The “overwhelm” is what her husband blamed when he hit her. She would cower on the bed, making herself small against the wall while he swung his arms. Kate, a frank Midwesterner, described all of this on the phone to me last week. How she would tell herself and everyone else that these incidents were her fault. How she would stand in the kitchen after the fights, making his favorite breakfast sandwiches, because she thought that if she had provoked the violence, then somehow she could also provoke the peace.
Kate was one of many survivors of intimate-partner violence I spent last week interviewing. We were talking about the stories they told themselves and others about their abusive relationships, and how those stories weren’t always true.
And we were talking about the case of Jonathan Majors, a Yale-trained movie star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who was arrested last month and charged with assaulting a woman who is thought to have been his girlfriend. On Thursday, his attorney released a set of text messages to TMZ. She said they were exchanges between Majors and the alleged victim sent in the hours after the alleged assault. The texts were seemingly intended to exonerate her client, who has denied any wrongdoing.
“They said they had to arrest you as protocol when they saw the injuries on me,” the woman allegedly texted Majors, referring to the police and explaining that she hadn’t wanted him to be taken into custody. “I read the paper they gave me about strangulation and I said point blank this did not occur…I also said to tell the judge to know that the origin of the call was to do with me collapsing and passing out and your worry as my partner,” she continues. The texts are several paragraphs long. “I told them it was my fault for trying to grab your phone.”
When those alleged leaked texts were posted online, plenty of readers did see them as proof that Majors was the wronged party. Others, like Kate, heard echoes of the excuses they had made or the faults they had admitted to survive the most fragile moments of their lives.
The experiences and memories of those women have to do with their own relationships. How they remember communicating with and about their partners should not be taken as evidence of what might have happened between Majors and his accuser. I want to be clear about that. We don’t know what happened there, or what evidence may come to light; certainly the actor deserves the presumption of innocence in the American legal system. This is not a column about Jonathan Majors’s guilt or innocence.
This is a column about the slipperiness of language, and about how hard it is to understand what is happening between people in a relationship simply by studying their words — especially when it comes to conversations around abuse.
“If there’s a single phrase that makes my heart sink in a domestic abuse situation, it’s ‘I told them it was my fault,’ because I’ve told so many people that my own abuse was my fault,” one woman said, asking that I not use her name, which was an easy request to grant — she didn’t want her ex-partner to find her.
“I said it was all my fault,” remembered another, recalling how she’d taken the blame when a roommate came home to find her crying. This woman had been watching a sitcom with her boyfriend, she told me, when she mentioned that she didn’t think a character was as funny as he did. He started to storm out of the room, and when she stood up, too, thinking this was all part of a joke, he slapped her across the face and told her she needed to learn when to be quiet. She knew that telling the truth about what had happened “would make things worse and I didn’t want him to get in any trouble.”
So the women I talked to told their roommates that it was their own fault. They told the police it was their own fault. They told their abusive partners it was their own fault. They told themselves most of all.
One said it was her fault for not knowing when to be quiet.
One said it was her fault for not remembering to paint her nails in another room, when she knew her partner hated the smell of polish.
One said it was her fault for neglecting to log a purchase in the checkbook, when she knew her partner liked the financial accounts balanced.
They said it was their fault for forgetting to turn their ringers on, leading their boyfriends to accuse them of cheating, or for forgetting to turn their ringers off, leading their boyfriends to accuse them of disturbing their quiet.
They said it was their fault because saying they were at fault was sometimes the easiest way to avoid another explosion, and avoiding another explosion was the goal of every minute and every day. They said it was their fault because they were trying to save their own lives.
And they said they were at fault because sometimes it was easier to genuinely believe they were at fault. To believe they had some control over what was happening. The alternative, that there was nothing they could do or say that would fix this terrible cycle — the alternative was somehow worse.
“A lot of people saw me as strong,” said one woman I talked to. She was in the military, and physical and mental toughness were part of her identity to her family and friends. “I didn’t want them to see me as a victim.”
Her ex-boyfriend was military, too. She’d wondered if he was cheating on her but couldn’t get a straight answer, so one Thanksgiving weekend, she locked herself in the bedroom and picked up his phone. He broke down the door. He put his hands on her neck. He strangled her until she passed out. When she woke up, she called her mother, who told her to call the police, but even as she agreed, she knew she never would. Maybe she’d just picked the wrong time to ask whether he was cheating, she thought. When she asked again another weekend, he pointed a gun to her face.
We are having different kinds of conversations about domestic violence now than we used to have. We are realizing the questions we used to ask — why did you stay, why didn’t you tell anyone, did you do something to make your partner mad — were simplistic questions, checkers-board questions, when abuse victims are always playing a life-or-death game of Risk.
When I talked to Kate, she told me that she was relieved every day to no longer be playing that game.
“I thought that the biggest failure would be my marriage ending,” she said. “But the failure had already happened, and they were the things my husband had done, the things that were his fault.”
When she finally understood that, she said, she could move on with her life, and the new one that awaited her was happier than she’d ever imagined.
