A newlywed woman was beaten up by her husband on the third night of their honeymoon after a row over two transgender women.
At the Family Law Court on Monday, the woman said that her new husband head-butted her on the nose and beat her up in their hotel room, resulting in her having swelling around her eye and nose. "I had bruises all over me. I had broken nails from trying to fight him off."
The woman said that the two had earlier been out drinking at a bar where her husband was looking at two women at the bar. The woman said that she pointed out to her husband that the two were transgender. “I told him they are actually men and he instantly changed and he said ‘so you are calling me gay?’ and I told him ‘I am not calling you gay’.”
Recalling the 2014 incident, when she outlined to Judge Patrick Durcan the history of their relationship as she sought a safety order over a separate incident last December when violence was not involved, she said that her husband was shouting and roaring on the way back to the hotel and "that I was calling him gay because he was looking at them".
She added: “I wasn’t making fun of him or anything like that and he kept getting angrier and angrier and I walked off. When I got back to the hotel, he just started going crazy and he beat me up in the room.”
The woman said that her husband had beaten her up in the years before they got married. “He was always sorry and used his own past for his reasons doing what he did . . . I always forgave him because I always felt that there was something good in him and I believed in him and believed that he could change.”
However, the woman said that she left her husband after little more than a year of marriage. Now, after receiving counselling, “I never realised how brainwashed I was about him and how damaging it was to our kids and how it was really affecting them”.
The woman recalled several previous incidents, including one around New Year’s Eve in 2005. “He started beating me up and started to strangle me and strangle me until I passed out. I told him that I loved him so he would stop.”
She said that the following day, he brought her to Dunnes Stores to buy a product to cover the bruising around her neck.
The woman was seeking a safety order concerning an incident outside her home in December last year with her husband where he was not violent.
Judge Durcan said that there has been a history of alcohol and drug abuse by both parties.“There is a litany of kiss and make up in this case.” Refusing the safety order application by the woman, Judge Durcan said that the incident from December 18th was the fault of the woman and not the fault of the man. He said that the woman subsequently invited him to see his children at her home.
Judge Durcan said he found it very hard that someone who was invited by a person to their home was someone that was feared and could compromise the safety and welfare of the applicant.
He regarded the safety order application as “a total abuse of process”.