Alan Grayson's Divorce issue. It just got sadder. There's video

[BainsBane]

398. The video doesn't enable us to see whether he struck her prior to the seconds shown

Or whether he struck and beat her, leaving the bruises she reported to police, on another occasion. That is not to say that pushing her husband is justified, but it doesn't tell the whole story. We do know that she filed a report with the police and an investigation is in progress. We know that he did not file a report with the police. That, at this point, is all we know.

Now, as a general matter, I have to wonder if you are insisting the partner who is first struck has no right to defend him or herself? My view would be this: If the partner first struck is bigger and stronger than the second--which is usually but not always a woman--then the other partner should avoid retaliating unless necessary. In general, neither should strike back unless necessary to defend themselves. If, however, a person is being beaten severely, they have ever right to self defense, regardless of the size of the attacker. I don't see why an intimate relationship nullifies that right. While the best approach for anyone under attack is to try to extricate his or herself from the situation, that is not always possible.

In my own experience (personal and from others with whom I have been in therapy groups) is that the battered spouse does everything she can think of to try to avoid conflict. Battery is not a simple push. It is a pattern of behavior that creates a constant climate of fear in which the battered woman (or man) does everything she can to placate her partner and try to keep him from losing it. That means keeping quiet, not doing tiny things that set him off. It also means a painful awareness of the patterns of tension and a sense that he is becoming increasingly angry and close to the point at which he will explode. This pattern is something you feel. You can feel the anger increasing inside of him as he becomes increasingly silent, withdrawn, yet seething with anger that is on the verge of explosion. You know it because you have lived through it so many times before. These patterns are also well established in literature on the subject. And indeed some women have been known to find that tension so unbearable that they do something to set their partner off, perhaps hitting him, to break the tension and move on to the next stage, which is remorse. So if she triggered him by an act of violence rather than doing something like leaving her make up on the counter, criticizing him, or going out with friends, you would consider her ever bit as guilty as him, even though she is the one who lives in a constant state of fear and has been beaten and terrorized throughout their relationship. I do not. I consider her a battered woman who is dysfunctionally adapting to severe trauma. One point is generally a given: psychologically healthy people with clear sense of boundaries to not get themselves into and stay in abusive relationships. To expect the battered partner to be a paragon of restraint is not in keeping with the reality of these kinds of situations. The fact that these relationships involve so much more than a single act of aggression is why courts have considered battered partner defenses.

So you see, having been through much of this myself, a shove like that wouldn't have registered on my radar as an assault. If my husband ever shoved me like that, I have no memory of it. I do remember his destroying the house in fits of anger and threating to kill me by bashing my head in with a lamp. Since I got out of the marriage before I was ever to the point of being hospitalized, I never reported any incident to the police. As a result of my experiences, I may well have a higher tolerance for violence than others, but it's hard for me to look at that push as an act of battery, principally I would not consider it battery if it were done to me, whether by an intimate partner or anyone else. That doesn't mean it wouldn't piss me off (now so more than when I was married). but I think it highly unlikely I would report it to police. That doesn't mean I don't think someone else doesn't have a right to file a report if they see such an incident differently.

As for Grayson, if he considers that push by his wife an assault, then by all means he should report it the police. Thus far, he seems more concerned about its usefulness for PR purposes.