The Christmas Day Shooting and Intimate Partner Violence

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I'm excited today to welcome Dr. Dawn Hughes to the Mighty MERP podcast. Dr. Hughes is a clinical and forensic psychologist who specializes in the assessment and treatment of interpersonal violence and traumatic stress. She maintains an independent practice in clinical and forensic psychology and is a clinical assistant professor of psychology serving on the voluntary faculty. Ooh, that was hard. I'm messing up.

Serving on the voluntary faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Will Cornell Medical College, New York Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Hughes is board certified in forensic psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology and it is the immediate past president of the Trauma Psychology Division of APA.

This podcast is not a source of legal advice. No two legal cases are the same. Contact an attorney if you require legal assistance.

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We are here with Dr. Dawn Hughes today and we are going to talk to Dr. Hughes about her specialty, her career, and also truly focus on intimate partner violence, which I think most people just think of as domestic violence. But we're gonna also talk about the nuances of that. So welcome, Dr. Hughes. Thank you, I'm so happy to be here. Great, so.

Before we start talking about your specialty, always like to start when I have guests on to say, what's your origin story? Sort of where did you grow up and how did you get from there to here? In five seconds or less? And in, You can talk as long as you want. I always find it really interesting to find out where people started and sort of how they got to where they are in their.

either careers or lives. It's always interesting. Yeah, so I am a native New Yorker. Grew up in New York City, so I'm a little rough around the edges in growing up in the big city. I did do my undergraduate in psychology. I always wanted to know why people do the things they do since a very early age. I my mom told me I asked why all the time, and it was very annoying.

So after getting my psychology degree, I was also very interested in the law. So I worked for two years outside of, after getting my undergraduate degree, I first started working in the South Bronx in methadone maintenance treatment and clearly there saw a whole lot of chronic trauma and, you know, social issues and poverty and marginalization and how that impacted individuals that led them to substance abuse.

And then I said, well, maybe I want to be a lawyer. So I went to work for the Federal Defenders for the Southern District of New York as a legal services assistant, where I also had to understand why people committed the crimes they did to try to figure out mitigation. And it was really at that point that since I realized that wasn't so simple, that I wanted to do advanced study in clinical psychology and applied to doctoral programs. So I always...

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kind of knew or maybe trusted the trajectory that those paths would cross and I'd be able to find a way to weave in sort of the law, the legal aspects with the psychological aspects. Well, you definitely, at least with my experience of working with you as a criminal defense attorney, have say blended it very nicely.

And that's what a forensic psychologist does, right? So forensic psychology in general is just the application of the science and principles of clinical psychology to a particular legal issue at hand, right? And that's what I do, but using the trauma background, right? So I'm a trauma forensic psychologist. So using the science and the empirical data and what we know about traumatic events, specifically interpersonal violence, which can be

rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, cult abuse, all things of that. And how do they then intersect in a criminal or a civil matter? Right. Because it always comes down to people want to know why someone did or acted the way they did. mean, especially in criminal matters, right? That becomes, mean, certainly juries want to know that. It doesn't always blend so nicely with the legal

definition of certain things are, but I started working in the case, a case like that you and I worked on back in the late 90s on battered women, women who were in violent relationships who then acted out against their partner. And most of the time, clearly not all the time, but most of the time in self-defense that they felt absolutely threatened and their life was threatened and they had no other recourse but to either.

grab whatever was available to them to ward off that threat. So that's what a psychologist, certainly a forensic psychologist can do is we evaluate individual state of mind. Like how we know about fear, we know how it impacts people. So then you use the data on intimate partner violence and what do we know about what intimate partner violence looks like and how people are afraid and how they can fear for their lives. That makes sense to us because we study it we know it.

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Right, so I'm gonna jump into our case and then I think we can break it down into steps of sort of what you do and how you work with a lawyer and actually before we jump into the case, you've worked on cases where you've represented in assisted defense. So I don't represent, right? I'm called by attorneys, right, to

render a professional expert opinion and that could be by criminal defense attorneys. I've been called by prosecutors offices. That's what I was getting off into when they are in the prosecution of someone who has committed a rape, a sexual assault, an intimate partner, violent act to explain the sort of paradoxical things that happen in these relationships that may not be what an average person thinks about. Right. We all sort of have this

invulnerability belief about ourselves. Well, I would never be in that situation, or if he hit me, I would leave right away, or if he cheated on me, I would leave right away. We know from the data that doesn't happen in the overwhelming majority of time. So they use a prosecutor, And their prosecution of a criminal defendant will utilize an expert like myself to explain those myths and misconceptions so the jury is not making decisions.

based on knowledge that is actually not correct. Right, and my point really is that you've been hired as an expert as both for the prosecutor as well as for criminal defense side as an expert, and you've also been hired in civil cases as well. That's correct for both sides as well, correct. Right, and it's fair to say when you're hired, you don't have an agenda. You have to come to each case

open-minded and do the evaluations and the investigations through some objective testing. I'm going to ask you about exactly what type of testing or analysis you do because I think that people don't really understand how an expert can come to their conclusions and how thorough your work has to be in order to support the conclusions that you come to. Is that fair?

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That's absolutely fair. do come into this realm with an objective standard, right? That is part of our ethical demand, right? Part of our professional kind of guiding light that, you know, our job is to look at all the data and come up with an opinion. And to do that, we utilize a variety of different methods. you know, expert witnesses do get that sort of...

and sort of that maybe that layer that sort of media hype about being a hired gun and that you're just going to get hired and you're to say what anybody wants you to say. And as with anything, are there some people who do that? Probably. You know, I'm certainly not one of those. And certainly I would say the board, the professional board of forensic psychology or people like myself would mask a certain amount of experience who would hear to the ethics and the profession standards of how we want to practice.

So, you what I always say is by the time I get to either write a report or testify, I've already got to the point where I can testify to my opinion to a reasonable degree of psychological certainty. If I can't, then you're not gonna see me on the witness stand. You're not going to see me write a report because I have not been able, based on the data that I need to use in my field, give that opinion.

So it's what we say in psychology, a skewed sample ization, right? You're only seeing the tail end of those cases that get to that point where, of course, I've come to an opinion, you know, with a high degree of confidence in my opinions. Right. So I met you. I reached out to you for a case that I was handling where my client and

I always like to say this when I'm talking about cases is that I have permission for my client to talk about this case. The case has been resolved already, but I think it's important to note that I wouldn't be talking about the specific facts of the case unless I had the permission. But I had a case where I have a client who, when I was first retained, which was right after the incident, which is she shot her husband.

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on Christmas Day. And there is no dispute about those two facts. It was Christmas Day and she shot him. Yes. And she was charged with murder. And from the beginning of the case, I thought that she was overcharged and that it was not really accurate of what occurred. And when I went to see her, I think Christmas was on a Saturday.

and I went to see her on Monday or Tuesday. Which is unique that we can get a criminal defense attorney like yourself with your requisite experience to be in so early, which I think was a crucial sort of factor in the positive resolution of this case. Right. I agree with you. And it just happened to be that she was friends with another attorney. And that attorney called me right away and had me.

meet with the family and I had my, you know, I was prepared with an investigator right away and I went to the jail to talk to her and what was not in any of the reports that I had at the time is I could see in talking to her that she had bruising all up and down her arms and nobody took pictures of it at the time.

And also very, very critical in this case. Yeah, it was very critical. And thank goodness the family hired an attorney right away. We got out there right away. And then my investigator, and I'm going to shout out to Bill Skoll because he did an amazing job and was able to get to the jail pretty immediately and was able to document the pictures and the bruising, which again, they're

Aside from the bruising on her arms, she did have bruising on her back and on her torso and her chest. so, you know, this was an individual who was around 52 at the time of the incident, maybe 51. No prior record, lived a law-abiding life.

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was married almost 30 years to her husband and had one child. And right off the bat, what I knew to be true is that she experienced trauma and violence that night. She unfortunately couldn't remember a lot of the details. And I thought the murder charge was an overcharge.

and really trying to figure out the best way to be an advocate for this woman. So the bad facts that I did not share, which I will share, is that when her husband was shot, we knew, and the state said this from the beginning, and they were right, he was in bed, he was undressed, and he did not have a weapon in his hand at the time that he was shot.

And so that's why they charged him. So based on that and those facts, I knew that we needed an expert. And it took me some time to actually find the right expert. And I'm just going to do the shout out to Dr. Don Hughes because Dr. Don Hughes was the expert. And in talking to Dr. Hughes about the case, I knew that as much as I knew about domestic violence,

there was so much I still needed to know and learn and understand to be the advocate for this client. I don't know, do you remember our first phone call or when we talked about the case, what your first impression was, or I know you said you thought you could help or you could be an expert. You didn't know what the conclusions were gonna be, but you definitely knew that. Right, I mean, certainly I...

you know, probably more than most I would say, you know, at this point have evaluated more than most homicides, domestic homicides, know, intimate partner homicides. So I know I can evaluate that, whether that what I remember saying to you, because it's sort of part of my spiel is that I don't know if what I'm going to find is going to be helpful to your case, right? And, and that's, that's the risk that a, that a criminal defense attorney takes that you're going to send in someone like me.

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to evaluate everything and we know, mean, people can shoot people out of anger, right? They can shoot people out of greed. They can shoot people out of other reasons, but they can also shoot people if they feel that their life was danger, in danger and threatened, right? We know that too. So I know that I could assess for that and come up hopefully with a conclusion that was, I could rest my hat on and then you could decide if that fits with.

the legal charge and the legal theories that you needed to put forth. Right, right. And so it's sort of, you know, from the legal perspective, the definition of self-defense, you know, in these type of cases is complicated, because the legal definition of self-defense is imminent harm of serious bodily injury or death. And so in a case like this, where the individual at the time

The gun was fired.

did not have a weapon.

and was unclede naked in bed, it's hard to establish a full self-defense. Well, you have to assess that, right? So that's where I always say the law and psychology don't really mix. Because when there is a threatening incident, which we're saying happened immediately prior to her discharging the weapon, know, one threat does not dissipate.

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Right? So I always say, you can press the alarm. And if anybody's been in a school or a building where an alarm, fire alarm has been pressed, it goes on for a long time until the threat is clear and it's shut off. That's what happens to us physiologically. So that's number one. And number two, you know, what else was he doing and saying that continue to elevate her threat? Right? So someone who has experienced, you know, 30 years of intimate partner violence.

knows very well what their partner is capable of. Like we know even in situations that are not violent, what our partners are capable of, right? Are they gonna, you know, put the milk container in the recycling or just leave it on the counter? Like those stupid things, we know that, right? Because we get, that's how we understand human behavior. We track this. So we don't know because of, in this situation, this case, because her memory was impaired, which we know happens in trauma and also.

Christmas Eve, there was alcohol involved. So that was a very difficult factor because there were pieces that we didn't know. So we had to rely on sort of what we do know, right? And one of the things that you mentioned, and this is why really important, thorough evaluation is really, really important. He was unclothed. He was always unclothed. Now, a regular person might not know that, right? The prosecutor, the police, which makes sense. But when you talk to...

not only the people who live in the home, know, Mary Lou Wigginsworth and her son, he did that all the time. He'd come in and take off his clothes. Now that might not be normative in your house, but that's what was normative in their house. So you really have to step into what happens in that house. What are the unique factors in that house? So him being unclothed didn't make him sleeping or not a threat. So we had to really look at those factors and evaluate them as well.

And before I'm going to talk about the type of evaluations you did with Mary Lou, I do want to go back to what you said, which was your first point, because I believe that this is outdated law. And it doesn't coincide with the reality of trauma or fight and flight.

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our understanding of fight and flight, which is that your body will regulate so quickly after a traumatic event because that's the way the laws written is that you will use the laws written as your body will regulate, but we know it will not correct. Yes. Yes. Correct. That you still will be functioning. So in this case, what we later learned was that,

the decedent, her husband, put a gun to her face prior to the shooting. And so then the question is, how much? said, I'm going to kill you, right? So you pair a verbal threat with an actual objective means of following through that threat. That's a very powerful fear. But we didn't know if it was two minutes or five minutes. We know that it's close in time. know because

the incident was short, but. And we went back to investigation, which we do use as our anchors. We know that because we have the video of them going in their house and we have the time by which the 911 was called. What was that? Which was within a 20 minute period. So we know that this was quick. So even in 20 minutes is somebody's fear if they were threatened with a weapon in their face, straddled on top of them and they're on the floor and with a threat to kill.

Right? Something happened where that stopped and he didn't do it, but we don't know what else was going on. With multiple weapons in the house, with access to multiple weapons. Multiple loaded. Correct. We're both saying the same thing. Loaded weapons. But here, this is what is not caught up with the law is that, and this is my lay person lawyer research, mental health, psychology sort of.

research so it's very general is what I'm saying. My understanding is when there's a traumatic event like that, your body cannot regulate within two minutes or even five minutes, that your body still remains in a fight or flight potential mode. And so the law is pretty much saying if you have any time to cool off, then it is not self-defense. But psychologically, cooling off

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could take a significant longer time than just a few moments. Is my layperson understanding correct or am I off? No, you're off. And I think the other really relevant factor is we also know that the individuals who are perpetrating the violence, they don't just stop either. So we know that.

they could keep going. So even if there are verbal threats in that time where someone has not cooled off, that's going to keep them in that heightened state even more so, right? And it could be more threats that are coming through. We don't know in this case, but certainly in many other cases, I've had that happen. So not only are you dysregulated and still in fear, the person is still saying, I'm going to effing kill you. Why do you think that's not true when you've just had a gun in your face, right?

how the mind has to figure out, right? Fight or fight, threat, is this real? What's gonna happen? In split seconds, that really sort of jumps past, and sometimes volitional control, right? It's happening so fast, we just act. So what about the argument that even if the person was saying, you know, this is it. So this case that we're talking about, she did experience domestic violence for her whole marriage. Yes, correct. You know.

And there was objective evidence of that from even in the 90s. I think she had pictures of abuse that the family was able to provide to us. in the context of that, what about the argument of, well, even though he pointed a gun at her, he never acted on it.

He didn't kill her previously, so why would she think she was going to be killed this time? mean, listen, I know I'm asking crazy questions, but this case and domestic violence cases in general is that I think people have what you started with is why didn't she just leave? I don't know after the case was resolved. And I don't normally read

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like comments, but it was, I did read just a few comments on this case because it was just a case that was getting such big headlines. And it was really interesting. There were people that were so, had such a visceral, she shouldn't spend a day in jail or prison, to she should spend the rest of her life. There was like no middle ground on this.

And it's hard and I do understand and appreciate the difficulty that a prosecutor's office might have in understanding that. what you're really talking about in the law is this idea of imminent threat. And what does imminence mean? In the law it means, in the moment, say he was pointing a gun at her, then she grabbed another gun and shot him. It's an immediacy to it. It's an immediacy, correct.

the majority of cases are not like, you know, the old 90s, you know, film, The Burning Bed, you know, and where somebody, you know, does this in this whole premeditated way because she can't get away, which may be true, right? In some of these really pathological batterers, but the majority of the cases are when there has been an assault of episode, right? And there was clear evidence based on the bruising, the fresh bruising on her body that that happened, right? So we were able to establish that.

We also know about, we go back to guns, like what do we know about guns and domestic violence? It's a significant risk factor for lethality. So women who were threatened with a gun before are 20 times more likely to be killed. Still, Mary Lou Wigglesworth was still statistically much more likely to be dead than her husband. As tragic as this is, and it is tragic, but that- is, the whole family, for the whole family it wasn't tragic.

You know, and these threats with a weapon that not only happened that night, but also happened at other times, right? They reinforce this dynamic of abuse and this dynamic of coercive control. So the other thing that we had to figure out in this case was why was, you know, he didn't kill her before, right? So why was this time different, right? What made this time different, right? And there were a number of factors, really his, her husband's deterioration.

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Right. And he was deteriorating, using more drugs, using more alcohol, becoming more erratic, becoming more violent. Right. So she knows he's spiraling out of control. I don't think that he's not going to do this now because of what I've been going through in this last year leading up to Christmas. so there's all those factors that for me, I understand go into somebody's psychological assessment of threat.

And that's what we sort of called and were able to explain in this case. How do you know if somebody you're evaluating is being honest or truthful to you? And how do you factor that into your evaluations? mean, you've heard people say, well, that person's a really good liar. so how, you know, obviously,

when you're doing an evaluation that has to be a factor in, know, in how do you know? mean, you're not. Yeah, we have, again, in order to render an opinion to a reasonable degree of psychological certainty, I have to have confidence in the reliability of the data I'm getting, right? From the individual litigant as well as other sources of information. So what I say is, and just to sort of be technical, what the

The methodology is it's a multi-method, multi-hypothesis driven hypothesis. That means we use a lot of methods, have a lot of hypotheses, anger, greed, whatever it may be. I just want to get out of here, who knows? We have to entertain a lot of hypotheses and then see where the data comes together. So one of the ways in doing that is through the use of psychological testing, psychological assessments, which do have sort of built in

what we say, validity scales, measures that allow us to see, is this person exaggerating the way we know how people report trauma, right? We have normative data, the way people report trauma, you know, is this person minimizing? Are they not reporting, you know, data the way we want to? Are they flatly telling us things that we just know are not true, right? know, schizophrenia is not about I see little green men.

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Right? You check that scale. We're like, I don't know, is this person really giving me valid data? Right? So if they're not giving you valid data, you know, it doesn't mean everything else that they're saying is wrong, but it causes us to pause. It causes us to suspect. Right? So for both of the psychological testing and that holds together, no evidence of malingering, which is the false production of psychological symptoms. And that's what's, you know, some people clearly in criminal cases want to make themselves seem crazy because they think they're going to get off.

right, or make themselves seem more impaired than they actually are, right? That was not the case here, right? So we look at that, you know, no evidence of malingering or exaggerating. And then we look at the external data, right? So you mentioned a picture, you know, she took a picture of herself early on in this marriage when she was beat pretty badly that showed bruising. Okay, we have that. We have the evidence at the moment. She's in jail of all those bruises. And we also have a picture

earlier Christmas Eve, because she's wearing an open chest sweater that her sister took, and there's no bruising. And now, the next day, there's bruising. And actually, it's a little low. know bruising takes a while to come out, which is why getting the pictures, they'll say during that interrogation, which we had the video of, you couldn't see bruising, right? Because bruising takes time to come out, right?

the fact that you went back in and took those pictures. And then of course, the jail took the pictures and the jail usually likes to take the pictures not to help the defense, but to protect themselves. A detainee can't say that I was beat up by the correctional. So they really do it for self preservation, but it can help us understand how the person is. And then you talk to people. So, I mean, I would say this case was a little difficult because we didn't have medical records.

not uncommon, right? A lot of times women and certainly men as well will not go to the doctor, tell them about what's happening. They'll say, fell or I hit this or I walked into the vacuum. And, know, she had a lot of, you know, a plethora of excuses that she used because a lot of people saw bruises. A lot of people saw this on her over the years. not only that, they saw what was interesting and you can, you can probably expand on it is that

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They saw it and then when asked initially about it, they said we didn't see abuse, but then, or they- Right, that's why we don't ask, are you a victim of abuse? Are you a victim of domestic violence? Because people are going to use their own definition of that. And I can't tell you how many times, well, like he didn't punch me or he didn't do this, so I'm not, right? But when I talk to the family and I talk to many of them,

They would say still, well, I didn't see him hit her, but he did grab her arm. did pinch her. did hit her. Wait, he did hit her? Like, you know, all I didn't know that was abuse, right? So there, once they're sort of saying what those behavioral specific things that happened, they saw, they also saw, which is really relevant because intimate partner violence is not just about hitting, right? It's a pattern of manipulation of fear of coercive control that has many different types of abuse, like physical violence is one.

but there's psychological abuse and emotional abuse, financial abuse and sexual abuse, coercive control, all different types that really encompass what we know about intimate partner violence. So they all saw this really erratic controlling, you know, man who really demeaned his wife and really belittled her and really controlled her. They saw that, that was front and center. And that bled into other.

areas of the family's life where they wouldn't invite them over. They didn't want them at certain events because of the fear that he was going to be erratic, you know, mainly toward his wife, but also to other people as well. So that was back to kind of how do know somebody is not telling you the truth? Like all those data points come together. They're all consistent. They all track right to what she's saying and what they're saying, you know, and that allows us to say, okay, this is really holding together.

Right. And that was the case with in Mary Lou's case that it did all track together. Yes. And she also had told her, I mean, she also ran away once in that last year and told her sister, you know, she didn't know what to do. And they were trying to get her out. Right. And this is what is so sad and tragic and frustrating in these cases that, you know, she, know, Mary Lou was more like, I have to go back. He's going to kill me.

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Right? And we don't understand that when someone says that, that's not hyperbole. Right? And it's really hard for a lay person to think, well, he's not going really kill you. But they don't know. people, I think that's what people think when they hear that. Although I'm not sure if the, if some of the family, mean, the family seemed to want her to leave and we're trying to assist in a way, you know.

And she was petrified of leaving and and you know, she was really beaten down after 30 years of being told how worthless she was. And I mean, he would call her all the horrible names in the book. And that's just really, really damaging to one's psychological well-being and then their ability to have sort of the the wherewithal, the skills, the power, the belief that you can leave. Right. And in her situation,

You know, I always say to people like domestic violence in this, whether in whatever form, whether it's physical violence, coercive, you know, financial, it doesn't start on your first date. It doesn't start, you know, you know, if you went out with someone and on the first date and they were, you know, physically aggressive or, you know, violence or, you know,

manipulative in a way, most people would say, my goodness, never seeing this person again, right? Alternatively, you chalk it up to something else. he was drinking or he was smoking weed or he just got in a fight with his brother and he'd had a bad day at work, right? Depending on the circumstances that we find ourselves in on that first date, know, we all, all of us give second chances, right? Especially if we're looking for love and we're looking and there's all those other factors that lured us in for that first date.

So it depends on, you know, those circumstances of what we rationalize, what we overlook and why. Right. She was very financially dependent on him. Yes. And she also, I will say, she, I think she was very intelligent in the sense of street smart, really empathetic, good with people. But she, she, and I think herself had self doubt about her.

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intelligence because she struggled through school, probably had an undiagnosed learning disability, didn't graduate high school, couldn't get her GED. So she was very dependent on her husband for financial support and also will say status in the community and they'd been together a very long time. So I think all of that played a factor in her staying. People really, I mean that was always the question, why do people stay?

And so multiple reasons, right? I mean, that's one thing we know we are complicated human beings very rarely is there one reason for something right? So, you know, certainly though, for her and for many women, reasons is a reason right that that they think they can't understand how they would be able to provide for themselves, right? They also have fear of retaliation. We know very clearly through the data that the violence doesn't always end when the relationship ends, right? So there's no guarantee that that's going to

You know, there could be threats. If you leave, I'm going to X, Y, and Z, right? Those threats can continue. There's also still love, right? I mean, just like Mary Lou and like all of us, we get into relationships and marriages and partnerships full of companionship, know, friendship, all of these wonderful things. We don't get into it with, you know, okay, I'm going to be an abuse victim. So it's really hard to get rid of and abandon.

the earlier positivity love that we may have had with our partner. So we rely on those, what we say those moments of lack of violence or neutral moments that maybe the hope, maybe he's gonna go back to that guy that I know is in there. And very rarely does that override all of the violence and the abuse and that's the problem. Right, so this is a case that I thought was very interesting the way we handled it.

that the state was very open to the way we handled it. Because after you wrote the report, which you, the report definitely had significant evidence that Mary Lou was a victim of domestic violence. As you said, there was the pictures, there was the prior pictures, there was statements by family members and witnesses who saw prior acts of domestic violence.

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And statistical risk factors, that were in this case, we do have data on what happens in women who are in violent relationships and women who end up dead by their partner. And the more, when you look at the difference between those two groups of people, there are these really significant risk factors that are there and in the empirical literature, and there were very significant risk factors in this case.

So that gave us some sort of external validity for us to understand her fear, right? If the majority of women who end up dead by their partners have all these variables that happen, like threats with a weapon, like coercive control, all of those things, the emotional, the drug use, all of that, you know, and the substance abuse by the partner. You know, if all of those are there, you know, that sort of kind of collides together for us to understand that this was a very serious case. Right. And the state

I mean we met with the prosecutor who was handling the case, you and I together, and we were an open book. Or I should say you were an open book because rarely ever would I say, here is my expert. You can ask any question that you want, which is what I did.

And I thought that we did a really good job as well as educating the state on the reality of this case to get what I would say a very good resolution for my client. An expert should be an open book, I mean, my job is to be able to support my opinions based on the data that I have. And nothing is 100 percent, right? In anything we do not.

Every single piece is going to fit in this beautiful puzzle, right? But do we have a substantial majority of the pieces? Does that come together for us to really have a pretty good hypothesis and opinion about this individual, right? So I should be able to support that. So it doesn't feel odd or threatening to be able to do that in a collegial way where someone can ask those questions that they need resolved. I'm happy to answer them.

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Right. Right. And you did. And we spent a lot of time just having the conversation and letting the state really ask any question that they wanted to, you know, and you were candid about the fact that there is a few minutes that we don't know what happened. Mary Lou couldn't remember, you know, and, you know, I think it goes to

the fact that she was being truthful of what she did and didn't remember because, you know, she could have made it into a neat bow for herself, right? Yeah. And she did. that that point of, you know, that the points that where she could remember and what the questions that the prosecutor wanted to know. And and I do one of them, I remember she asked is like when she was taken in, right? Why didn't she tell us about all the domestic violence? Right. She wanted to know why didn't she just tell us? Right. And

You've spent 30 years hiding it, avoiding it, suppressing it, putting on a different forward facing front, right? That doesn't come naturally. Even if you just had your life threatened and you had to act in self-defense, that doesn't automatically shut off. Well, it wasn't her first time that she had to act like that she was protecting herself and him. And I will say, mean, she has, I would say that she's still

loved her husband and has tremendous remorse for that day of events. Absolutely. But yeah, I I think she was still protecting him even after the case, after she was charged. And she never wanted to disparage his memory. Even when he was alive, she didn't want to disparage him. She deferred to him.

at the expense of herself, right? So that was so clear that when they were out, I want them to know Fun Dave. And he did, he had the Fun Dave part and he was, you know, just really nice to be around in the party animal and the jokester. But there was this other side of him that a lot of people saw too. I mean, that's what really was helpful data for us. A lot of people saw that other side. It wasn't just the Jekyll and Hyde where he only showed up in the house, right? But people can't imagine what it's like once you close that door.

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Right? They know he's abrasive, erratic, can throw things, can get aggressive. Right? They knew that, but they didn't know that he could do that to her. Right? Our minds don't go to those ugly places unless you know. If you know, you know. Right? So that's part of it. So that's what's, you know, trying to in many ways, you know, educate the public about what that is and how that looks. you know, clearly if he can be that unhinged in public, my guess is, you know, we can, you know, put that tentative. See, that's what I think.

And I don't know if it's because I've worked in this area, look, type of law that I work in, handling criminal defense cases. I have a lot of clients or lot of situations where there is trauma or mental health issues with, or, and so I think in my head, as you're saying, what everyone saw, if he could behave like that in public.

with the pinching and the twisting the arm or smacking her in the head. Ordering her around, calling her names, cursing her out, all of that. Yeah, I can only imagine what's going on in closed doors because people are usually behaving the best they can in public. why I think this case is so important is one, and I have said it repeatedly, there were no winners in this case. This is, you know,

son lost his father and And his mother is for many years in his mother in the same. Yeah. And, but I did think that we got to a fair and just result. And I thought the plea to the manslaughter charge really, and I thought that was the right resolution. Right. But

Again, people's opinions of the case were so dramatic. so for somebody, I represent victims in restraining orders for domestic violence. I also represent defendants. But I think there are so many myths and misunderstandings about intimate partner violence. And so I'm going to ask you if you could, I mean, I know there's probably, you could probably check off a number of them.

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maybe three biggest myths about intimate partner violence. And then I am also going to say, you know, I always use the term prior to handling this case, either domestic violence or bad or woman syndrome or something to that effect. And you were very great and kind of educating me about intimate partner violence.

and really the new understanding about intimate partner violence. And so I'm going to ask you, you know, sort of explain that evolution, but also what do you think is what people need to understand and be educated about with regards to this issue? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly, I mean, we have amassed significant data since really Lenore Walker, who did coin the phrase, bad woman syndrome in the late seventies and wrote the Hallmark book.

the battered women. And we've done many studies, either clinical-based studies, ER studies, large-scale epidemiological studies. And we know in the Centers for Disease Control still says that intimate partner violence is a serious public health problem. And even if women are not talking about it, they're showing up in ERs, they're losing time for work, they're not maximizing.

their mental health, they're running around with anxiety and PTSD and depression. So it has a very wide impact, right? So I think one of the main myths I would say is it's not just about hitting. And of course the physical violence is a part, but it's this constellation of behaviors that serve to first gain and then maintain power and control over your intimate partner, right? And that's really what underlies this. This isn't about somebody who

had a stressful day at work and through the dinner plate. That can happen. Then that might not be intimate partner violence as we know it, right? That can be someone with an anger management problem. But when somebody is trying to sort of micromanage your life, right? And tell you, don't talk to your sister, she doesn't understand us, you can't go see your mother. I don't like when you wear those skirts. I don't want you to make that.

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don't go out, you have to call me, where are you? You know, and this was something and in the case we just talked about, right? All of these sort of coercive control dynamics that really restrict a person's freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of access to money, all of those things, right? And then physical violence punctuates that, right? It reinforces that time and time again, that I am the one in control and I get to say what I do. Right, so the classic, let me just say the classic example in this case, right? Is that,

You know, when Dave would call, she had to answer. If she didn't pick up in a certain number rings or she was doing something and had to call him back, it was mayhem, World War III, right? So she, you know, started wearing the Apple watch so she wouldn't miss a call, right? That's not normal. But if he goes to the pub after work and disappears for four hours, she can't call him, right? Is that equal? Is that equitable? No, right? So you look at

who holds the power in the relationship. And when all those dynamics are together, we're really seeing that's what intimate partner violence is, right? This real sort of circular cycling through all of these different behaviors. So I think that's the probably number one myth. It's not just about hitting. And that's why it's so hard to leave. If somebody's controlling all these different aspects of your life, you can't even think straight because all you're trying to do is answer the phone.

I mean, I had another case where the woman, I mean, we got testimony from the people in the hospital where the the battery would call the nurses station and she would come barreling down the running down the hall in the hospital to pick up the call sweating and in panic because if she didn't get there in a certain amount of time, she's going to get beat later. Right. This I mean, it's not just a story like this is an account that we have studied and we have seen this dynamic and that's

You know, really a problem of what this, you know, abuse of power and control looks like. Right. But the language that you're using, coercive control. Okay. So I'm not sure how long that language is language that you've been using in your expertise, but course of control was just for the first time put into the language of the law in January of 2024. So less than a year ago.

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Right? New Jersey statute in our. So it doesn't look like it's an assault. We know what that is. Right. We know what that looks like. You we knew we've known about coercive control since the 70s. Right. We use different terms. We use psychological aggression. Right. The use of tactics to get control, subjugation, threats, intimidation, humiliation. These are all tactics of control. I mean, it was really Dr. Evan Stark, who kind of, you know, wrote the book and really

framed it in this coercive control because we did see cases that didn't have physical violence. And yet that kind of coercive control can really restrict a person's life and have them feel as if they have no alternative in these situations. And it actually was in the, got passed in the legislature in the UK before it starts making its way here in the United States. So they were able to put that as a crime in the United Kingdom.

That's been on the books for a while. And now it's just sort of coming full cycle, which is good because we're really understanding, even though me and our fields have been knowing this and talking about this. Now the law is again, recognizing it, which can help us in cases like this, right? And in cases of what does, you know, threat look like, what does imminence look like? What does it feel like if you can't leave the situation? This is why. Right.

Right. So myth number one is it's not all about violence. It's not all about the hitting. So, so myth number two, right? would say probably is, you know, if she didn't leave, it wasn't that bad. Right. And, and that's not sorry. Right. hurts my heart when you say it. It's true. People say it. hear things like that. Right. It wasn't that bad. So, certainly, there has been research and been done.

One of the earlier studies was by Dr. Marion Dine, who was my mentor, who trained me, and looked at, you know, the more the violence goes up, the more the strategy she uses. So it's not that she's not doing anything, right? But he's gonna keep using the violence, and I'm using he and she, and we know that that can, obviously we can have, you know, another dynamic, although it is disproportionately still in this kind of fear-based.

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power and control, a male female dynamic as well. But so I'm using she, but you know, the more violence he uses, the more things she tries to do to try to protect herself, to avoid it, to prevent it, to acquiesce and comply and all these strategies to have it not happen. So, so leaving is one strategy. It's not the only one, right? And leaving, as I said, doesn't stop the violence. So we know also from the risk when a woman leaves,

her risk of being killed increases, not decreases. So her staying in some ways is survival, is preservation, because she knows what he's capable of. We like to fall back on, he would never do that, but that's not true. We just had a case here where a New York retired NYP detective shot himself and shot his wife and then shot himself, leaving three kids behind, right? Like, you know, if you, this sort of control, if I can't have you, no one can, right?

So it's just not true that it wasn't as bad because she couldn't leave. So we need to look at the factors. Why didn't she? Why couldn't she leave? Right. And then I always flip it on its head. Why does he continue to abuse her? Why don't we ask that question? Why not a question that we allow ourselves to continue to ask? Right. And I think we are so victim blaming still in this society and so female leaning blaming, right.

Women get a lot of blame for a lot of things and mothers get the blame and the partners get the blame for not doing certain things as opposed to us. she just did or if, you know, so yeah. that's very big piece about, you know, how leaving is one strategy, but it's not the only one. that when we don't only look at the strategy, we look at like, what's the effectiveness of the strategy? So

You know, maybe, you know, myth 2A would be if it was that bad, why didn't you call the cops? Right. So some women do call the cops. Right. And some, the majority, don't want to involve law enforcement, especially in certain communities. We're not bringing law enforcement into this. That's not going to solve my problem. Right. That's just going to give me a bigger problem. And what happens, again, I can't tell you, if I had a nickel so many times that, you know, a current case that I'm working on where

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She did call the cops, but she called the cops because they were trying to take the kid, right? So she calls because of the kid, but then they ask her, well, was he violent? Has he ever choked you? Does he have a gun? She's like, well, no, no, no, no, no. So now they're all upset because she didn't tell them. But where is he when she's talking to the cops? He's right over there. there. And then what happened after, even though she said nothing, she got that shit beat out of her. Right. There's consequences for calling the cops. So, so.

We as human beings and certainly people in violent relationships, they weigh that cost benefit analysis. Like, is that really going to help me? Right? We would love to say that. I'm all for law enforcement coming in and helping. Like, I don't want to get rid of that. And we've trained our law enforcement about these dynamics. I'm glad that NYPD asked her those questions, but I also understand why she couldn't answer. Right. So then there's also the situation later that they say,

She was asked and she said no to any of that. But we know. Right. And I said to the you know, I testified I have to go back, you know, the sentencing. But they I said that I said your office calls me to testify why they don't answer these questions now because she's the one being prosecuted for acting in self-defense. All of a sudden, it's like, we don't understand why she wouldn't say that. You do know why. So they do know why.

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Right. Right. But they're still prosecuting her. They're still prosecuting her. Correct. Yeah. So we got to two. Do you think there's a third one? am one. I'm going to let you think about that. But let's talk about the kids, the kid factor and how that plays into the staying versus leaving. don't know if this is a myth or not. I've heard it. So

women will stay until they can't protect their kids anymore. Or sometimes when the violence starts going to the kids, that might be the catalyst for them to leave. And yes, I'm using he and she as well for the same reasons. And I, again, know that that's not always the case, but. Yeah.

It's very unique. don't think we have really good, clear data on that because sometimes the violence is so bad that they can't protect the kids. Right. And that's a very upsetting situation for all of us, especially people in our field and especially as a mother wanting to do whatever I can to be the mama bear and lay down in front of anything coming towards my kids. But also we understand that if somebody is so beaten down and controlled and manipulated and fear based about their

decisions, sometimes they can't protect their kids. So what we do know is we do that when kids are involved, when there's a family, it does make it really, really harder, not easier for her to leave, right? Because now she's usually threatened with legal consequences. Right now we have the abuse through the legal system. You're never going to get those kids. You know, I'm going to tell them you're crazy. Right. And chances, maybe she went to therapy because she was so anxious and depressed and having trauma based symptoms because of living in this violence.

And now that's going to be weaponized against her time and time again in family court. Right. So then they become real reasons for her to stay. Right. We also know that there is a high degree of correlation between men who abuse their partners and then they abuse their kids. Like it's not 100 percent, but it's high. Right. So we have a hood. So we have concern if they are abusing their partner that they can be also abusing their kids. And then we also know

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that kids witnessing intimate partner violence is damaging. It's damaging for their development. It's damaging for their psychology. It's damaging for how they perceive role models in society. And they end up having usually a lot of anxiety and fear. And so many parents will say, well, they didn't see it. And then you talk to the kids, and they see way more than you know. They hear it. They see it. They feel it. They see the consequences. They feel the tension.

And that's really not good for their mental health. Kids know everything. They do. Yep, they know. And it's not the same correlation, but just, I jokingly say I had the best marriage that ended in divorce, and I still get along with my ex-husband. We do all the holidays together, and he's a very kind and sweet man. But my kids knew that we were getting divorced before we got divorced.

Right. They felt it. They knew it. They just they it was palpable to them that there was a change. So I can only imagine in a chaos and family, you know, a chaos situation, because I don't know how else to explain. Right. But so kids, because they're dependent on us as adults, they biologically, survival wise, have to be perceptive because we are their survival.

Right? We they they have to have that dependency. So they are watching. are modern. are. are watching everything. I'm sure that a child in a household of domestic violence and who sees violence probably can predict it's occurring. Yeah. Or see the rise and level of of of the I would say.

The bursting that is about to occur. So everybody sitting at that dining room table feeling it, right? The kids feel it, you know, and that level that now they're sitting in that level of fear because they can't protect their mom. They don't have any power. They don't want to get hit themselves. You know, they're afraid to excuse themselves and go to their room. They're afraid to stay. I mean, now they're living in this constant state of hyper arousal and fear. And that is not good for developing brain as that is not good for any person.

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No, no. And people that I know who have experienced, whether it's verbal abuse or witness violence in their home, they still talk about things that trigger them, you know, as adults. You know, even think like just a much more sort of, I guess, basic example, if you're in a store and someone's yelling at a clerk.

Like you could feel your tension going up, but you can feel like that's so uncomfortable, even though it's not being directed at you. Well, that's how I am. If someone yells at a waitress or a waiter, I am like, it's memory. And that's again, we have survival kind of mechanisms in our body that are physiologically hardwired because we have to respond to this threat, right? That's how we're created. So, you know, to be living in it in the home where you're supposed to be.

your safe space. Home is not safe for a lot of people. Yeah. So.

Well, we went in a lot of directions. So I'm going to ask you if there was anything that you would want to say or share about this issue that we, I think we've like hit almost every topic. I am going to say from the legal side of it is that what we know from the psychological side of it and what occurs in a court are not the same and that that's always hard.

to figure out what the best how to how to have the best results and i'm gonna say in my case with mary lou there were a lot of people who didn't think that she should spend any time in prison and and i understood their position and what i would say is that my client and her family were given all the options that they you know had legally and that

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she chose to accept the plea resolution because she thought it was fair and just. But I do think that what she suffered for most of her adult life is tragic. she can't get that back either. So I don't think the law and the re-

I don't know how they coalesce really. mean, I can say for what would have happened at trial, her resolution was better than if she lost that trial. And there's always a risk of taking a case to trial. But I do understand people's position that she, you know, should have potentially fought the case, but the state wasn't dismissing it. So she had to weigh all those options.

And many of us are never in that position. do I fight it or do I spend, you know, risk 25 to life in jail? Right. Those are really, really, really hard choices to make. know. And I would say the people who say, well, you can't take law into your own hands. Like, that's not what this is. Right. That's this is not a retribution type of matter. And and I think that's very oversimplistic of and just a misguided view of many of these cases. I mean, sometimes maybe, but not in

certainly this case and the majority of cases that I've worked, you know. And I think just the other thing that I would say is that, you know, I think it's important, obviously as a trauma psychologist, a trauma forensic psychologist, that we do educate the courts, that we educate prosecutors, that we do give them this information so that whoever the trier of fact is, whether it's the prosecutor choosing to charge it, the judge or the jury, that they can at least use this information, use this knowledge, right, to decide.

Right. And that's why we have, you know, this kind of adversarial system. Like, let's give them all the data. Let's let them understand what we know about intimate partner violence. Let's them know about the risk in this case, the specific facts in this case, as they make a decision to weigh their verdict. I think that is just a very important piece and kind of grateful we were able to do that in this case. No, me too. And I think that, as I said, I will keep coming back to, I think the resolution was a fair.

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in just resolution. was something that my client wanted in the end. There's something about the certainty of it. She'd already spent a significant time in custody. She'll be out, you know, by 57, you know, 56 years, probably 56, you know. She has a full life ahead of her. I would say she has a full third act ahead of her. So. And hopefully she can.

avail herself of treatment and ways to heal from what she went through and heal from, you know, the actual incident. It's traumatic to take someone's life, even in self-defense. That's traumatic. that whole, you know, changing the course of her life and her son's life is tragic. And I think that there is healing that can happen for people after these situations. And that would certainly be my wish for her and her son and her family that they could, you know, find that healing.

Yes, I agree with you. agree with you. Well, thank you so much for giving me a lot of your afternoon on a Friday. And it was great seeing you again and catching up. And I look forward to talking to you again. Thank you for joining Mighty Merp. Thanks for having me. It was really a pleasure working with you on this case and developing this collegial friendship and relationship. So that's nice too. I appreciate it at all. I really enjoyed love.

Loved learning from you and loved our conversation throughout the process and even now. Well, thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Mighty MERP podcast. This podcast is not a source of legal advice. No two legal cases are the same. Contact an attorney if you require legal assistance.