Why Women Stay

L to R: AP Photo; Newscom In her harrowing memoir, Leslie Morgan Steiner chronicles her abusive marriage. She talks to Will Doig about why she feels sorry for Rihanna—and Chris Brown.

Leslie Morgan Steiner isn’t stupid, but she says that’s the first word that pops into people’s minds when they think about someone like her: a woman who, for years, stayed with a man who savagely abused her. Steiner met her ex-husband, “Conor,” on the New York City subway when she was in her early twenties with a promising journalism career just beginning to develop. Conor’s charms were intoxicating, so much so that when the beatings started, Steiner felt compelled to keep giving him more chances. After they were married—he punched her in the face as she drove them to their honeymoon—Conor convinced her to quit her job and move with him to Vermont, isolating her from friends, support networks, and the density of Manhattan, where neighbors might intervene. Even as life in their little New England house devolved into madness, Steiner couldn’t bring herself to leave the man who pushed her down the basement stairs, threw food in her face, held a loaded gun to her head, and beat her with increasing abandon. It was only when they moved again, to Chicago for business school, that she was able to finally leave him, following a terrifying beating during which Conor smashed their framed wedding photo over her head.

“I think Rihanna will leave him eventually, but I think there will probably be more violence before then.”

Steiner’s story is harrowing, hard to comprehend, and, she says, a fairly typical case study. In her new memoir, Crazy Love, she dissects those dark years with Conor, attempting to figure out why women like her stay with men like him. She spoke with The Daily Beast about what was going on in her head each time he hit her, domestic violence during recessions, Rihanna’s gun tattoo, and why she feels sorry for Chris Brown.

While I was reading your story, all I could think was, 'Why is nobody stopping this? Why don’t her friends drag her away from this guy? Kidnap her, if necessary?'

From a legal standpoint, it’s hard to physically restrain somebody. They would have had to commit me to a hospital or something. But nobody intervened in a formal way, the way you would with an alcoholic or a drug addict, and I think that’s a very good idea going forward.

For people who haven’t been in your situation, it’s hard to comprehend it. How do you explain to people why you stayed with your ex-husband for so long?

Well, I say that’s why I had to write a whole book about it. If I could explain it in just a sentence—if you could identify what was the weak link in my self-esteem or my psychological makeup—then this would be very easy. I think it was a whole lot of different factors, and one of the factors is that our society raises girls and women to think that in some ways we’re really strong emotionally, and we can take that kind of abuse, and it’s sort of our obligation to help men in that specific way.

Crazy Love: A Memoir. By Leslie Morgan Steiner. 336 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95. It’s almost as if some of the tenets of feminism create this dilemma by saying that if you’re truly a strong woman, you shouldn’t run away from a man or admit that a man is too powerful for you.

I wouldn’t exactly blame feminism because I think our culture, long before feminism, put that burden on women—that even though we may not be stronger physically, there’s this idea that we’re stronger emotionally and that we have to be nurturers and help men. I had that really bad. It was a twisted kind of confidence. I think that’s one reason why I didn’t run away at the first red flag, because I thought, I can take this. I want to go into his personal hell with him and try to help him find his way out. I had no idea how incredibly serious it was.

One thing that surprised me was how premeditated the abuse was—his making you leave your job so you’d be financially dependent, and moving you to Vermont where you’d be isolated. I always thought of domestic abuse as more spontaneous and chaotic.

I thought the same thing as you did. It was incredibly eye-opening how predictable batterers are. And I’m not sure that’s the same as premeditated. I don’t think that night when he met me on the subway he said to himself, “Aha! Here’s somebody I can gradually destroy and move away from New York City and beat at will.” I think it was unconscious, but also predictable.