by himself, and I wasn't there because I was at work, and we got into this really heated argument and he just started throwing things. He picked up my coffee table, he threw it out

the window. He threw a bottle of coke in the house. He picked up a computer stand, he threw it and it ricocheted off the wall and I was holding our son and I had to move and it hit me in the head so that it didn't hit him. And he just kept yelling and screaming, and I had put Lee in to bed and was just hoping that he

wouldn't wake her up. And I eventually told him just stop, and he didn't like that, and he was standing in my kitchen at the time, and he just lunched at me and he grabbed me by the throat and he slammed me against the wall while I was holding on to kid, and he just held me there and I was just I was motionless. I couldn't do anything. I just was so focused on not dropping my son and hurting him. He was just a wee little baby. What am I going to do if I drop him and

something happens? And I just I was silent. I couldn't breathe. I remember feeling dizziness, and eventually he let go and I just fell on the ground, still holding onto kid, and he left. He got up and he walked out. I sat on my shower floor crying for hours and hours, and I didn't know again how I was going to get out of this, because he'd gone to another level and I didn't think it could get worse. Despite the fact that I didn't think it could get worse.

is this? And I didn't know what to do. He picked up a vase in the front of my house and smashed it all through the front entryway. There was glass everywhere. Leah and Kaid both woke up. Luckily Bonnie wasn't there, and he just started screaming and yelling and

having this absolute breakdown. I had had to put shoes on the kids and get them settled and get them breakfast and all the things that you're trying to do in a normal mourning around this absolute, un pretty didictable lunatic who's just throwing things around my house and screaming at the top of his lungs. And I sat them down, I got them breakfast, and then I went back to him and he was in my garage at this point. I shut him in the garage and locked it so

he couldn't get back into the internal house. And to try and get back into the house, he pulled a suitcase of clothes that I had packed to give back to him over to the door and set it on fire. I saw smoke starting to come under the door, and my reaction was, we're going to die. He's going to burn the house down and we're all going to be in it. And there was smoke everywhere, and Leah had come out asking me if it was okay, and he had just said, get the kids out, Get the kids out.

It was terrifying. I didn't know what to do. He was between me and the car. I couldn't get to the car without going past him. I didn't know what he was going to do in this manic episode to me if he managed to get his hand on me and the kids between there and the car. I had called my friend and she had called his friend and he came to the house. He talked James down. James had put the fire out by this point, and he was just coughing soot everywhere all through the house, just

walking through the house, just coughing this black soot. His friend helped me get the kids in the car and I drove away. My mum and my friend tried to convince me that it's wrong and this shouldn't happen, and you need to take some serious action here, but I didn't know how. I just felt so stuck, and I remember saying to them, this is my life now, this is just how it is. There's no way out. He has the upper hand, he is more powerful than me,

and there is nothing I can do about it. And that was how I felt.

I found that he had been paying women for sexual gratification in money and in drugs, and I confronted him about that the next morning, and I said, look, it's time for you to start telling me the truth about things. Are you capable of telling the truth? Prove that you're capable of telling the truth. I asked him about it, and he again just saw red and went into this

fit of rage. He picked up a deathque that was in my living room and he started slamming it against the roof and the ground and the couch and the walls, and the desk was completely mangled by the end of it. And I didn't see what else he was doing. He sort of started throwing computer equipment around. But Leah came and grabbed me by the hand, and I had kid with me, and she took me into her bedroom and she said, it's all right, Mummy, We'll be safe in

here while daddy breaks the house, just staying here. And I broke down and just thought, how my kids should not be thinking like that. They shouldn't be thinking that they have to save me from anything. They should feel safe. And I couldn't do it anymore. So that Friday, I went to my mum's house. I stayed there and I just made excuses to be away from the house as much as I could all that weekend, and on the Monday, I went to the corner. I filed for a violence

straining orner. Something clicked for me and I couldn't let this person keep doing this to me, and I couldn't let it keep happening in front of my kids. I was really disappointed in myself. I didn't know how I had let my life get to that point where I was having to get a restraining order against someone that six months earlier I could have married. I felt really regretful that my kids had experienced so much and they

were so little, and I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had allowed him to compromise my moral values to suit his agenda when I didn't need to, and I could have gotten to the same outcome, potentially in a less violent way. I was just so lost. You hear it all the time, and you hear people talk about these domestic violent situations, And before I was in one would have said, why don't they just leave? And it's such a common misconception that this leaving is something

that you can do because you never feel safe. The day that the vero was served, he tried to go to daycare and take Leah from daycare. He never really had a relationship with kid, so I wasn't worried about him taking CAID, but Leah, yes, it worries me. His parents have taken the restraining order very seriously, mind you, and I have had no contact from him directly and I haven't seen him. I was tact for him when

I got my restraining order. I made sure that he was living back with his parents, that he didn't have access to income, he'd be made redundant at work so he couldn't come after me. He had as little resources as possible to use against me, and I then had a lawyer assist me in drafting up a statement of everything that had happened and helping me collate the evidence, and I gave it to the police in early twenty

twenty four. The police investigated and came down to a number of charges, and he was charged with those things in March. Now it's really disappointing because a lot of the assault charges couldn't be proven after the fact, and there are a lot of things where it's really violent coercive controlling behavior, but unfortunately coercive control isn't a crime yet where I live, so we had to go down to what is a crime? Revenge porn, so threatening to

send into images of me as a crime. Setting the fire is a crime, and breaking into my house and causing damage the way he did was a crime. So he was charged with those things. They set a trial. They ended up negotiating with him to get a guilty plea to avoid trial, and he walked away with a two and a half thousand dollar fine, which to me,

it's just insulting. And I don't blame the police, but I think that the justice system is a really difficult place to navigate, and they're not keeping up with the expectations of the community or the social justice side of things.

There are so many women who die every year, and this is why, because violent defenders like James are let off the first time that they do something like this, they're let off the second time that they do something like this with a fine, and then the third time that they do something like this, someone will die, and naturally then they'll receive a harsher penalty. But it shouldn't take someone to die for him to be in prison.

And sometimes I wish I did die he strangled me on two separate occasions, and on both of those occasions, I thought, well, this is it for me. I'm gonna die. When he would constantly come into my house in the middle of the night when I was asleep, and I would wake up to him standing over me angry, I always wondered what happens if one day he just brings a knife and I'm just gone, or he gets a gun and there's nothing I can do about it. And

I did think I wouldn't survive. I thought he has so much control and power that it's just a matter of time before he kills me. And I definitely didn't think I would ever get out. I thought that I would be living like this forever. And it's hard to explain the way that it makes you feel. But when you're getting these constant text messages every day and these phone calls, and just this cycle of no matter what you say, you get abused, and everything is your fault.

Every single thing that would go wrong in James's life was my fault one way or another, and you just had this way of manipulating things. And the best way I can explain it is that your brain feels like it's just being pressed down on someone's got a wet rag and they're just ringing out your brain and you just want it to stop, and it's so uncomfortable and it just makes you so fuzzy, but you can't make

it stop, and it hurts so much. Your brain feels like it's going to explode under all of this pressure of someone ringing it out. But until that other person is satisfied again and they stop abusing you and they stop coming for you for that short period, it just feels like that. So that's why you always just give in and you do what they say and you're amenable, because otherwise your brain feels like that, and it's you

can't deal with that. It feels like your ears are going to start bleeding, your eyes are going to pop out of your skull, and you feel like you're going to die just from words, which is completely unrealistic, but

it's exactly how it feels. I think that if anyone is listening and they are going through forms of domestic abuse, it's really important to know that there are a lot of community supports and you don't know it when you're faced with it in the moment, but there are people there that want to help you, and it's really important to understand how to get out and who can help

you get out. And those people do exist, and their numbers are available online, and if you can just get five minutes to research them, do it, because there are genuine businesses and associations that can help you get out. If you are in a situation where you're feeling stuck and you're feeling like there isn't going to be a way out, there is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel, and you can get there. You can

do it. It's been instrumental for me to recognize the difference in how I feel when I'm at home, and that's something that I've really honed in on for myself, is when I'm at home now, I don't feel scared and anxious because of him being there. I don't feel like I need to act a certain way or not speak or not laugh, or not have my friends over or keep my kids quiet. I don't feel like I need to conform to what somebody else wants of me,

which is unrealistic. I'm comfortable. I'm confident. My kids can play, they can laugh, they can smile, they can do what they need to do and it's not harming anybody else. And I think that the way that I feel at home is something that I reflect on a lot when I'm thinking, Oh, this sucks, my family's broken. I still lost that person. Even though he didn't turn out to be a good person at the time, I still wanted that person, so that gives me a lot of grounding.

I don't think you ever really can just move on from something like this. I think you have to grow into it, is my view, and I notice behaviors and things in myself now trying to maybe start dating, and those sorts of things that I just I'm not ready, and I have to recognize that it's probably going to be a long time before I'm ready to have that

kind of a relationship with a male again. And growing into it, to me is accepting that there's limitations to who I am now because of what's happened to me, but not letting it become my entire personality. I don't want to be known as the victim or as someone

that this has happened to. I want to be able to help other people who are going through this situation, and I want to harness the power that it's given me as a woman to be able to speak out and to be able to provide that support to other people. I get overwhelmed from time to time. Three kids on your own is a lot, and parenting wasn't meant for single parents. But I have a lot of support in my friends and my family. I'm quite far down the

journey now. I'm past the shock of what people are still finding out about, and I'm more into the acceptance part of my journey and trying to evolve from it. And it's not easy. It's not easy to live with this thing that's happened to you that tries to define you. But I think I'm dealing with it as best as I possibly can. And I just want to make people aware. I want to try and help other people. I want to use it for good rather than let it drag me and my kids down. And don't want to be

branded as a victim or branded as viral. I'm just me trying to get through every day. I'm living every day in the hope that the system will have my back.

by Linda Scott. If you have a story you'd like to share, email podcast at momamea dot com dot au. You can support us by following the show in your favorite podcast app and leaving a five star review. We'll see you for the next episode.