Crosspost "My wife (29) of four months called the cops on me (29) & my mom, we both got arrested for battery, but the case was dismissed largely due to the texts she sent me beforehand. Some community elders want us to meet now & possibly reconcile..." from /r/islam:

Relevant screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/YiyYYfG/

Background: The night before our altercation we had an argument about our travel plans to my brother’s wedding on across the country. The wedding was on a Sunday, I would be getting off a 24 hour ICU shift Saturday morning at 6am and I told her the only flight I could take would be a $600 multiple layover flight in the afternoon. I recommended that she fly out Friday night not only so she could get more acclimated to the different time zone we would be in, but to also have the comfort of flying with my parents since she told me she has only been on a plane a few times before. She said she did not want to fly Friday night because of work (she’s an elementary teacher and could be grading report cards late). While initially skeptical, I said okay that’s fine (I remember thinking to myself, “Well, I don’t know the ins and outs of being a teacher it's entirely possible she would be grading so late to not make a 730pm flight…”). I next suggested she take the only direct flight offered the next morning on Saturday at 7am which, importantly, would be $400 cheaper than the less-than-ideal flight that I would be taking later that day. She then said she did not want to take the 7am flight because she would be “too tired” and instead she wanted to fly with me because, “This is our first trip together and we should be flying as husband and wife. This should be romantic.” I told her very simply that we are going for literally just the weekend and that since I would be paying for our tickets there was the practical cost of the airline fare that I was taking into consideration. She then proceeded to argue with me for nearly two hours that evening about this topic going on and on about these “rules” she had about marriage and about being husband and wife. I was also getting the impression she simply did not want to fly with my parents either, and was hell bent on flying with me no matter what. I eventually was fed up and said, “You know what, you buy the ticket yourself then and tell me what flight you are taking.” I left our bedroom to finish some notes from the hospital. That night, she tried to be intimate with me, but I was very upset at her behavior and told her several times that I did not want to be intimate; I eventually had to push her off of me after she literally was laying on top of me to engage in foreplay. The next morning she had to go to work three hours earlier than me, and woke me up to argue her point further from the night before. I literally still had on my eye mask and was half asleep. She eventually did what she had done several times already during our short marriage: she ripped the blanket off of me to get my attention. I got up and grabbed her wrist to get my blanket back, and started yelling at her to stop. We exchanged nasty words, and before she left she slapped my arm twice, but I didn’t care at that point as I just wanted to rest. This was maybe the dozen or so time she had done this with the blanket as she was used to arguing with me a few mornings a week.

During the day, I did not text or call her. Sometime in the afternoon, she began calling and texting me simultaneously. She literally ended up calling me 34x in less than 90 minutes (she had behaved like this before other times and the really bad days she did this I took screenshots and showed her later to emphasize how this behavior was not fair to me). Anyways, as she started texting me I became frightened and shocked at what she was texting me. Her messages were erratic, confrontational, manipulative, and threatening. I genuinely thought she was unhinged and I was scared that it seemed she was almost trying to blackmail me. I told her to stay at her parent’s house that night (she would spend 1-2 nights per week at her parents since it was closer to her work than mine). When I got home that evening, I noticed she had stopped sharing her GPS location with me and assumed she just decided to stay at her parents house. Later that night my wife texted my mom (she lives with us), not me, that she was a few minutes from our house. When she got home, I was in the shower and she walked in and started berating me for not calling her or texting her at all during most of the day. I told her to leave the bathroom, so I could wear a towel, and she even said, “Why, I have seen you naked before.” When she walked out, I whispered to myself, “This is so stupid.” She swung the door open and yelled at me to not call her stupid. I apologized, changed into my clothes, and we both started talking in our bedroom. I told her I’d like to sleep in separate bedrooms that might because I did not want a repeat of what happened that very morning to happen again (and I also wanted time alone to frankly process what she had texted me and how she was behaving with me). After she repeatedly told me we would be sleeping together and my repeated refusals, she did something I never imagined possible: she spat on me. In that moment, I was humiliated, but also scared. “If she just spat on me, what else is she about to do,” I thought to myself. I told her she needed to leave and go to her parents house. She refused, and I then grabbed her hand to ask her to leave. My wife pulled away and I took her phone out of her hand and walked away from her (every time we fought she would call her mom or sister and at this point I was scared what she would do). At this point she started screaming hysterically, almost like a toddler -- she literally was covering her ears with her hands as she was screaming. My 60 year old mom ran towards us hearing the screaming and my wife now was yelling at me to get her phone back and I was telling her to calm down first. My mother eventually tried to calm my wife down with a bear hug, almost like a safety hold even. She continued yelling and was not becoming any less calm, and after a few minutes my mom had let go of my wife and she ran out the front door. She left her car and just ran away. We both tried looking for her, and one hour later the cops arrived and arrested me and my mom for battery. My wife had told the police that the red rash on her neck was from my mom choking her, but failed to mention that that this rash was there from the day before as she regularly developed hives from her allergy to our dog (I made her go see an allergist even because of how common she was having these allergy outbreaks).

The case was later completely dismissed largely due to the text messages & played a major role into why charges were never even filed anyways. Importantly, after my mom and I were taken away from our home, my wife accessed my phone and deleted our text chat off my iPhone (and disabled the iCloud backup). She did this because, among other reasons, text messages were her way of fighting with me, especially when I would be at work. Luckily, I had a partial backup saved onto my MacBook Air. The thing is: my wife hasn’t revealed the existence of these texts to anyone and for the first few weeks after the arrest she likely assumed she had successfully deleted them until my lawyer revealed them to the prosecutor who himself had no idea these existed. As the case was looking like it was going to be dismissed, it seemed her family was trying to find alternative ways of hurting me as her sister had the gall to email my boss at the hospital the police report to get me in trouble at work even. Her sister even texted some of co-residents the arrest record as well. Luckily, my employer has been on my side as I think they saw through these despicable and desperate maneuvers.

It has been now about two months since the arrest and my wife and I have been separated since then. She has been staying at her parent's home and I have had zero contact with her or her family. While our family has remained relatively quiet and tried to keep this matter private, my wife and her family have been going around town creating a grossly distorted narrative that the whole incident and failure of our marriage was due to me (and literally just making up lies along the way like that I would not let her go visit her parents or that she had no key to the house or that I own a gun). I think part of the desperation in their behavior and allegations is that her family is worried about getting their daughter re-married given the circumstances (not to mention the other younger sister is divorced herself). And so taken all the above into account (and especially their decision to involve my job), I have a deep burning desire to expose my wife for her vindictive, deceptive, and frankly, unhinged behavior to the whole city by publicly releasing the texts she sent me. She has very carefully curated a public image of a shy and meek girl and so these texts will shock just about everyone and put doubt into what her family has been saying I believe. It does not help that she is half my size and half my weight which makes people even less likely to believe that my wife could emotional and verbal abuse at me. People think just because I am a man and that I am bigger than her, and maybe even because I am a doctor, that it is not possible for me to be a victim. I should share that, disturbingly, only days after the arrest and our separation my wife posted her profile on a Muslim dating app with her profile picture showing the dress from our wedding photoshoot of all things (this is likely her mother's doing). Despite all this, there has been several attempts by community elders to initiate reconciliation or a meeting between her and me, and I have been extremely resistant to this idea only out of concern for my mental health. I've had to enter therapy since the arrest to not only help me deal with the trauma associated with that, but also the verbal and emotional abuse I endured during our marriage. I have had to even start taking anti-depressants. However, some believe marriage counseling can perhaps salvage our relationship which I doubt.

Edit: Do I wish I could have gone back and after she spat on me, locked myself in a room with my mom and called the cops? Sure. Do I wish I got in the car and drove away? Sure. But I did not. In that moment, I did what I felt was safe for me and my mother. Also worth mentioning that in my state, spitting on someone is considered simple battery and that a person can respond with mutual combat as a form of self-defense. This was another reason why the case was dismissed.

Edit 2: A few weeks after we got married, she started yelling at me one day because I had talked to my dad about the best credit card to set her up with (she was using her dad's still), and my wife the next morning woke me up (again ripping the blanket off me while sleeping), and yelled at me, "Why did you tell your dad my FICO score?!" As we were arguing, it became clear she herself had no idea what a FICO score was. She was just upset that I broke another one of her rules ("we are husband and wife you can't go to your parents about everything"). She continued yelling at me so much so my own father could her screaming at me from the first floor. Later that day as I was leaving for work, she came to my car window and said she would kill herself if I left her.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/SOV6wXc/

Posted by throwRA12380 | 1 April 2022 | Link