Kit Gruelle & Cythia Hill talking:
I survived a very violent marriage that ended with the death of my husband 34 years ago. And he was killed in an accident offshore in Louisiana, and it just was—the whole experience was so astonishing, and it took a long time for me to start to pull myself together. But then I took my boys and moved down from the mountains to the Chapel Hill area, and I saw an ad for a training opportunity for crisis line volunteers for the domestic violence program. And I went to the training, and I felt like I had just been—that I had found my emotional home, my spiritual home, my intellectual home. And it just fit with my personality type, because I feel very strongly—I’m a human rights activist, but, to me, this is so essential because if you can’t be safe in your own home, then where can you be safe? And then, because of my own experience, I just recognized that it wasn’t just the abuser that the victim had to deal with, it was also these oppressive systems who would marginalize her and judge her and stigmatize her and make her feel like she was doing something wrong. And so, I wanted to challenge that, too.
a lot of people believe that domestic violence only happens to poor, uneducated women. In my case, my late husband had been—he had gone into Vietnam, gone to the Vietnam War as a marine, and so he was trained by the Marines to be aggressive, to hunt people down and kill them. And he told me repeatedly that if I ever tried to leave, that there wasn’t a place on the planet that I could go to get away from him.
And so, the reality for battered women is they just learn to live with the violence, because, unfortunately, for a great number of women, when they do make that bold move, what I often refer to as a declaration of independence, and say, “I can’t live like this anymore. The children can’t live like this anymore. We’ve got to go,” then the abusers oftentimes hunt them down and kill them. And so, for us, as advocates, we see women have to make the choice of staying and living with the violence or leaving and running the risk of being killed. And we just believe that there should be a lot more options, and that’s what advocates work towards.
The other thing is that we’re so desensitized to violence in the United States that oftentimes women have to be beaten badly enough before our criminal justice system responds, like, for example, in North Carolina we have a charge called misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon. So a North Carolina man can shoot or stab his wife or girlfriend, and unless it involves a serious injury or a life-threatening injury, it’s going to be charged at the misdemeanor level. And so, essentially what that is is that’s just the criminal justice system giving him a green light to just carry on.
the thing that he liked to do most was strangle me. I think he liked knowing that he had my life in his hands. And he—you know, he put his hands around my neck and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. And, you know, I’m not going to use the language that he would use, but he’d say, “I could break your blanking neck if I wanted to.”
And then there were the things that I refer to as the minutia. He was trying to gain muscle weight. He was a bodybuilder, and he wanted a lot of calories that were protein calories. And so, he wanted—every night he’d have a bowl of ice cream, and on the ice cream he wanted peanuts because, he said, the peanuts were so high in protein. But when I went to the grocery store—and he didn’t want the—he didn’t want salt on the peanuts because, he said, the salt would cause him to retain fluid. But when I went to the grocery store, I had to buy salted peanuts, bring them home, rinse them off in the colander, pat them dry, put them on the ice cream. And then, if he came across salt on his peanuts on the ice cream, then he’d come after me because, he said, I didn’t do a good enough job washing the peanuts. And so, one of the things that’s so important is that I couldn’t call law enforcement and say, “I’m terrorized by husband because I don’t do a good enough job washing the peanuts.” They’d laugh at that.
But the reality of it is, is the anger is only a tactic. What it’s about is control. What it’s about is seeing the woman, the wife or girlfriend, as personal property to do with as the abuser pleases. That was certainly the case with my husband, as he just treated me like I was his private property to do with as he pleased.
Jason, our son, was only 14 months old when his dad died, so he didn’t—he didn’t see anything. And Matt, my older son, I don’t think he remembers much, because he was only four when Jack died. But it’s been—it’s been interesting for me as a single mom raising boys, wanting very much for them to grow up knowing how to relate to women in respectful and nonviolent ways. And there were challenges along the way, because there’s a lot of external, you know, misogynistic reinforcers. But I had them at Friends School for a while, and they’ve grown up to be two pretty great guys.
Deanna Walters is a woman from the mountains of North Carolina, from West Jefferson. She was attempting to separate from her husband, and he wound up kidnapping her and their daughter, and putting them in an 18-wheeler. He had his cousin drive. And as they left North Carolina and drove all the way out to California and halfway back to Oklahoma, Robbie beat Deanna and strangled Deanna and kicked Deanna and urinated in her face and beat her with a Maglite flashlight and almost killed her. And she survived. When the truck was stopped in Oklahoma, she was taken to the local hospital.
It was only stopped because Deanna—Robbie put Deanna on the phone with people that he was paranoid that she was having affairs with, which was baloney. She wasn’t—you know, she wasn’t doing that at all. And because of her robotic sort of approach to having these conversations, they became concerned that something was happening. They called the trucking company. The trucking company realized that he had unauthorized riders in the cab, and the truck was pulled over in Oklahoma.
And Deanna got out of the cab looking like this—just like she had been in the worst car accident possible. I mean, her face was smashed in. She had petechial hemorrhage in her eyes, which is the first symptom of acute strangulation assaults. Her body was bruised from, you know, the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Her knees were grotesquely swollen where he had beaten her with a Maglite flashlight, I think, so that she couldn’t run.
Her daughter witnessed everything.
And Martina was just screaming and screaming over and over again, “Why are you doing this to my mom? Why are you doing this to my mom?” And Robbie would say things to Martina like, “I’m doing this because your mother doesn’t love us, so it’s OK for me to do this.” And Deanna had had a seizure disorder that had been in check, but after the blows to the head, her seizure disorder has now started back up again, so she’s on medication for that.
And yet, when she got back to North Carolina, the local prosecutor, his first question to her was: “Why didn’t you try to run?” And, you know, there are a thousand reasons why she didn’t try to run. Robbie said that if she tried to run, he’d kill Martina. She didn’t know where she was. She was hideously beaten. She was being threatened with her life. She was afraid that if she ran or tried to run, he’d kill her, and she didn’t know what would happen to Martina. So, this is why we have to stop asking women, “Why don’t you just leave?”
he kidnapped her in North Carolina, but the local prosecutor seemed unimpressed with her injuries. In fact, when Robbie did come back from Oklahoma, he told the local law enforcement officers that he beat her so bad that he thought he broke his fingers. And yet they still only charged him with misdemeanor assault on a female.
And he also told her not to say that he’d done this. So, as long as Robbie was within earshot, of course she was going to say what she’d been instructed to say. But the minute she was able to say, “No, he did this to me,” by then he was gone
When we first met Deanna, it was just a few months after the incident had actually happened, and she was so distraught thinking that nothing was going to come of this and that he was not going to be held accountable for anything. And she just was—I don’t know. She just—and you can see this in the film. She just is—she seems hopeless, like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I’m just going to have to live with this.”
But what’s amazing about having this story and this trajectory and watching this process of seeking justice and the feds finally picking up the case and him actually going to prison for almost 21 years, and seeing Deanna transform from victim to survivor is pretty spectacular. You know, I don’t think—I mean, it’s one thing that I have never seen in a film, or a documentary film, actually being able to see physically her transformation.
there’s this one image of her laying on the hospital bed, and she looks like a corpse. It looks like she’s dead. She just is so bruised. And you just cannot imagine somebody actually experiencing all of this, in the way she looks, and still be alive.
we were thrilled at the sentence that he got, because it shows the difference between the federal prosecution, where he got a 21-year-plus sentence, and in North Carolina the most he would have gotten is 150 days. So, it just shows the stark contrast.
it should have been charged as attempted murder, right. But because of the kind of inherent patriarchy in our criminal justice system and because there are many laws that still regard women as less than or as the property of their husbands, because that’s the reality of how it plays out—I mean, we do have good laws on the books in some states, but how do those laws get translated? And what does it mean for someone like Deanna to be beaten that badly by her husband and then to have the person who’s in charge of holding him accountable for what he did look at her and say, “Why didn’t you run?” It’s just a completely upside-down and backwards way to approach this very private violence, that ultimately plays itself out in public ways, because when kids grow up exposed to domestic violence, they tend to not do well in school. Oftentimes they wind up running away. Girls get pregnant early. Boys become violent themselves. They join gangs. So, I refer to domestic violence as kind of the Petri dish for all of the other social issues that we ultimately pay for.
one of the things that has happened, thanks to the Violence Against Women Act, is that there has been a lot of law enforcement training. And part of what they look at now is who’s the dominant aggressor. And so, they’ve been trained in looking at offensive versus defensive injuries. They do a much, much more comprehensive and thorough job gathering evidence, talking to other people, talking to neighbors. And as a result, I think that a majority of law enforcement officers around the country now see domestic violence as an actual crime, and they treat it like a crime.
But unfortunately, in many pockets around the country, it’s still not considered criminal conduct. And so, for me, as someone who works very closely with law enforcement in North Carolina and also in California, I just hope that in the next months, years, decades, that we can really start to focus on this crime and deal more appropriately early on with the offender rather than blaming her for what he’s done.
part of what we’re trying to get the negotiators to understand is that battered women are what we refer to as benign hostages. And what we mean by that is that they—you know, they wake up every morning, and their abuser gives them a set of rules and regulations that they have to live by. And if they don’t abide by those terms and conditions strictly, then there are consequences—you know, physical violence, sexual violence, coercion, intimidation.
And 80 percent of the hostage-taking incidents every year in this country are domestic-violence-related. Most people think it’s about banks, but it’s not. It’s almost always where, you know, the woman has done what everyone has told her to do. She’s left. She’s got an order of protection. She’s drawn a line in the sand. And yet, he says to her and to the court system and everyone else, “You’re not—no, you’re not walking away from me.” And he goes over and barricades in, and then the hostage negotiators are called out.
In fact, it just happened here in Utah last week. Right as we got here, there was a police officer who shot and killed his wife, his two children, his mother-in-law and then himself. And what I’ve heard from the domestic violence community around here, she had separated from him, and then they reconciled at the holidays. But it sounds like she probably had decided that it wasn’t going to work and was about to leave. And for many battered women, that’s the most dangerous time for them.
what we really want to happen with the film, or what we want audiences to walk away with, is to not ask that question anymore of “Why doesn’t she just leave?” because it’s clear, after watching this film, that you cannot ask that question and expect to get any results that are meaningful. I mean, all it does is just blame the victim for the whole situation without putting any sort of responsibility on the perpetrator at all. And then, also, as society, you know, we need to understand that we do play a role in this.
Every woman that I’ve ever worked with who has killed her abuser, when she goes into the prison system, she says, “I’ve never felt this safe.” And it just—it just blows my mind that this is—you know, this is the United States of America. And for battered women who turn to the criminal justice system, like Deanna did, only to be told, “Your injuries don’t satisfy me as being serious enough to do anything with it,” and then it continues to happen, or she decides, “I’m not going to call 911, because what’s the point?” And then she has to take matters into her own hands, and then she goes to prison and says, “Well, this is the safest I’ve ever felt.”
it’s a privilege to be a part of this opportunity to train law enforcement officers in North Carolina and in California. I have to say California is very forward-thinking about this crime, so that gives me hope. We still have a long ways to go, and it’s not exclusive to the criminal justice community. I think that everyone has to understand that when they look away from a battered woman, they’re—all they’re doing is reinforcing the isolation. So, if what anyone and everyone can do when they see or hear something that gives them an indication that a woman is being abused, that rather than looking away, if they can learn a few basic things, helping her understand that this is not her fault, that there is help for her, that she’s not alone, that we understand that leaving an abuser is not an event, it’s a process, but there are people in the community who can help you do this, is so important to helping her understand that she does in fact have people she can turn to. But then, the other side of it is we have to say to abusers, “You can’t do this anymore.”
— source democracynow.org
Kit Gruelle, a domestic violence survivor who has been an advocate for other survivors for 30 years. Her story is featured in the new film, Private Violence, which premiered here at Sundance.
Cynthia Hill, director of the new HBO documentary film Private Violence, which is currently at the Sundance Film Festival.