Rebuilding a Battered & Broken Life

Hello, everyone. My name is Kelly and I'm trying raise funds for and help my friend "Hope" and her pets, who have been going through many kinds of hell for years because of cruelty and domestic violence that was happening in their home and in her marriage.

They are at serious risk of having nowhere to live. Any funds raised will go towards living expenses (rent, utilities, person and pet food), getting her a badly and urgently needed lawyer, and making her feel safer in her home.

Please understand that she is not comfortable with her real name being used because she has a legitimate fear of her abuser finding anything out about her sharing her story and taking more steps to do harm to her and her pets and their lives. She has already been punished severely for telling a small number of friends and family about the physical and emotional abuse she was secretly enduring for years.

Hope needs help because her abuser has continued to make her life extremely difficult and everything she has been put through caused her to begin having "silent" heart attacks in the summer. These became worse and escalated to stress cardiomypathy in December and she has been hospitalized many times, costing her a job and preventing her from working while her bills have racked up. She hasn't had propane for heat and hot water all winter. She has been relying on space heaters and boiling water.

Hope also has a bad hip that she was born with that was often kicked by her abuser and she continues to have severe pain in it along with swelling in her leg.

To understand how it reached such a stressful and challenging point for her, please continue reading.

Hope is a genuinely caring and compassionate person who will go out of her way to get along with and try to understand someone. She will especially go out of her way to help ANY animal that is suffering, lost, or afraid. Even wild animals recognize her spirit and let her help and even pick them up without incident. It's honestly incredible to watch.

I first met Hope several years ago when she reached out to a support group for domestic violence that I was involved with. Here's the kind of person she is: when she first reached out, she was doing so more to try to understand and help her abuser deal with their issues than trying to help herself.

She believed the abuse was unintentional and the result of childhood trauma and that it would stop once the person received help. She even went on to marry this person, fully believing the best in them.

The abuse she was going through at that time was very infrequent and less severe than it would later become, but involved the deliberate targeting of a part of her body (her hip) that had already caused her pain throughout her life. Her abuser always seemed to have no recollection of their actions and Hope wanted to believe that.

In 2019, only in her 30s, Hope finally got her hip replaced and was looking forward to enjoying many of the things she had been unable to do for so long. Unfortunately, she was only able to enjoy "her new ride" for a few short months.

That December, the person she had married and saw the best in became very angry with her one night and went on to violently kick her new hip over and over again, immediately doing damage and causing terrible, ongoing pain. The intense violence and anger Hope was the victim of that night didn't end with physical pain. She was emotionally devastated and has been diagnosed with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

During the next 3 years, the abuse continued and became a much more regular occurrence. On top of that, she was being subjected to verbal and psychological cruelty while also being blamed for everything that was going on. She was often called a "loser," told she didn't matter, or told she had let down her mom who had passed away a handful of years earlier.

Her pets, who have been her reason to go on and who she loves like her own children, also began to sometimes be on the receiving end of the violence. When the anger and abuse was aimed at her pets, she would put herself in front of them.

In the meantime, a global pandemic had begun and she found herself stuck with her abuser 24/7 for nearly a year.

After a year of the violence getting worse, Hope finally began trying to defend herself. When she was cornered or backed into a wall or was just laying down, she would sometimes shove her abuser off and away from her. In response, this person she married and loved and trusted despite everything, began talking to and treating her like SHE was the abusive one in the relationship and pretended to have no memory of their own violence.

Complicating the situation even more, her abuser increasingly seemed to be disconnected from reality. Hope would be saying or doing something kind and loving and be responded to as if she had done or said something awful and insulting. This began happening so often that she started to wonder if she really was doing and saying things differently than she thought.

As you can imagine, all of this continued and worsening physical and emotional abuse and the mind games were only making Hope's PTSD and mental health worse.

She had been proud to land a dream job in the middle of it all and during the worst of COVID. But her abuser was constantly interfering with her work (that she was having to do from home) and blaming her job for the problems in their marriage. After having this job she enjoyed so much for only 16 months, she gave in to the demands that she resign, believing it would make her home life easier and safer.

Just over a year ago, Hope became optimistic that things were going to get better when it was finally agreed that they would see a marriage counselor and begin addressing the abuse. But her life was instead turned further upside down.

When they sat down to begin their appointment (which was 40 minutes from their home), Hope's abuser suddenly said they were leaving her and wanted a divorce and that she was being left there. By the time Hope was able to get home, not only had her abuser been there and left already, but several of Hope's beloved pets had been taken too, as well as some of her very personal and sentimental belongings from as far back as her childhood. She was and continues to be heartbroken and devastated.

She was left with all the bills, no job, and physical challenges caused by the abuse. Her abuser continued to play mind games and make threats. Hope constantly asked how her stolen pets were doing and if she could have them back, but has still been told nothing about them.

The system in the state we live in has done more to protect Hope's abuser and assist them in continuing to torment her than it has done to help her. Because it is a no-fault state regarding divorce, a person can abuse their spouse for many years and it does not matter in the eyes of the court. The abuser, no matter what they've done, is entitled to half of everything the couple owns.

The law also views pets as "property," which means Hope's pleas to have them returned to her have gone nowhere. Anyone who has or has had pets understands that they are not property. They are a part of your family.

Using the Courts to Abuse

Several months after she was walked out on, Hope finally spoke up discreetly in a social media post about what had been happening to her in her marriage. This got back to her abuser and she received several angry messages demanding she take what she said down unless she wanted there to be consequences.

Hope did not take it down and, a few days later, a sheriff's deputy showed up at the door serving her with an order for protection (OFP)...against HER!

She couldn't believe it. None of us could. It is, however, a common tactic that abusers sometimes use in order to do more harm to their victims, to maintain control over them, and to avoid taking responsibility for their abuse.

To obtain this dishonest OFP, her abuser had filed a report full of lies and used a text message Hope had once sent where she said she was sorry for how stressed out and depressed she had been the last couple years and that "I hate that I've ever gotten physical back with you." The rest of that text where Hope went on to say "It's just that when you get so violent with me and I can't get away, I don't know what else to do" was intentionally left out of her abuser's filing.

It was the OFP that set off Hope's cardiac issues. On top of everything else she had been and was continuing to go through, being abused for so long and then being treated as the abuser was too much.

An evidentiary hearing about the OFP had been set for a day in December. It was going to be the first time Hope had seen the person who was causing all of this harm. She was a nervous and terrified wreck. The night before the hearing, she had a panic attack that turned into awful chest pain and a heart rate that wouldn't go down. She ended up in the emergency room.

Hope's condition only got worse that night. It was bad enough that she was transported by ambulance to a larger hospital. Both she and the hospital were leaving messages with the court explaining what was going on. She was actually in the ambulance at the time the hearing was taking place.

It did not matter to the court, however. Even though they received documentation of where she was and what was happening, because she was not there, they ruled in favor of her abuser and granted the OFP against the real victim.

This unjust ruling has meant that the OFP against her shows up in background checks and has cost her countless jobs that she has been desperately applying for. All of it has caused more stress, trauma, and depression for Hope and contributed to more cardiac episodes that continue to lead to hospitalizations.

In the meantime, her divorce has continued to drag out and her abuser and their lawyer have been very aggressive. It's far more than she can handle on her own and she is badly needing to be able to pay a lawyer to help protect her and fight to get her stolen pets returned and to help her fight to have the OFP corrected.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Neither Hope nor her pets have deserved any of what has happened to them. They could all really use help right now, so if you're able to, please consider donating so they can have some security and so she can begin rebuilding her life.

--Peace and Blessings--