Personal Struggle — Part One

What I am about to share is deeply personal and extremely painful to write about. It is part of my biography that I would like to completely erase from my memory and delete from my consciousness. It’s something that I’ve struggled with for the past 18 years, for most of my adult life.

I thought it was going to be a short post, however it’s turning into a pretty long story. I figured that I’ll just share it in several parts.

Part I:

I let my ex get away with attempted murder. He tried to kill me. I almost died. I was seconds away from taking my last breath. I have survived unbelievable physical and emotional abuse. Yet, I never got to press charges. I never got to see him behind bars. I never got to experience some sense of relief. I never got any justice.

My only witness (who saved my life) died under questionable circumstances shortly after (supposedly from a stroke despite being pretty young and healthy) and before she got a chance to deliver a proper testimony. I’ll get to this part of the story a bit later.

I feel like I need to share this story because I know that I’m not the only one. I know that when you are a “victim” in every sense of this word, the justice system works against you. We live in a society that promotes winners and the winner always wins. Especially, if this winner has all the right credentials with his summa cum laude Ivy degree, and a stellar career and reputation.

It quickly turns into his word against yours and nobody wants to believe you. Besides, he is your husband and you are his wife.

I guess I should start my story with some background information on how I even got to the point of getting married to that monster. I know that it didn’t make sense to a lot of people then. Sometimes, it wouldn’t make sense to me either. I was young. I was beautiful. I was rich. A lot of people hated me because I seemed to have it all. So why would someone who seemed to have everything going for them get married at a tender age of 20 to someone much older, not that great looking, and financially struggling?

People couldn’t see that I was actually doomed from the start. I had a lot of internal insecurities. I had very low self-esteem. I never fit in well with my peers. I was already doomed for failure when my parents moved to San Francisco in 1995 and enrolled me in Drew College Prep. It was a small private high school for the spoiled little brats of Pac Heights who didn’t get into University High. Vast majority of this relatively tiny school lived within a 5 block radius of the Billionaire’s Row, had trust funds, and were completely clueless about the rest of the world and life in general.

It was there where I met my first boyfriend, JW. For someone like me who just moved to the states and was desperately trying to blend in with that affluent waspy crowd from Drew, he was the epitome of everything American. He had Mayflower lineage on both sides and was a descendant of Benjamin Franklin.

He wasn’t the tallest in the class, but he was incredibly athletic and fit. He worked as a windsurfing instructor on the weekends and did all the extreme sports I could never do. At first, it was all rosy and sweet, but after a couple of months I realized that JW was only nice and sweet when things were going his way. He quickly turned more and more irritable and aggressive and when I tried to break up with him after about 4 months, I thought that he was gonna kill me right there and then.

I was very afraid of JW. I knew that he could easily break into my house. I knew that he could easily hurt me. I knew that he could easily kill me. He was crazy. He did crazy shit. He got in trouble. He got me in trouble (That’s for another story). And I also knew that he would get away with anything. He was invincible. His family connections and money made him invisible. I learned that early on. I learned that whatever you could do for money in some places, you could do for a lot of money here in the US.

Luckily for me, JW’s parents decided to send him abroad for a year after high school. That gave me a nice break from him and all the craziness. If you were a bored teenager with money in SF in the 90s, you had endless opportunities for self-destruction amidst all the parties, the underground raves, and readily available drugs. It was wild. SF used to be wild.

Fast forward 2 years after first meeting JW, I was now 18, taking classes at USF, still living at my parents house. JW was now away teaching English somewhere in Cambodia. It was Spring of 1999 and I was depressed that I was single. I must have whined about it to my mom a little too much. Not that she cared, but it did make her mind open to setting me up with just about anyone. That’s how my ex came into the picture.

He just turned 29. He moved to the US 10 years prior with his elderly parents from Moldova without much money and worked his way up through college, graduated from UC Berkley, got into Harvard Med School (which he actually never finished, but that’s a different story) and was now doing an orthodontics residency at UCSF and moonlighting as a general dentist at a dental office where one of my cousins used to work.

He had a lot of regrets about going to med school instead of business school. He never really wanted to be a doctor in the first place and all he cared about was how much money he could make. He had amassed a ridiculous amount of student debt from all his medical and dental schools and it really weighed him down. He knew that he could never be financially successful if he worked for someone else and did salaried dental work. He could never pay off his student loans. His elderly parents were destitute and living in subsidized housing. There was nobody who could help him. He was dreaming of opening his own practice(s) and having cash to invest in other businesses, but that was close to impossible with his amounts of student loans and shitty credit scores.

It was 1999 and the dot com boom was happening. He would get extremely jealous of all his buddies who never went to school and yet joined tech companies as freshly minted engineers after some 2 month long coding courses and made 7 figures overnight. It was also a wild time to be in SF.

My ex had a girlfriend back in Boston. They were together for 4 years. They lived together. She worked and supported him while he was in school there. They were planning to get married. He was her everything and he was in love with her. He was really in love with her. They must have been made for each other. They must have been soulmates. I think he might have given her a ring already. This story is actually worthy of a novel and a Hollywood movie.

I’m still not exactly sure why she didn’t move to SF right away with him. She stayed behind when he started his residency program. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be very temporary until he was going to settle in. Regardless, I didn’t know that there was someone waiting for him when I met him. As far as I knew that relationship was over. In reality it wasn’t and was going very strong, but I didn’t realize this until much later. Years later.

I guess by working with my cousin he found out that there was an eligible bachelorette that could be his lucky ticket out of financial troubles. I came from a very wealthy family and he devised an elaborate plan to court me and marry into money and connections. I’m pretty sure that he planned from the very start to take my money, get rid of me, and provide a better life for the woman he loved that was waiting for him back in Boston. If I turned out to be the most hideous creature on earth, he would not have cared. If I had 3 legs, he would not have cared. He would still have married me. I was his once in a lifetime opportunity out of poverty and mediocre life.

I do have to mention that as a child my ex was a chess prodigy. He would even make money for his father when he was little by playing chess. His dad would make bets on him. I think he peaked when he was 9 years old. He would win every match. He even played professionally into his teenage years, but then he abandoned the sport. Although he no longer played it, one thing from chess stuck to him. He developed this almost supernatural ability to plan and strategize everything 50 moves ahead; and this skill encompassed everything in his life. He grew into this master manipulator and everyone else turned into pawns on his game board.

My mom was an easy target. All it took was a few mentions by a couple of people who knew my ex to tell her that there was this nice new Jewish boy in town who was nice, and smart, and bound to be a successful doctor with a Harvard degree (never mind he was actually an orthodontist). He was very skillful at projecting an image of success — a poster child of the American dream and what he had accomplished here. He was serious, mature, and reliable. A stark difference to my first boyfriend JW, whom my mom hated with a passion (and rightfully so). She was sold.

I was definitely open to meeting new people and a double date was quickly arranged in early May of 1999. It was going to be me, my cousin who worked together with my ex, my ex, and his ex girlfriend from many years ago who he was still friends with and wanted to set up with my cousin. It was really weird. The whole evening was very odd and awkward for everybody.

When I first saw my ex that night, I really didn’t like him. I found him to be repelling both in the way he looked and his personality. I felt like I had nothing to talk to him about. I actually didn’t even bother to talk to him. He hated me from the first moment he saw me. He already had all these preconceived notions about me. He assumed that I was a spoiled little bitch who was very stuck up and entitled. I was counting minutes for this double date to be over and that was the end of it. We parted ways and nothing happened after that. He never called me back. For a month.

I brushed this date off and completely forgot about it. And that’s when JW came back to town. It was the beginning of summer, which meant that he could torment me again for the next 3 months before leaving again for college. JW was already sitting on my bed in my room and I knew that I lacked any and all willpower and self control to tell him to leave. I knew that he would eventually pressure me into doing drugs and sex. I was sitting there terrified at what I felt was about to happen to me.

As I was sitting there in my room with JW, my phone started to ring. I picked it up and it was my future ex husband on the line apologizing for not calling me sooner and asking me out on another date. If he would have called me at any other time, I probably would have said “no” or would not have even picked up on him. However, at that moment I could not have been happier to hear his voice. We made plans to meet again the next evening, I put down the phone and I told JW to get out of my house.

To be continued ….