Lydia’s Story
Lydia met her boyfriend after a couple of chance encounters. Looking back, she now believes he was stalking her from the beginning. She was in her late adolescence and he was several years older than her.
It wasn’t long into their dating life when Lydia experienced the first incident of controlling behavior and violence. She was at the beach with her family, and due to poor cell service, she didn’t know he had been calling and texting her repeatedly. When she answered later on in the day, he demanded, “Where the fuck are you?!” When she arrived back at her house, he was there. “He was waiting for me, and he just slapped the shit out of me.”
Over the course of the several months that they dated, Lydia described him as “controlling,” saying he “didn't want me to be around my mom; it started little by little, but he was taking me away from my family.”
Her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend also warned Lydia, “he likes to go for your neck,” which she soon experienced firsthand. “He got this look in his eye, like a blank stare, like he wanted to just jump me and grab me by the neck,” and eventually he did. Later on, she learned he’d been arrested for domestic violence against the previous girlfriend. Lydia said, “He wanted to control me… I was like his puppet… the more he controlled me, the more control I gave him.”
At one point, Lydia’s uncle walked in while he was choking her. In response, the uncle got physical with the boyfriend, threatening him, “Don't you ever put your hands on my niece again.” Lydia said, “I didn’t have the heart to tell him how often it happened.”
She described her boyfriend as a “smooth talker, educated and eloquent,” able to fool others if you weren’t in a romantic relationship with him. She described an incident where she went to see her probation officer with her boyfriend. Lydia wore sunglasses because she had a black eye and refused to take them off. She subtly signaled to the probation officer that she was in danger, but the officer did not pick up on the cues.
Lydia described how he would “pretend to be dead when we fought,” then suddenly jump up and “sock me!” she said, laughing bitterly. She believed “it was his thing… he thought it was funny.” This happened more times than she could count.
Lydia felt he “loved” her but “my life was a joke to him.” One time, he threatened her with a gun she illegally possessed, pointing it at her, spinning it like Russian Roulette, pulling the trigger with the safety on. “My life was a joke to him.”
Her childhood psychiatrist also asked, “Who is hitting you?” but Lydia lied, too scared to tell the truth. The boyfriend broke her finger, and she bought a splint from Walgreens because he wouldn’t let her go to the hospital, warning, “I’ll tell them you sell drugs and have a gun.” The one time she was offered help to go to a shelter, she cried, “I couldn’t go! He wasjust going to find me!”
Lydia estimated she was physically hit about four times a week, “He was sweet [during those other three days]... I loved the good side of him.”
During their fights, he would often “choke me out almost every time.” He also raped her twice, but she didn’t understand it as such at the time. She would tell herself, it was normal, that “men are allowed to have sex with ‘their women’ even if they don’t want to.”
“I was his rag doll… I was young; I was fresh meat. I knew if I wasn't his, I wasn't gonna be anybody’s.” Lydia ended by crying, “[DVSJA] needs to be a law for domestic violence… Do you know how many women here…” she trailed off as she cried.
