Lauren Russell

There were days when I prepared a board packet for the CEO of a critical access hospital, and others when I discussed with a legislator's office why a single word in a statute matters. For a long time, I thought of those as two separate lives - the professional life, and the personal one.

I was wrong about that, and realizing why may be the most useful things I have learned.

Advocacy and institutional leadership are usually treated as opposing skill sets. Advocates are cast as the people with moral clarity and little patience for process. Executives are cast as the people with process and no urgency. Both caricatures are wrong, and both are expensive.

I have watched genuinely good policy die because no one advocating for it understood how the receiving institution would absorb it. I have also seen too many mandates create problems of their own - unintended consequences, competing priorities, and requirements that look reasonable on paper but are difficult or counterproductive in practice. And I have watched institutions absorb a mandate on paper and change nothing in practice because no one outside was tracking whether it took hold.

The answer is not fewer mandates or more mandates; it is understanding what it takes to make change work.

What I did in a hospital - board and medical staff governance, contract and lease administration, survey readiness - looked like a competent administrative career running parallel to my real work in advocacy. It was actually training in how institutions work, under leaders who understood that governance, compliance, and execution matter.

Here is what it taught me.

Find where the decision is actually made.

Nothing consequential is decided by the vote. It is decided when someone sets the agenda, when someone drafts the packet, when someone decides which item is discussion and which is consent. If you have ever assembled a board packet, you understand that the work is upstream of the room. That is equally true of a legislative committee, a school district, or a county prosecutor's office. New advocates spend enormous energy on the moment of decision and almost none on the process that shaped it. The people who change outcomes have usually done the opposite.

Learn the second language.

Institutions do not move on moral urgency alone. They move on mandate, liability, cost, and capacity. None of that is obvious from the outside, so when I do not understand how a process actually works, I ask. Asking has never cost me credibility in a room; assuming I already knew has. When I ask a system to do something differently, I bring the moral case - and I also bring what it will require of them, where the authority comes from, and what declining would mean for them. That is not a compromise of the moral case. It is the difference between being heard and being agreed with. I would rather be effective than righteous, and I have learned that translation is not the same thing as dilution.

Assume passage is the beginning.

This is one I feel most strongly about. In 2015, Oregon enacted Erin's Law, requiring age-appropriate abuse prevention education in schools. It works - I know that firsthand, in a way I did not choose to learn. But years later, districts across the state are out of compliance, and the statute itself has been amended in ways that soften what it was written to do.

A law on the books is not a law in practice. The signing photo is the easiest part of the entire enterprise, and it is the part that gets all the attention. Implementation is unglamorous, technical, and where the actual protection either happens or doesn't. That is compliance work.

It opened my eyes to a dual perspective - how change looks from the outside, where the need can feel urgent and obvious, and how it looks from the inside, where far fewer people are responsible for actually carrying it through. Because I have had the opportunity to learn how systems are governed, I can walk into a prosecutor's office or a legislative discussion without wasting time or feeling lost. I have also been trusted with rooms I would not otherwise have entered - helping raise more than $2 million for child safety and writing to oppose a prosecutorial appointment in terms specific enough that the letter was read on the floor of the Oregon House. Because I have sat with survivors and families, I do not mistake a policy for an outcome when I am inside an institution either.

If you are a woman building a career that seems to be running on two tracks, I would offer this: stop apologizing for the track that pays. The competence you are building there - how decisions actually get made, how money actually moves, how obligations actually get met - is not a detour from your purpose. It is the equipment.

The most effective people I have worked with are not the loudest voices in the room. They are the ones who know how the room works.

Beyond the Bruises

When people ask me what our relationship was like, I still struggle to answer in a way that makes sense.

It was the most chaotic, senseless, reckless, and extreme time in my life.

And somehow, woven through all of it were some of the happiest moments I’ve ever known.

That contradiction is one of the hardest things to explain about an abusive relationship. Because it isn’t bad all the time.

Sometimes, the person hurting you is the same person who makes you feel more loved than you have ever felt. The same person who harms you can be the person holding you afterward. The same person who tears your family apart can convince you that he is the only one who will protect you.

That was my experience.

Before I met the person I’ll refer to throughout this article as “my ex,” my daughters and I had already survived profound trauma. My former husband, my children’s “father”—or so he cleverly presented himself to be—was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison after accepting a plea settlement for abusing them.

Around a year after that case concluded, a dream of a human being came into our lives. And at the time, he appeared to be everything we never knew we needed.

He didn’t rush. He pursued me carefully and respectfully, like every step mattered—bonding with me, his daughter’s best friend’s mom, and even sharing his own experiences with abuse. When you are publicly going through hell, people share a lot. With him, I eventually let my guard down, and we were swept off our feet. He earned our trust. He engulfed us with so much love that it felt intoxicating.

He told my daughters, through words and actions, that he wanted to show them how a man should treat them and their mom. He wanted to be their dad. He wanted to be my partner.

I’ll never forget the day my youngest came to me and shared that she’d asked him if she could call him Dad. That hadn’t been brought up yet, so at five years old, she took it upon herself and went for it. He wrapped her up in his arms and brought me in, too. He knew us—he studied us and fell in love with us just for being us, and we fell in love with him. From there, he wanted the other two to call him Dad, too. He leaned into it—being their dad, my partner, and the man in our life.

He didn’t have to choose us—he chose us because he wanted us. He loved telling us that. For the first couple of years, I thought we had found our silver lining. Our ace in the hole. We wanted to be together, everywhere.

Sending me songs was one of his love languages—like Ace in the Hole and Everywhere. They became a running soundtrack through the years, each song bringing a smile to my face. I didn’t question the words, the promises, or the story they seemed to tell. I simply believed them. And I believed in him. We were writing our own love story unlike anything we’d ever known—two sparrows in a hurricane, or so I thought.

We quietly eloped in 2019, then celebrated our marriage in June 2020 with an intimate ceremony surrounded by family and our closest friends at his family’s ranch.

Since then, I have learned that this was not the first time he envisioned that same kind of ceremony with other women from his past. It has been enlightening to listen to their stories—the same charm, the same ability to captivate and make someone feel uniquely chosen, followed by the various forms of abuse they each endured from him. Some of those stories reach all the way back to relationships he had in high school.

Hearing their experiences has given me a perspective I could never have had while I was living inside our story. What I once believed was ours was simply a pattern he had been repeating for years.

The Physical Abuse

Shortly after our wedding, everything began to change—quickly and against the backdrop of a pandemic that had him deep into prepper mode, stockpiling and preparing for collapse.

In early 2021, after we moved our family to his hometown, the physical abuse began.

I tried to understand it. That is one of the things I wish more people understood about survivors. We don’t always immediately see the person hurting us as a dangerous person. Sometimes, we see the wounded person underneath.

I knew the history he had shared with me. He told me about experiencing multiple forms of abuse throughout his childhood and into adulthood—at the hands of various family members and others within his orbit.

He presented himself to me as a man who had survived that trauma—a man who had “done the work,” who had even learned to forgive the abusive women in his past since, as he told it, they were the ones who caused him the most harm.

So, when he became abusive toward me, I tried to make sense of it through the lens of everything he had survived.

I thought maybe coming back to his hometown had reopened wounds he never really healed. I thought perhaps he was lost in his pain. I watched him numb that pain with alcohol, mostly. And when that pain came out behind closed doors, I convinced myself I could love him through it.

I believed that if I understood where it came from, I could help stop it.

It was far more complicated than that, though. After each abusive episode, he would then gaslight my daughters and me—rewriting what happened, shifting blame, and triangulating us with one another or with other people whenever it supported the story he needed to tell. It was disorienting.

Then, he would love me. He would reassure me. He would pull me in so close. He would make me believe that what had just happened wasn’t the whole story of who he was. And, like a light switch, he became the person I remembered again.

That cycle kept me hoping. It also kept me deeply confused.

The Violence Escalates

By the end of 2022, the physical abuse had escalated.

In early December of that year, he once again took my phone, this time smashing it with a hammer in our garage. He kicked over the computer, breaking it. He struck me several times on the side of my head in a way that was meant to leave no mark, picked me up and body-slammed me in our laundry room, shoved me down the stairs, and then kicked me while I was down. He dragged me out of our house, shoved me into the pickup, and put me in a headlock as we drove toward his family’s ranch.

When I finally got free, I jumped out of the moving vehicle near a weigh station headed north.

That was the last time he physically assaulted me.

At least until the next time.

During some of the worst periods of the physical abuse, our family was simultaneously navigating other criminal court cases in our county.

Much of my ex’s behavior was justified by what he called the “sacrifice” he made by assaulting the adult who assaulted our minor child.

He presented himself as the protective father who did something about it. That became part of the explanation and justification for much of the abuse we endured. It also became part of the explanation for why he terminated his relationship with one of his biological children.

My dad once witnessed an episode of my ex’s drunken verbal abuse. He told me to be wary of a man who walks away from his own children and blames that decision on welcoming mine into his life.

I didn’t exactly understand what he meant then. If anything, I believed it was my dad who didn’t understand the dynamics of our life.

I was blind.

After those criminal cases concluded, my ex repeatedly told me that if anything ever happened again, there would be no more “half measures.” He took that phrase from a show—and seemed to carry parts of his life through a lens of fantasy. He would tell me that if something did happen, he would “take it all the way.” At the time, I understood those statements as threats—just not sure to whom yet.

Looking back, they were part of a much larger pattern of intimidation, control, and the stories he told himself about what he was capable of doing. He talked about scattering people’s bodies throughout the ranch where nobody would ever find them. He explained in detail how he built his vehicles so they could be used as weapons in the event he didn’t have a firearm. He always tried to make sure he had one, though. He’d previously been convicted of felony assault, long before I knew him—a conviction I later helped him get expunged, which quietly cleared the way for him to legally own firearms again.

I once witnessed him pull a weapon and fire it toward the ground near his own flesh and blood on the ranch—a place he held up as sacred, but which, beneath the surface, has carried some of the deepest layers of abuse, trauma, and dysfunction in his family.

When the physical abuse finally subsided, I thought it meant something. I thought perhaps the worst was behind us.

The verbal abuse, however, remained. It was some of the most vulgar and dehumanizing language I have ever heard.

I used to tell him to stop projecting his insecurities onto me. I thought naming it might help him see what he was doing. It worked sometimes; other times, he raged on.

I was trying to solve the problem as though it were a communication issue—as though there were the right words I could use to make someone stop choosing to hurt their own family.

First Attempts to Break the Cycle

In 2023, there was another abusive episode on Father’s Day.

For the first time, I walked a few blocks to his parents’ house seeking their help.

Later that week, my ex went to an alcohol treatment center in Southern California. It felt like a turning point. I wanted to believe it was.

For years, I learned to separate the person I loved from the person who was hurting us. I thought the person who loved us was the real person. The other person was the trauma. The alcohol. The anger. The circumstances. The past.

Anything that allowed me to believe the person I fell in love with was still underneath it all.

I thought if the drinking stopped, perhaps the violence would stop. If the trauma was treated, perhaps the cruelty would end. If he could heal, maybe our family could heal with him. After everything, I still chose to believe there was something worth saving.

Treatment, Relapse, and Tools

In 2024, I sought treatment for my own trauma and was diagnosed with PTSD and ADHD while there. I could work with that. I learned about radical acceptance, post-traumatic growth, and neuroplasticity—concepts that have become some of my very favorite topics to explore. More importantly, I left with a wealth of tools to help me navigate life in a healthier, more intentional way.

I didn’t know it then, but the work I did there would become some of the very tools that, years later, would help set us free.

Some people are uncomfortable with mental health treatment. I am not. I am incredibly grateful for it—for myself and for what it has given my children. Therapy and various trauma programs have given us tools to navigate circumstances that, at times, have felt unfathomable.

When my ex sought treatment in 2023, I protected his privacy. He needed that desperately, so without question, I gave it to him. In 2024, he promised to protect mine, too. He was seemingly so supportive.

I later learned how far the story traveled. He told my children, our friends, and family members that I was away because I’d finally lost it and had been diagnosed with various personality disorders—and any number of other things designed to make people question me.

He made many of them promise not to tell me. He framed it as concern. As compassion. He was quietly supporting me, after all. He was doing the best he could with me—just ask him.

That was the story he needed people to believe. Because if I was crazy, then he wouldn’t be seen as abusive. If I was unstable, then he didn’t have to be accountable. If everyone believed I was the problem, then no one would look closely at him.

And that is how his story worked.

While I was still in trauma treatment, he relapsed. That relapse led to him verbally abusing my oldest daughter again, along with a pattern of unusual punishments toward all of my daughters, like refusing to allow them to wash their clothes.

His verbal abuse regularly included using the trauma we had already survived against us. When the abuse escalated into dangerous territory, he would remind us that, at least, he wasn’t “f*cking” my daughters.

That was his measure of whether things had gone too far. As long as he hadn’t crossed that line, everything else—the multiple forms of abuse, intimidation, cruelty, control, and fear—apparently didn’t matter.

Those words are difficult to repeat. They are even more difficult to explain.

Because by then, we were not simply dealing with someone’s temper. He knew exactly where our wounds were. And he knew how to put his words into them.

I wanted to leave treatment. I was very concerned about my daughters, who were home with him. I spoke extensively with my primary therapist, and we agreed that, rather than leaving immediately, he would work with me to try to manage the situation from there. We were in the middle of digging through layers of trauma, and I wasn’t quite ready to walk away from that work.

We made it through those days.

Then it happened again.

I left on a Saturday morning in a rental car and drove sixteen hours straight. When I got home, I had an entirely new set of tools to work with. I was as ready as I could possibly be.

And getting home truly was when the real work began.

I tried. He tried. We tried. We even tried marriage counseling later that year.

He encouraged me to be open and honest about the past abuse so we could truly work through it and get to the other side. I believed him. I believed we were different and that our story could have a different ending.

I was once told by a well-respected psychiatrist that getting to the other side of this kind of abuse simply cannot happen. Yet, I still convinced myself we were different. After all, it had been a long time since he physically abused me. I thought that meant something. I thought it meant the work was working.

I thought it meant the person I loved was winning. I thought we were winning.

Eye of the Storm

From 2023 into early 2025, we went through several ups and downs.

At one point, someone called in a welfare check on me. I remember how difficult—and humbling—it was to navigate that conversation with one of our local deputies while still protecting my husband. That call shifted something. He became aware that someone was watching, and it seemed to sober him—at least for a while.

Spring 2025 through early 2026 were some of the calmest months together since the beginning of our relationship. To the best of my knowledge, putting down the alcohol again was a big contributor. He would remind me of the work he was putting into himself, for me and our family. In moments, it felt like I was starting to see my person again. He appeared committed to his sobriety and to us. There were incidents, but nothing like what we’d experienced before.

Turns out, none of that was true.

It was simply a guise.

I have since learned, from several people, that he never stopped drinking—and that he mocked me to them for not knowing. He wasn’t sober. He’d simply gotten better at hiding it from me. He came to me once during this time and told me he knew he would never be a good man because of things he’d done to me, but he was still my man, and he would spend the rest of his life showing me how much he loved me.

Looking back now, I recognize something I couldn’t see then.

Sometimes the absence of an obvious explosion doesn’t mean the danger is gone. Sometimes someone has simply become better at hiding it. More careful. More calculated. More difficult to see from the outside.

And yet, there were so many good times. We adventured. We explored. We lived. We loved. We made the most out of our life. There were moments when I felt completely alive.

That is the part of the story that will make an outsider ask:

“If it was really that bad, why did she stay?”

The answer is complicated.

I didn’t stay for the abuse. I stayed for the person I believed was underneath it. I stayed for the family I thought we were building. I stayed for the good days. I stayed because I also knew him to be wonderful. I stayed because I believed the terrible moments were the exception.

I stayed because I thought love, therapy, sobriety, forgiveness, patience, and dedicated work could get us back to who we really were.

I thought he was worth all of that.

I loved him so much when I could. I held on to the good. I told myself that was the real part. Because if the good wasn’t real, then what had we spent all those years fighting for?

The Slide

In early 2026, my ex had surgery—a procedure that needed to happen years earlier but finally happened after a series of decisions that insulated him enough to justify the timing.

His son took a voluntary layoff from his apprenticeship to come stay with us and help. By the middle of February, the two of them began drinking together. By the middle of March, things escalated.

I began getting calls at work telling me to come home and intervene before things became physical between the two of them. By evening, they would make up, then start drinking again in the backyard or garage.

Other people working for him would frequently come and go—workers who doubled as drinking companions. Substances were being consumed heavily, constantly. To those of you I eventually kicked out of my house—you know why.

The verbal abuse began again, and it escalated quickly into territory we had never experienced before.

I would later learn that spring break was also when he began trying to convince my daughters that I was suicidal.

Words were weapons to him. At times, he used them strategically.

He told my daughters I was planning to take my own life—and that if they told me about the cruel and unusual punishments he was giving them when I wasn’t around, or about his rage episodes, it would be their fault if I died.

My children were being forced to carry something no child should ever have to carry—the responsibility for keeping their mom alive…and I had no idea. They were being taught that telling their mom the truth could kill her. Coercive control, dressed up as protection. It was a pattern we already knew too well.

At the time, I was unaware of what was happening behind the scenes in my own home—and I was responding to him differently than I ever had before.

In February, I discovered that he had once again taken all the cards and money out of my wallet, right before I took our daughter back to the airport—over three hours away. I didn’t react the way I once would have. This time, I told him he was an idiot, then downloaded our cards into my digital wallet.

I never stole from him. I wasn’t abusing our finances. I was, however, financially controlled. So were our children. Transportation. Money. Communication. Access. They were all ways he would punish us.

In the early months of 2026, I was beginning to understand that protecting him was not the same thing as protecting my family.

No Fooling Around

It was after my ex called in a false suicide welfare check on me the evening of April 1 that I began learning about many of my daughters’ experiences.

The morning before, on March 31, I sent him a letter. A final reckoning—written by a wife who still loved her husband but had reached a point where that love would no longer require her to excuse his behavior, absorb its damage, or protect her family from what it was costing them.

He texted me back that he would read it and study it, and that he loved me.

I later learned that he verbally abused my daughters that same morning—so severely that they were unable to attend school. He then called their schools to excuse their absences, making sure I wouldn’t find out. All of this was happening while I was attending a luncheon in Central Oregon for a fundraising event benefiting a Child Advocacy Center that had supported our family through past trauma.

I have been invited to speak by that organization multiple times, and being there meant more to me than I can fully explain. Being part of an organization dedicated to helping children and families through trauma was one of the ways I was dedicated to turning our pain into purpose—without knowing at the time, in that exact room, how close we were to the moment when that purpose would become something even more personal.

When I got home that evening, everything was seemingly calm. Maybe the letter landed. It wasn’t brought up—just a quiet evening. That was different.

The next day, everything changed again.

I started the morning on a call with a crime victim law center, talking about the next legislative session and brainstorming ways I might contribute. When the call ended, I went downstairs and noticed all the keys had been taken from the rack by the front door.

Uh-oh, I remember thinking. It’s going to be a bad day.

That was my cue.

He asked me if I was ready to go to work. I told him I needed to get a few things ready. He told me to get in the f*cking pickup.

I told him not to talk to me like that. I was intentionally working on communicating my boundaries with him.

He demanded that I get in or he would put me in there. I reluctantly cooperated.

He drove me to work, fuming about the letter. An hour or so later, he sent me a text apologizing for what “went down” and reiterating his love for me.

That afternoon, he wanted me home by 4 p.m. to do the business billing since it was the first of the month. I told him I wasn’t going to make it home that early, but we could take care of it when I got there. That was not received well.

I finally walked home a little after 5 p.m., only to watch him drive away.

When I walked through the door, per his request, I texted him to let him know I was there and ready whenever he got back. The phone calls poured in after that—thirty-three in total.

I recorded some of them, eventually set my phone down, and let it ring. I shifted my attention to my daughter, and we started making dinner.

Then there was a knock on the door.

It was his son—I hadn’t seen him since an incident the previous week. He came inside, declined to have dinner with us, and let me know he was there to get some guns for his dad.

What?

I carefully let him know his dad was not in a good place. He told me he’d let his dad know I wouldn’t let him take them. That felt threatening, so I opened our safe. He began carefully separating what stayed and what went, then moved much of the collection out to the Jeep in our garage.

While he was still there, another knock came at the door.

Law enforcement.

They were there for a suicide welfare check on me.

He had threatened to do that in the past. This was the first time he actually followed through.

My ex watched it all unfold from afar on the front-door camera—he monitored it like a hawk.

What he didn’t account for was that the men in law enforcement who showed up cared. They arrived genuinely concerned for my safety. They left spooked by what they encountered and the circumstances they walked into.

For once, the version of events my ex intended to control wasn’t the only one others saw. The contrast was surreal.

To law enforcement, he presented as a concerned husband worried that his wife might take her own life. At the same time, he had just had some—though not all—of the weapons removed from our home and was explicitly and verbally abusing me.

Chaos.

After everyone left, my daughters began disclosing their own experiences of abuse. I listened for what seemed like hours. I was calm. I was processing. And I knew we were done.

That night, I locked the house. I disconnected the batteries to our front-door keypad because I wanted to know if and when he came home.

He never did let me know when he arrived. A little after 10 p.m., he opened the garage door and crawled through a small access door—15 by 20 inches—from the garage into the house, and we heard him.

I slipped into bed next to our youngest daughter, listening to him moving quietly through the house, whispering my name as he searched for me.

I told her to pretend to be asleep. At the same time, I was in contact with my other daughter, who was downstairs in her room, trying to keep track of what was happening.

In that moment, my only job was to keep us safe.

This was new territory.

I managed the situation as best I could. I had my phone with me and continued to communicate with my daughters until he eventually passed out in our bed.

In the early hours of April 2, I finally fell asleep on the couch.

Strangled to My Senses

When he woke me in the darkness, he was using his body to pin me against the solid-wood, blue-and-buggy-pine couch my grandfather made.

I was able to reach my phone. I carefully placed it under me, just in case.

It was 5:21 a.m. on April 2.

That is when he took my phone—which he later threw into the fireplace—and the abuse began.

He took me upstairs to our bedroom, lay down beside me, pinned me beneath his body, and held me in a headlock. He then headbutted the top of my head. When he released the headlock, he strangled me for the first time that morning.

I remember closing my eyes and hearing a fast-whooshing sound in my ears—the blood flow from having my arteries compressed. The next thing I remember was him asking me questions and hitting me for not answering, while still holding me down in our bed. I began trying to answer, but each response was met with another blow and the words:

“Wrong answer.”

Eventually, he released my legs and drove his heel into my calf. The pain was so intense that it launched me out of bed, and I began yelling. He didn’t expect that.

He turned on the light. He was blocking the door and repeatedly told me to “shut the f*ck up.”

I kept yelling. I even yelled to him that I would be quiet when he let me out of the room. He finally did, and I ran downstairs with him chasing me into the kitchen and around the island. At that point, all I could think about was staying out of his reach.

For perspective, he is 6’4” and 200 pounds. I am not quite 5’2” and nearly half his weight. The difference in our size and physical strength was overwhelming. His reach alone felt like it covered twice the space I could control, and I knew that if he caught me, I had very little physical ability to stop whatever would happen next.

More happened throughout the house before we found ourselves dancing around the island again. Meanwhile, my two younger daughters were now together in one of their bedrooms. Then we heard one of their voices.

He flew downstairs and blocked the bedroom door, yelling at them—with no idea they were on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. He thought it was their older sister.

It wasn’t.

That decision saved my life.

That morning made something else undeniable. There was no more version of this relationship that I could save, or that was worth saving.

There was no amount of understanding that would make us safe. There was no amount of trauma work I could do for both of us to come back from this.

For years, I told myself that if I could just understand his pain well enough, I could help him stop hurting us and we would be happy again. I convinced myself that if I worked harder on myself, communicated better, forgave more, supported his recovery, and stayed through the difficult periods, we would eventually get back to good.

But love alone cannot make someone safe.

And understanding someone’s trauma does not require you to become the place where they release it.

I endured 56 minutes of abuse that morning by a man nearly twice my size before my daughters and I finally got away, meeting an Oregon State Police trooper on our sidewalk at 6:17 a.m.

What I have learned is that there was no way to protect my children, myself, or anyone else from someone who was not only willing to hurt the people closest to him but who seemed to find power, satisfaction, and enjoyment in doing so.

My daughters are my heroes—all three of them—for more reasons than I could ever count. And we now understand that April 2 was our only way out.

Not because the years before weren’t serious. They were. Not because the threats weren’t serious. They were. Not because the financial control, punishment, humiliation, manipulation, intimidation, weapons, and constant fear weren’t enough.

They were.

That morning simply became the moment when the danger could no longer be hidden. It became the day he was unsuccessful in taking my life—and, in that failure, my children and I got our lives back.

What Came After

On April 7, he was formally indicted on felony strangulation and felony assault, as well as served with a FAPA Restraining Order and Emergency Risk Protection Order.

That same afternoon, he closed the bank account from which all of our household bills were paid. He was the account holder; I was an authorized user.

Since then, he has made a remarkably consistent set of choices—and not one payment toward the house, the vehicles, the utilities, the insurance, or our children’s care.

Nothing.

Not one single dollar.

He removed me from our credit card accounts, took me off our fuel and home-heating accounts, and has since made several expensive purchases for himself. He even acquired a new pickup—and added it to our insurance the day after he was served with our divorce papers. A ’94 Chevy Silverado 3500HD.

Of course.

Something large and imposing, much like himself.

It’s almost laughable now how several times throughout the years, I brought him divorce papers—amicably filled out, asking for nothing beyond my children and my freedom. He’d tell me that calm was the right time to approach him with them, so that’s when I tried. And every single time, he would embrace me. He would hold me with so much love. He would tell me that we both knew that wasn’t what I really wanted. He would remind me that, outside of the chaos our life had grown into, our relationship was the best either of us had ever known.

So. Many. Stories.

My ex is a chameleon of sorts, skilled at narrating entirely different versions of a story depending on his audience and what he needs them to believe.

And somehow, despite his GPS ankle monitor and formal indictment, there are people who have believed him.

He has continued working and moving through the community. Most recently, his work was recognized for remodeling a local daycare center. The irony in that is that, while being recognized for updating and creating a safer building for children, he has simultaneously been found responsible by the State of Oregon for abusing my children.

It is a striking example of how differently the same person can be seen depending on which version of the story people are given.

I’ve learned he reached out to the person from my first marriage, who happened to attend school with his ex-wife—the same woman I have since learned he abused in a previous marriage. I wouldn’t discover that paper trail until months later. And then there is the strange irony of that same woman—his ex-wife—and her mother showing up recently in court to support him.

I was dumbfounded. And, strangely, grateful—for a thought I’ve learned to hold close over the years:

Thank you for showing me who you are.

I was later informed that he reached out to the family of my ex-husband—the monster currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for abusing my children.

Let that sink in.

The “man” who claimed to love me and my children, who portrayed himself to people around us as the one who loved us the most and was the protector of our family, is the same person who reached out to my child’s convicted abuser’s family—who never once supported us.

That isn’t protection, loyalty, or love—it doesn’t even compute. It is something entirely different.

It is evil.

What Was Revealed

There is another part of this story that I still struggle to understand.

The document trail I stumbled across revealed that my ex had previously been court-ordered to complete a Batterers Intervention Program, mental-health assessment and treatment, chemical-dependency assessment and treatment, and parenting classes through the DHS child-welfare division—all arising from the dissolution of his first marriage.

I was not aware of that during our relationship, so finding their divorce judgment, hidden away in a folder in our house, was disturbing—not only because of what it revealed about his history but because it was a history never disclosed to me.

And yet, in 2024—after being convinced it reflected his commitment to me and our family—he was allowed to adopt my daughters.

The Reflection

For a long time, I asked myself: Why didn’t I leave? Why couldn’t I leave?

There were no answers that made sense.

There were no answers at all.

Now I ask a different question: What was happening inside that relationship that made leaving so difficult—and what might have happened if someone understood sooner?

I’ve learned firsthand that survivors don’t need us to understand why they stayed nearly as much as they need us to understand what they were surviving.

The people who make decisions about these cases have an opportunity to look closer—to understand the story behind the charges and the patterns that led there. They also have a responsibility to understand the danger survivors can face when they disclose.

From there, we can look at the threats and the control. Look at the gaslighting and manipulation. Look at the periods of calm. Look at the apologies and promises. Look at the attempts to leave. Look at the times the victim went back.

More importantly, each of us has an opportunity to listen with an open mind and remember that survivors of abuse are still whole people—not just the worst things that happened to them.

As a society, we should not make survivors feel as though they need to minimize themselves or remain silent. They need to be seen.

For many of us, our voice is a layer of protection and, ultimately, liberation.

The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is not necessarily the first time someone is hurt. It can be the moment when the person being abused finally begins to believe they actually have the capacity to leave.

And the final assault isn’t the entire story.

It’s simply where the story finally becomes impossible to ignore.

I used to think my job was to prove that I loved him enough to save our family.

Now I understand that my job was only to survive.

And if there are things I hope other survivors will take from my story, they are these:

You do not have to wait until your life is nearly taken to believe what your life is already telling you.

You do not have to hate someone before you are allowed to leave them.

You do not have to deny the beautiful memories to tell the truth about the terrible ones.

You can love someone and still know they are not safe.

You can understand where their pain came from and still hold them responsible for what they do with it.

You are allowed to survive it without becoming it.

The Awakening

I realize I am one of the fortunate few who has the rare opportunity to see some form of justice. For that, I am grateful—and very curious.

In the meantime, he can keep changing his story. Try to control the narrative. Tell people I was crazy. Play the victim. He can even find people willing to listen. And he’ll probably reassure them that this too shall pass.

But none of that changes the truth. And, as he frequently reminded us, the truth shall set you free.

Loving someone does not make you responsible for saving them from themselves.

That morning, my daughters saved me and gave me my life back.

They took theirs back, too.

Now, we get to spend it living—not just surviving.

When a Child Has the Words to Speak

In 2017, one of my children learned something many kids her age never get taught directly—the difference between safe and unsafe touch. Her school delivered the Safe Touch Program, a curriculum designed to satisfy and support Erin's Law, legislation Oregon adopted in 2015 requiring public schools to teach age-appropriate sexual abuse prevention and awareness.

She was ten. Following the lesson, she told her teacher—someone she trusted—that a close family member had "broke the safe touch rule."

That sentence, made possible by a curriculum that gave her the words, is what ultimately helped free her from her abuser.

It is also why I have spent years watching how Erin's Law is carried out. What I have found is troubling: many Oregon school districts remain out of compliance, and since the law passed, the state has amended it in ways that, in my view, quietly weaken its purpose. A law on paper protects a child only when it is actually taught in the classroom.

What happened next in our case moved quickly, and the child advocacy center and law enforcement involved were, without exaggeration, excellent—the kind of trained, trauma-informed response every family in this situation deserves and far too few receive.

They cared.

Where it became even harder was in the courtroom, and later, specifically in what I didn't yet understand about how plea negotiations work.

I had assumed that when a state passes a law like Jessica's Law—mandatory minimum sentencing for certain crimes committed against a child under 12—that law is what governs the outcome.

I learned, case by case, that prosecutors can sometimes structure charges and plea agreements in ways that avoid those mandatory provisions, including by negotiating pleas to offenses that do not carry the same mandatory sentencing or supervision requirements.

I wrote about exactly how that happened in our county in a letter I sent in 2021, opposing a District Attorney's nomination for U.S. Attorney. That letter quickly found its way to the floor of the Oregon House.

I'm sharing it here as it was written because I think the specifics matter more than a summary would:

June 14, 2021

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is regarding a candidate who is being considered for the U.S. Attorney position for the State of Oregon, John Hummel.

We were introduced to the Deschutes County District Attorney's Office in April of 2017. John Hummel was the District Attorney and currently remains in the position. My then-10-year-old child attended the Safe Touch Program at school, and following the course, she disclosed to her teacher that a close family member had "broke the safe touch rule."

Following my child's disclosures, a series of events took place that ultimately incarcerated the perpetrator, with bail set at $600,000 and an indictment consisting of 26 first-degree counts. Those counts included: 10 counts of Sodomy in the first degree, four counts of Rape in the first degree, two counts of Unlawful Penetration in the first degree, and 10 counts of Sexual Abuse in the first degree. Inconceivable crimes were committed against a young child by a once-trusted family member.

Suddenly, we were entrenched in a rapid education about how the judicial process "works" and learned about Jessica's Law—a law adopted by the State of Oregon in 2006. The law requires minimum mandatory sentencing for offenders convicted of first-degree rape, sodomy, or unlawful penetration involving victims under 12 years old. The MINIMUM, MANDATORY sentence for each count is 25 years (with no possibility of early release), with strict post-prison supervision that includes 10 years of active supervision and lifelong tracking for offenders convicted of the applicable crimes. According to the indictment and Oregon law, the defendant in our child's case was looking at 462½ years based on the crimes committed (most of those counts came from our child's traumatic recollection of the acts that were done to her, along with the defendant's confessions to two Jessica's Law crimes and two Measure 11 crimes—62½ years based on his confessions)—not much time for someone who rapes and sodomizes children. However, this offers the prospect of some sort of justice and peace of mind for our child, family, friends, community members, and all of humanity by locking up a monster capable of such crimes.

Our case concluded in May of 2018, and the defendant accepted a plea settlement for 300 months (no Jessica's Law, a couple of Alford Pleas—which were a complete travesty as well as a mockery of our child, who survived the unspeakable acts—the possibility to earn good time, and 36-month post-prison supervision). This led to more research trying to understand what was going on in Deschutes County.

Initially, we naively assumed that John Hummel had a personal vendetta against us because of the very forward and direct advocacy I did while fighting for my child, but soon learned an even more unfortunate reality: We were contacted by other families with similar stories and learned that removing Jessica's Law provisions was standard in Deschutes County. To clarify—if you are under 12, raped, sodomized, or unlawfully penetrated, regardless of the merits of the case, the defendant will be offered a "good deal." It is almost unbelievable that a District Attorney would be soft on sex crimes committed against children, yet that is the reality in Deschutes County.

Jessica's Law seems simple, yet appropriate for the crimes it encompasses, but there is a very disturbing catch: Our District Attorney, John Hummel, does not believe in Jessica's Law because he feels that the law is too harsh for criminals. Yes, you read that correctly—some of the most heinous crimes committed are not prosecuted to the full extent of the law adopted by the citizens of Oregon based on the personal beliefs of our District Attorney; he has blatantly stated that to us.

Early on in our case, we were informed that the judicial system and process were nothing more than a revictimization for victims, which has turned out to be disturbingly true. We are aware that not all cases have the merits to be fully prosecuted and not all defendants are guilty of the crimes they are accused of; however, NOT ONE Jessica's Law case in Deschutes County has been pleaded out as such during the duration of time that John Hummel has been DA. Therefore, the pleas offered and accepted for Jessica's Law cases include no lifelong monitoring, no 10 years of active supervision, and no adequate justice for victims.

We could not even begin to understand how this was possible, given that our child was 10 years old at the time of her disclosures. We did some research to hopefully comprehend how this was happening. We learned that in the descriptions of the various 26 counts on the indictment, the DA's Office removed the language of "a child under the age of 12" and replaced it with "a child under the age of 14" and "a child under the age of 16." Those are the counts plea bargains are based on, and that is how the DA's Office maneuvers around Jessica's Law—intentionally guileful, yet beyond disturbing.

Fast-forward to March of 2020. My husband and I met with John Hummel to discuss this very issue. Since he refused to offer any direct answers during that meeting, we submitted a public records request to see if we were understanding our research correctly. Our request was for all Jessica's Law cases from January of 2014 to that present time (72 cases under John Hummel's reign and a price tag of $2,100 for the records request). The steep price tag was for the DA's Office to gather the requested information, redact any personal information to protect victims, and print the documents that were paid for. Well, the DA's Office did not redact all the victims' information or print the documents as agreed upon. However, they did request another $821.25 to print them, and John Hummel personally offered an apology for the oversight involving documents containing minor victims' information. Unbelievable. The review of these documents further confirmed the profound lack of legal protection for our most vulnerable citizens: children.

While our relationship with John Hummel began under horrifying circumstances, we have grown to be cordial toward one another. It is with that thought that we must clearly state that he is a poor candidate for the U.S. Attorney position. He does not enforce laws adopted by the citizens of our state, nor protect victims. He clearly stands with criminals, not only on child sex crimes but other crimes as well. This is not an individual who should be appointed to a position that is meant to prosecute criminals or crimes of any caliber on behalf of the State or Federal Government.

Respectfully,

Lauren Russell

That letter didn't change my child's case—it was already resolved by the time I wrote it. But it became part of a public record and eventually part of a legislative conversation because I discovered that the pattern I'd uncovered was bigger than our family.

It usually is.

My advice is simple: Ask questions. Research.

Ask what the legal terms and provisions in charging documents actually mean. Ask what laws and sentencing provisions apply—and which ones don't. Ask what a proposed plea agreement changes. If something doesn't make sense, ask.

You have the right to understand what is happening. You just have to exercise that right.

That case is where my advocacy work started, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. I was simply trying to understand what had happened to my family.

But the questions didn't stop once our case closed.

They turned into public records requests, conversations with legislators, speaking at fundraisers, and sitting at tables with prosecutors and researchers who were asking some of the same questions I was asking.

Over the past decade, that work has grown into a body of advocacy rooted in that same instinct: don't accept an explanation that doesn't hold up, and don't stop asking until it does.

Because sometimes, giving a child the words to speak is only the beginning.

The adults around that child have a responsibility to listen—and then to keep asking questions until the system does what it was created to do.