The sudden fall from grace of New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, reveals that the public might benefit equally from an article, appearing in Esquire or GQ, titled, “Did Drinking Make Me Beat Up My Girlfriend?”

In The New Yorker piece that immediately caused Mr. Schneiderman to resign from office on Monday, he is accused of drinking to profound excess and physically abusing four women he was dating. He is, if we are to believe the women who have spoken, an alcoholic.

As one of his accusers recalls in the piece, Mr. Schneiderman “would almost always drink two bottles of wine in a night, then bring a bottle of Scotch into the bedroom. He would get absolutely plastered five nights out of seven.” On one occasion, she continues, “he literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down, like a tree falling.” His attacks would follow.

The connection between alcohol and domestic violence is hardly speculative. Women who advocated for temperance in the 19th century did so, in part, because they’d had enough of seeing men come home from saloons and take fists to their wives.

Alcoholism was so rampant among the well-off that a bogus treatment known as the Keely Cure, which promised to extinguish the desire to drink, gained popularity in the 1890s. (“Does Your Husband Drink?” a 19th-century newspaper ad for the treatment inquired. “Yes, we know the uncertainty, the broken promises, the dissipated fortune, the disgrace and the heartache. You have suffered only what a drinking man’s wife can suffer.”)

A century later, in the 1990s, a study by the Justice Department discovered that more than half of defendants accused of murdering a spouse had been drinking at the time the murder occurred. Scientific literature has long supported the association between alcohol dependence and aggression. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has stated that two-thirds of victims who had endured violence from a partner reported that the partner had been drinking at the time of attack.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/nyregion/eric-schneiderman-domestic-violence-alcohol-abuse.html