This is a guest post I wrote on domestic violence, which was originally published at Black Box Warnings on August 22, 2013. Since that site is unfortunately no more, I’m posting it here.

That’s what the legal system might call it. An accessory is a person who is involved in the commission of a crime, but does not actually participate as a main offender. In Canada, a person who doesn’t stop someone from committing a crime is treated the same as the main offender under criminal law. That’s a charge called aiding and abetting.

I was guilty. For eight years, I allowed a crime to be committed against me and did nothing to stop it. Well, to be fair, only the last few of those years involved assault, battery, property destruction and attempted murder. Still, all eight of them involved lies, manipulation, verbal abuse, fraud and embezzlement, though I didn’t know a lot of the details at the time.

I refer to him as Monster #2 (Monster #1 was already taken by the sadistic pedophile who sexually abused me as a child) for lack of something better to call him, but he really is a monster. I’m not a mental health professional, but I would classify him as a sociopath. He’s very good at charming people, yet he has zero compunction, self-control or empathy.

He ensnared me in his world for a while. I helped him abuse me by doing nothing to stop it. When you are a victim of domestic violence, you can’t tell anyone for a few reasons. Abuse is embarrassing. You don’t want to seem like an idiot. You don’t want people judging you. You’ve spent years making up excuses to cover black eyes and broken teeth; it’s hard to admit that you’re a victim and that you lied about it. Only dumb people without backbones get caught in abusive relationships, right? I used to think along those lines before it happened to me. The truth is, anyone can end up in an abusive relationship. I don’t care how smart or how much life experience you have, it can happen to anyone.

Another reason you can’t tell anyone is because you have no way out, or at least, that’s what the abuser convinces you. He will track you down. He will follow you. He will kill you. You can never escape. You have no options and nowhere to go. It seems like a hopeless cause. You are stuck in a hole and there’s no way out. You become completely unattached to the concept of continuing to live. Strangling me was his favorite punishment, though he wasn’t above using his fists. One night, he straight up backhanded me in the face and knocked out a tooth while I was driving.

I remember yelling at him when he was strangling me that he should just snap my neck and end it. I actually wished that he would just kill me. I couldn’t stand the attempts anymore. I remember taking a little joy in the thought that once he finally killed me, he’d end up in jail. Even that didn’t sober me up. He had convinced me that I was worthless. He convinced me that I couldn’t live without him. It was only towards the very end that I realized he really intended to kill me rather than punish me. My choice was leave and live or stay and die. I lived. That may seem like the obvious choice to those who haven’t lived through it, but believe me, it’s not an easy choice to make. I really did consider dying rather than deal with the fallout.

Did you know that, in the United States, property damage is a felony while assault and battery is a misdemeanor? At least that’s how it was in the state where it happened at the time. That means that when the he punched and kicked me when I was already down on the ground bleeding in front of witnesses, it was only a misdemeanor charge, payable by a fine like a traffic ticket. However, breaking the window in my car and leaving fist-sized dents on the hood was a felony, which could mean jail time, had he not skipped town and avoided it altogether. To the law, my car was worth more than me. They don’t typically extradite between states in America for anything but murder. He stepped over the border to another state and was free.

I threw a cigarette out the window of a car once and got a misdemeanor ticket. I was remanded to court and could have served jail time for that. Instead, they dropped it down to an infraction and I had to pay a $300 fine. According to the justice system, throwing a cigarette out the window of a car is the same as beating someone nearly to death. The only difference is that I actually paid the fine and he paid nothing. I have never thrown a cigarette out a window again, while he’s still out there, creating more victims without any sort of penalty.

The few arrest warrants I was able to get–including federal mail tampering and fraud charges for stealing my mail and applying for credit cards I didn’t even know I had–have expired now. He is free and clear for what he did to me, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that anymore ever.

Every once in a while, I do an internet search to find out where he is. A few years back, I panicked when I discovered he was in California, only a couple of hours away from where I live. For a while, every time I went outside in my yard, I took my baseball bat with me. That’s no kind of way to live.

I did a search today. He changes names like people change clothing. He’s got so many pseudonyms that I’m not sure how he knows what to call himself when he wakes up in the morning. From what I can cull from the internet, he seems to have put the violence reserved for me on hold and has become a con artist now. How lovely. I read comment after comment online of scams he’s pulled. The latest complaint was just a couple of weeks ago.

These write-ups about what an incredible asshole he is are a double-edged sword for me. They make me feel safer since they give me his current information. I know exactly where he is and what name he’s using now so I can block it, but they also infuriate me because I tried to stop it. I tried to put him away and failed. I tried to make the world a better place by ridding it of him, but the justice system wouldn’t allow it. I won’t tell you who he is or what his aliases are because I do not want him to find his way to me. I want to remain anonymous, but I have added to the complaints. I do everything I can to make sure he doesn’t create more victims.

Every time I read another writeup from another of his victims, I feel badly for them, but they don’t know how close they came in dealing with the devil. They don’t know how lucky they are that he only took their money. Money is replaceable; life isn’t. There are only a handful of people who know how purely evil he is and I’m one of them. He not only took my money, but he tried to take my life and when he couldn’t, he simply destroyed what was left of it. I will always wear the scars.

I keep hoping that, one day, I’ll read the latest complaints to find that he is federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison where he bloody well belongs. I like to think he wouldn’t last a day in there, but so far, that fantasy has gone unfulfilled. In my search today, I found a claim that he scammed some people out of $100,000. He’s moving up to the big time. Now he’s getting greedy. He has committed crimes in most of the lower 48 states, but because they’re petty crimes in different precincts, he’s never been caught. Nobody puts all the little pieces together except me and I don’t know what to do with them.

The monsters will always be in the back of my mind until the glorious day of celebration that I hear that they are both dead or in prison. For thirty years, I’ve waited to hear that the Monster who sexually abused me as a child is gone. I’ve waited fifteen years to hear of Monster #2’s downfall and I’m still waiting. He’s never been caught for any of the things he’s ever done. As hard as I tried, it was all for nothing. There may be justice for others, but there has never been any justice for me. I am still waiting.

At least today, I can say that I am no longer an accessory to the crime.