DRUGS, alcohol, womanising, beatings, screams in the night. It sounds like the ingredients to a Lifetime original movie, but for Dr. Judith Bartley this was her reality for several years married to a man who almost beat her to death.She relayed her emotional story at The Physical Abuse Centre’s annual luncheon and told the Mid-Ocean News<$> she is only now getting to grips with what happened to her more than 20 years ago.

From the outside everyone thought her marriage was perfect.

They were a church-going couple with two adorable little girls and were popular amongst their peers and friends.

Female friends even admitted to Dr. Bartley that they wished their husbands were more like hers.

But her perfect world came crashing down in 1980 after her husband graduated from college with his bachelors degree.

She recalls how his behaviour literally changed overnight and he went from being an attentive and loving husband and father, to being self-obsessed and egotistical.

While his new personality was a little disturbing at first, she put her feelings aside for the sake of her family, who were in the process of returning to Bermuda.

Things only got worse after he started driving a taxi while waiting to get a job as a social worker.

Over a period of several months his behaviour grew more “peculiar” as he talked about his “missionary” work on Court Street and would come home smelling of alcohol and smoke.

“I had never been involved in the drug culture, so I didn’t know this was drug-related behaviour. I didn’t know what to look for because it was not a part of my world,” she says.

He had told her early on in their relationship that he had used drugs until he was 16 and after more than ten years she had no reason to assume he had started again.

When his behaviour became more extreme, she simply thought it was because he was working long hours and had no balance between family and work.

“I continued to be Judy without realising this person was changing and it reached a point where I couldn’t do anything right and everything became an argument,” she recalls.

Sometimes he disappeared for days and eventually he stopped paying the bills.

“I was trying to protect my children and hide them from it. I remained cheerful and happy and bright and everything that needed to be done for them was done .... I was an educator so money was coming in,” she elaborates.

The first time he hit her was in August 1983.

Dr. Bartley was seeing a marriage counsellor, something her husband refused to do.

“The marriage counsellor encouraged me to keep the communication lines open, so I approached him (my husband) about our situation and the next thing I knew my glasses were on the floor,” she says.

She was so distraught that she isolated herself, too embarrassed to go to work, or leave the house.

Her counsellor eventually convinced her to return to work, but she donned a pair of sunglasses to hide the black eye.

“A neighbour told my mother about my black eye and she encouraged me to go to June Augustus (who had helped start the Physical Abuse Centre in Bermuda), but I was too embarrassed, I was in denial and I was humiliated. I was an educator and this didn’t happen to an educator. I couldn’t let people know this kind of thing was going on and after all, I’m Bermudian, I have pride,” she recalls.

Instead, she asked her husband to move out of the house: “A minister at our church said he was my husband and I needed to continue having sexual relations with him even though he was sleeping with all these other women.”

Not being able to turn to her church for help, she did consider going to the Physical Abuse Centre, but admits she was too proud.

“I thought if I pretended, then everyone else would pretend too and forget that this was happening,” she says.

“I was humiliated and people didn’t want to talk about it, so I suffered in silence. What everyone said made me feel guilty and I thought it was my fault and I must have done something wrong, so I brought him home.”

Nothing changed and she only grew more isolated from family and friends, while keeping up appearances to protect her daughters from the monster their father had become.

There seemed to be some hope for a peaceful Christmas when he disappeared a few days before December 25 that year and Dr. Bartley invited family over to celebrate the season.

After dinner she and her daughters settled down to watch television when the door suddenly burst open and he stormed into the room.

She’s not sure why, but she can still remember that it was 9 p.m. and that while he walked towards her, as if in slow motion, he removed his leather belt from his pants, all the time muttering “I should have done this a long time ago.”

Her daughters, frozen in silent terror, watched from the couch as their father smashed the five-inch wide leather belt against their mother’s face so hard that the leather snapped with a loud bang.

With blood gushing down her chin a deep gash to her upper lip, Dr. Bartley recalls seeing her daughters faces and backing out of the front door onto the porch.

“Instinctively I took off my glasses, all the time saying to myself, in my head, that they would break. And I stepped off the porch because it’s concrete and I knew I needed to be somewhere soft when I fell,” she recalls with obvious emotion.

What happened after that is blocked from her memory, but when she regained consciousness her sister told her how she had heard a noise and come downstairs to find Dr. Bartley wondering around in a daze with blood all over her face.

“She said she didn’t know whether they should take me to King Edward or St. Brendan’s,” she adds.

Numb from the shock, she says she recalled very little about the trip to the hospital or the nurse who stitched her up, but she does remember the nurse saying “Whoever did this to you was extremely evil”.

Dr. Bartley was too afraid to go home the next day and and moved in with her sister for a week.

Meanwhile police had put out a warrant for her husband’s arrest.

“As for my church, the only person who came to see me was a foreigner visiting Bermuda who heard what happened to me and brought me a flower,” she says, taking a deep breath to gain control of her emotions.

“That’s the only visit I ever got from the church, so you can see at this point my relationship with the church was breaking down.”

During that week her husband continued to call and threaten her unless she dropped the charges.

Even though things might have changed since then, Dr. Bartley feels women continue to be treated unfairly by law, which is why so few women report physical, or domestic abuse.

She uses her degrading interview with police as an example: “After two weeks I had to go to the police station to be photographed. It was a Sunday and there were two male officers. I asked them for a female officer because I had to strip. They said there weren’t any working, so I was stripped and photographed by two male officers.”

The officers later told her she had shoe imprints from her shoulders all the way down her back and around he buttocks, where she had been savagely kicked.

Dr. Bartley admits she wasn’t even aware of these injuries, but believes that is because he kicked her in the head so hard that she has spent the past 15 years suffering from terrible headaches and constant pain.

Her husband was eventually arrested, but the court gave him a 12 month conditional discharge to keep the peace.

At this point Dr. Bartley started divorce proceedings and soon afterwards, he fled Bermuda.

Her advice to any women in a similar situation: “When you’re going through the experience, expect denial, humiliation and embarrassment, but don’t allow it to overwhelm you! Do what you know to be right and find help at the Physical Abuse Centre. Pick up the phone and call someone!”

She warns that it will be hard because people don’t always understand what victims of abuse are going through and will not have the sensitivity and understanding that these victims need.

Dr. Bartley adds that she is still struggling to overcome what happened to her.

“I’m not completely healed .... whenever I tell this story, I’m right back there again. You don’t heal, but you learn to look at it and see how you can grow and learn from it,” she shares.

Following the divorce she approached the Ministry of Education and told them she needed to go back to school.

“The deadline had passed for sabbaticals, but four days later Joanne Smith, the current acting senior education officer, came back to me and said they had approved my sabbaticals and I could go back to school,” she says with a broad smile.

She spent the next seven years completing her bachelors, masters and Ph.D. and believes she would never have been able to do it without the support from the Education Ministry.

Today Dr. Bartley is the deputy senior education officer at the Ministry and is committed to helping children with behavioural issues: “Because I recognise even in my ex-husband, that if something had been done, what happened to me could have been prevented.

“We need to find the real cause (of this anger) and deal with it and then these so-called inappropriate behaviours will cease.”

As for the future, Dr. Bartley admits with a smile that she is finally in a healthy relationship, but that wasn’t always the case.

Following her divorce, she continually found herself in abusive relationships and believes she was attracted to abusive men because she still saw herself as a victim.

“It’s important to work beyond where you are. If you don’t you will be caught in a vicious cycle and you don’t want to do that,” she warns.

“It will take a lot of determination to admit to yourself that you are not that person anymore and that you have value and can grow, and be the person you need to be.”