A woman kills her abuser and has proof it was self-defense — but is it enough?
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
At 2 a.m. on September 28, 2017, on a quiet suburban street in Poughkeepsie, New York, 28-year-old Nikki Addimando waved down a police officer as her car idled at a stoplight, her two children in the backseat. The dashcam footage from the police car captured her confession: “Oh my God, he’s dead,” Nikki says. “It was self-defense… Oh my God, it’s over.”
Nikki would spend the next two years of her life trying to prove that when she shot her longtime boyfriend in the head, she had indeed acted in self-defense after years of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. In so many cases like Nikki’s, the criminal justice system struggles to categorize women who have defended themselves against physical or sexual violence. The system demands black-and-white categorizations: offenders kill and victims die. Women who act in self-defense, especially after years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, are routinely dismissed by prosecutors as attention-seeking liars or manipulators who had better “options.” These women, after taking a plea or being found guilty by a jury, are often “disappeared” into prisons for years — or lifetimes.
(Forwarded this email? Sign up here.)
Journalist Justine van der Leun has been following Nikki’s story for 18 months, poring over court documents, interviewing dozens of people in her orbit, and driving upstate to visit her at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. Justine saw Nikki for the last time in early March, days before Bedford Hills closed to all visitors. Soon after, its incarcerated population was quarantined, and the coronavirus spread through the prison.
Nikki’s story reveals how the criminal justice system demands binaries, especially for women. “Offenders kill and victims die; offenders are monsters, victims are angels,” one legal expert tells van der Leun. Is there a place for Nikki Addimando in the American way of justice?
READ: “The Evidence Against Her,” by Justine van der Leun
— Michelle Legro, Deputy Editor, GEN
Go deeper…
•This feature from journalist Rachel Aviv reveals how domestic violence can be covered up by an entire community if the abuser is also a cop.
•Rachel Louise Snyder covered Nikki Addimando’s story for The New Yorker by looking closely at New York State’s new law that allows a judge to grant leniency in sentencing for crimes committed by survivors of domestic violence.
•It’s no wonder this riveting ProPublica story won the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a television series by novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, and screenwriter Susannah Grant. It’s completely unforgettable.
Who gets to be a “perfect victim”?
Cyntoia Brown was released from prison in August 2019 after serving 15 years for killing the man who had trafficked her. Her story is told in a new documentary on Netflix, Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story. Early footage of Cyntoia on trial at 16-years-old offers a heartbreaking look at how the American justice system decides who gets to be a victim and who gets to be a perpetrator.
Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee granted Cyntoia clemency not just due to her age at the time of the crime, but also her growth in prison, highlighting the “extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.”
TLDR: Totally long, definitely read
The longreads we haven’t been able to shake — just trust us.
- “I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore” by Anne Helen Petersen (Buzzfeed)
- “The Bushwick House Share Was a Haven — Then Covid-19 Struck” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
- “I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist” by Ellen Cushing (The Atlantic)
Flux populi
Over three years of relief work, Ms. Frankel said she has learned that crises breed corruption. Money is flowing, and people are desperate. “It’s so disheartening,” she said. “At the racetrack, you think you might get screwed. But when you’re dealing with the biggest health crisis in 100 years, you have to be a really sick, sick, bad person to exploit that.”
“Bethenny Frankel’s Dark Journey to Find Medical Masks” (New York Times)
And one last thing…
Very large numbers have been everywhere lately. The New York Times has been experimenting with ways to show how big these numbers really are, using the size and breadth of the printed page. On March 26, the Times used the height of its front page to show an unprecedented number of people filing for unemployment due to the coronavirus. And on Memorial Day, the paper printed the names and short profiles of 1,000 people who died in the pandemic — with the caveat that the actual number of dead was 100 times greater.
The 1968 short film Powers of Ten, created by designer Charles Eames, was a bold attempt to show the size and scope of the world around us, long before it could be rendered by computers. It describes itself as a “film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe, and the effect of adding another zero,” starting at a picnic in a Chicago park, zooming out to the edges of the universe, and then back into the atoms of a skin cell. It’s a wild ride — but so is infinity.
