Abuse Expert Explains Why Cassie Couldn’t Just Leave

That’s where she handed me a stack of cash outside her car. To a passerby, it probably looked like a drug deal. But the kind of “escape” Diane desperately wanted was different. She needed my help to plan a long-awaited getaway from her husband.

“He controls the finances ― always has ― and looks at every penny I spend,” she told me when we first chatted on the phone. “He also has monitoring devices and cameras around our house, and maybe even in my car. So I have to pay you for your services out of my secret stash of cash.”

We met at the local Whole Foods, one of the few places she was “allowed” to go.

As a divorce coach living in Fairfield County, Connecticut, a suburb in the New York City metro area, I’m used to the finance guys, hedge fund partners, and multimillionaire business owners. Many of the women who come to me feel trapped in a golden cage ― a way of life that looks like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous from the outside, but is hell behind the gilded locked doors. 

“Why don’t you just leave?” so many friends and family ask my clients. But in my view, just like Cassie, who is testifying against rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in his federal sex crimes case, they are abuse victims whose exits have been blocked. Combs has pleaded not guilty.

What I see so often in my work coaching women (and a few men) is something called coercive control. And, while it may not always leave a black eye or bruise, it’s a form of subjugation that’s insidious and paralyzing. I have had clients physically beaten, then were denied a restraining order because a judge said they “waited too long to report it.” So they were forced to go back to their home with the abuser. I’ve had clients see every dollar in the joint bank account disappear and have no way to buy food. 

And sadly, at least half of my clients, which include women from other parts of the country, too, have told me their husbands raped them after they refused sex. These men handled the rejection by saying things like, “You’re my wife. I pay the bills, and I’m entitled to sleep with my wife.” 

Many of these women are highly educated, but gave up their careers to “be a team player” and stay home with the kids, not realizing that once they gave up their financial freedom, they wouldn’t be able to get it back. 

As a coercive control survivor myself, I know how it creeps up on you. Even the smartest, most independent, cautious women (I am a former full-time investigative reporter on TV) can be hoodwinked. Think of the fable describing a frog that finds itself in a pot of boiling water. If the frog had known what was coming, it never would have jumped in. Instead, coercive control victims start out in tepid, even balmy, water. But little by little…they are boiled alive.

Leaving can seem impossible when your abuser appears omnipotent ― a puppeteer pulling the purse strings of your life. They are expert manipulators; I once got sweet-talked into going back to mine when he promised he “would change and get better” because we were “soulmates.” You also fear their rage if and when you leave. That’s why it takes abuse victims seven times on average before they escape for good.