THE THREE with Michelle Horton

An interview, a photo story, and Pop-Up Questions

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Michelle Horton is the author of Dear Sister: A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds, which was featured in The New York Times and named an Amazon Editor's Pick. She is also the co-founder of The Nicole Addimando Community Defense Committee, an advocacy group that brings awareness and action toward the decriminalization of domestic violence survivors.

Editor’s note: Michelle and I became friends online many years ago in the community of mom bloggers, and our paths kept crossing, and we kept chatting. Over the years, and eventually in a private FB group of about twenty women who all had kids young, I learned that Michelle is a smart, capable badass with a heart of gold. She is rare. One of the most impressive women I’ve ever (not) met- someone who holds high standards of herself for love in action and self-growth, without being judgy of others, while still maintaining a compassionate intellect that is always looking for better understanding of herself and the people around her. I’ll never forget when Michelle shared what was happening with her sister, Nikki, and the shock I felt when Nikki was convicted. I know this is a story that is about the abuse of women by men in a society and system sick with toxic masculinity, but the twin heart of this book is Nikki and Michelle as women, as sisters. As I read deeper into Dear Sister, I became engrossed heart and mind, and emerged enraged, determined to do something however small to begin to help move the needle, and more impressed with Michelle than ever. Nikki emerges also as a strong, incredibly resilient woman devoted to her children, and at the end of the story, it is the women who remain most in my mind, their power, the way the system betrays them and the way that they come together, above all.

POP-UP QUESTIONS

The writer picks five out of ten pop-up questions and answers them.

What writer romanticized being a writer for you as a young person?

From a very young age, maybe 6 years old, the sheer notion that someone could write books was romantic enough for me. But three writers immediately come to mind — the first being a fictional writer, Jo March from Little Women. (She’s still my idol.) And then there was Nellie Bly, the original investigative journalist who we learned about in middle school. She romanticized the idea that I could use my writing to uncover injustices and create social change. And while studying journalism in college, Joan Didion became my North Star. I consumed everything she wrote, and was both inspired and intimidated by her work.

How has technology been a part of your writing?

I wrote my memoir using all of the photos, video clips, voice notes, and ideas jotted down on my Notes App. What started as me obsessively documenting a chaotic experience just to stay sane, turned into virtually all of the material in my book. So much of the dialogue in the book is taken verbatim from emails with the kids’ therapists, in which I wrote down exactly what had happened minutes earlier, or from videos I’d taken to one day show Nikki. Without being able to record exact quotes and memories as they happened, there’s no way I would have remembered them so clearly.

What occupies your mind most often on being a woman in America?

I don’t think I fully understood misogyny until my sister was incarcerated and I learned about the violence that she faced both inside her home and at the hands of the State. A veil lifted, revealing the rampant, and often lethal, violence against women and girls in our society. So I think a lot about misogyny, mostly because there’s evidence everywhere, in every corner of our culture. And once you see it, it’s impossible to unsee.

What philosophy, religion or school of thought has given you something real, and what is that real thing?

I’ve been lucky enough to explore a variety of philosophies and practices, and for me, Buddhism — particularly Tara Brach’s Insight Meditation teachings — have given me practical tools and wisdom to be more grounded, present, open, and loving…especially during my most challenging times. Tara’s teachings — which I’ve been following for the past 10 years — have given me more access to myself, my innate wisdom and healing.

What music do you love on road trips?

I wish I had a cool, indie playlist to share, but I have to be honest: It’s Taylor Swift.

PHOTO ROLL STORY

The writer picks a photo from her phone and tells us about it.

Minutes before I took this photo, my sister, Nikki, had walked out of prison after more than 6 years of incarceration for surviving her abusive partner and saving the lives of herself and her children. She originally had a life sentence, and so we weren’t sure we’d ever see the day when she could ride in a car with her kids. This was a surreal moment — the first time we were alone together as a family, about to drive off of State grounds toward freedom.

THE INTERVIEW

The writer answers questions about her life and work.

Your memoir, Dear Sister, deeply moved me, but it also captivated me because of the way your point of view, your voice, comes across throughout this situation you all lived. Your sister Nikki was abused by her boyfriend ( whom she shared two children with ) for years, and the culmination of that abuse is his death, with his gun, at the hands of your sister- this is where the story begins in Dear Sister, and in a way, it's where it began for you, too, because you had no idea she was being abused for years, despite your close relationship and living proximity. You address this so honestly, so clear-eyed in your writing, repeatedly looking at all you didn't know, and trying to discern why you hadn't seen, or why she hadn't told you. Time has passed since you wrestled with this in the writing of the book, and I'm wondering where you have landed with these questions now?

First of all, thank you for your kind words — and thank you for being willing to read a difficult story and be moved. 

The more time that passes, the less personal and more universal that experience of “not seeing”/“not telling” becomes. To me, it’s proof that we’re all living in our own versions of reality, operating with limited, bias-filtered perspectives, and we can’t fully know the experiences of the people around us — even those closest to us. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but a necessary one. I’ve learned to forgive myself for all of the complex, nuanced reasons I didn’t recognize what was in front of me, and to understand the complex, nuanced reasons why victims typically hide abuse. Moving forward, I strive to be someone who can handle other people’s truths, to not look away or make excuses or ignore. Moving forward, I think it’s far more important how I showed up when I knew, than how I fell short when I didn’t. 

After Nikki is arrested for murder, you begin to find that she both kept the abuse she endured secret ( from some ) and also was completely open and honest about what was happening ( with others). One of the most shocking parts of this story was just how many professionals ( doctors, advocates, therapists ) either directly viewed the physical wounds of the abuse, or were told by Nikki, and yet no one could help get her and her children to safety. You address the 'why' of this in your writing, and I think it's so important for as many as people as possible to learn and understand. Can you sketch out some of the ways the system fails to help women feel able to leave?

Yes, as the abuse escalated to lethal levels — starting about two years prior to the shooting — Nikki started to be honest with her therapist and authorities about the horrors going on in her home. She started to "safety plan," to access domestic violence services in the community, and the abuse was even brought to the District Attorney’s office by a police officer who wanted Nikki to press charges (but she was too scared to take that step).

For starters, it’s important to know that it’s not always safe for a victim to safely leave — even with all of the support and services available. Any domestic violence advocate will tell you the same thing: A victim knows their abuser better than anyone, and it’s important to take their lead in assessing their safety and supporting them when they’re ready to leave, on their own terms. Just because someone is a victim, doesn’t mean that they lose their autonomy to make that choice for themselves, and the reasons that a victim stays in an unsafe home are individual and complex and, truth be told, sometimes wise. The vast majority of domestic violence homicides happen during or after a victim has left. 

Our system is more set-up to help victims leave than, say, 20 or 30 years ago; but it’s still up to the victim to pack up, to run away, to hide in shelters, and to face financial ruin in family court. The pressure is placed on the victim to navigate a complicated system that so often disbelieves women and statistically does very little to hold abusers accountable other than issuing orders of protection that are so often violated. The system requires victims to trust in them — trust in law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges — and to be “good victims” who comply with what the system requires, despite the fact that court proceedings are often retraumatizing, and sometimes life threatening. 

When the system enforces laws through tactics of power and control, then how can it hold abusers accountable? How can it truly keep victims safe? 

We could start with systemic change around how abusers are held accountable, even when those victims don’t have the capacity to respond to the violence themselves.  The system could err on the side of believing women, and recognize and condemn the red flags of coercive control. But then again, this system was never designed to support women or victims. This is a system that was designed by and for white men. Any real lasting change requires a shift in the patriarchal culture that we’re all buying into. 

And this is why we all must support the non-profit domestic violence organizations in our backyards who are doing the life-saving work of supporting victims, rather than assuming the taxpayer-funded system will save the day.

You have numerous deepenings of understanding in Dear Sister, and one of them that comes to my mind often- as a mother- is your thoughts on trying to shield children from the painful realities around them, or even from their own suffering, which adults might perceive as avoidable. At one point, Nikki's son has a breakdown in your living room. This is after his mom has been in jail for a while, and he's slowly realizing what's happening to his life. He begins wailing, and cries, " I lost everything! " You write that you could have said, no, you didn't, and made a few true points about things that he hasn't lost, or that haven't changed. But instead, you repeat back to him, " You lost everything. " And he sobs in your arms for a long while. You write, " I felt I was seeing his truest child self out in the open, the kind of scared inner child that could get trapped inside him as his body kept growing, the kind of original pain that some take decades to uncover in therapy. " How powerful or important do you think your courage in allowing suffering to be seen and heard was in the mental health of the kids and for yourself? What does that look like now, in the aftermath? 

We all need to be seen, to have our pain witnessed and believed. I think validating their experiences and allowing them to feel whatever they were feeling, without minimizing and distracting — for me, that takes conscious effort. I see that effort as breaking generational patterns, and hopefully setting them up to be able to regulate and understand their inner worlds better than I did growing up.

There’s another scene later in the book — when my son, Noah, tells me that taking in his cousins was the right thing to do for them, but the wrong thing to do as his mother. A lot of people bring that up to me at book events, wanting to know how our relationship is now. And the answer is that our relationship is stronger and healthier because he’s been safe enough to express those kinds of feelings without being shut-down. There is truth in his experiences, his reality, and it was important for me to hear it. 

Now, in the aftermath, that kind of emotional safety is still the goal — even though it’s not always easy for me to do. After everything those kids have endured, I figure that the very least I can do is allow their emotional realities to exist, and to be strong enough to witness and handle whatever they express.

As the story unfolded, I thought you did a brilliant job of taking us readers along with what is almost a coming-of-age story for you, in the most brutal way. Overnight, you become a mother to three children, you lose your sister to jail and an unknown future, your sister’s long-time boyfriend was not the person you thought he was and is now dead, you had recently become a single mom, and your own mother was ill. As you work to secure Nikki lawyers and funds, help the children, and stay afloat financially, we watch as you struggle your way into being an incredible grown woman with a quick mind, heart of gold and ovaries of steel ( as Betty would say ). I was particularly struck with your focus on doing the work and then releasing into radical acceptance, and your clear illustration of how imperfect and messy that process actually is, which definitely is not always made clear when gurus or self-help experts suggest it. Can you talk a little about what that process was like for you?

Well thank you for saying that, and I wouldn’t have been able to survive any of it, truly, without support and guidance from a large safety net of smart, connected people that formed around us.

As for my moments of radical acceptance and surrender, I had spent years trying to un-learn this idea that I could manage and control the uncontrollable — first through the dissolution of my marriage and my discovery of Al-Anon groups and codependency recovery, and also through my time working at The Omega Institute, where I was exposed to a variety of teachers in mindfulness and radical acceptance. So it had already been a practice, which I think helped. Not because I was Zen and chill throughout our family crisis (quite the opposite), but because I had a general awareness that surrender and acceptance was the right direction, and if I continued to control and manage and clench my way through the hard moments, I was only adding more resistance, more tension, to a situation where, again, I was powerless.

But at the height of this crisis, it wasn’t even a choice. The letting go was an act of self-preservation. And every single time, the release in surrender was the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing “grace.”

The incredible power of women is illustrated throughout this story. What is the group that formed to help Nikki doing now?

The story of our committee could be a book in itself, and it would be a love story. We still talk daily through our group chat, but most of our conversations are lighter and less frantic than we’ve had in the past — especially because Nikki is now part of the conversation. 

That being said, we still spend a good amount of time doing advocacy work in all corners of our lives. A lot of the work we do is quiet — connecting people to resources, Zooming with other defense committees to info-share, and figuring out ways to help wherever and however we can. Our commitment doesn’t end with Nikki, it never did. And some of our greatest work is how well we love and support one another, on a personal level. We started as a “committee” but the word village or sisterhood feels more appropriate. We are bonded for life.

For this book to work, you had to lay out the horrific abuse that Nikki endured. Without the specifics, the reader might not understand the stakes, might make excuses for the man who did these things. I was ENRAGED at the ways the documentation of her abuse was treated by so many in the court system, which is I'm sure nothing to the rage you felt. I still feel shocked and scared when I think about it. Some of the discourse and lawmaking was predicated on absolute patriarchal bullshit, so glaringly stupid and obvious that it's hard to understand how this is allowed to live in the court system. The fact that her abuse was ever called into question, much less denied, in the face of such astounding and horrific evidence, is beyond anything I expected. Is there anything someone can do, someone like me who read your book and wants to help make change? Organizations, laws to be aware of, campaigns? 

I’m glad to know you were enraged, because from my perspective, rage is the only reasonable response. And that’s part of the reason why I wanted to share my perspective. I wanted people to learn the things that I had learned about how our criminal justice system operates when it comes to abusers and victims, and — just like you said — how much is predicated on absolute patriarchal bullshit. Because what happened to Nikki is replicated again and again, long before her case and sadly continuing to this day. 

As I type this, Nikki is texting with a criminalized survivor in Florida named Ashley Benefield, and Ashley is telling her all of the ways that the judge is suppressing evidence, denying her witnesses from testifying, and preventing any abuse from being entered into the record. Every single thing that I exposed in Nikki’s prosecution is the norm for these cases, not the exception. 

Step one of changing anything, is seeing and understanding. All of us could serve on a jury, and all of us could one day be in a position of helping someone like Nikki. 

I gave a list of resources at the end of my book, but a few authors to Google and read include: Leigh Goodmark, Rachel Louise Snyder, Victoria Law, Mariame Kaba, and Justine van der Leun.

When it comes to laws, there are glaring gaps when it comes to self-defense and what is sometimes called “battered women’s defense,” which is basically obsolete at this point. Each state is different, but what you need to know is that if you live in a Stand Your Ground state (like Florida or Alabama), those laws do not work for women. Go ahead and do some research — the law fails women every single time. This idea that we have guns for protection, or that if victims were armed then they could stop abusers themselves — that’s a fantasy. Guns in the home, even if the victim owns them, makes it much more likely that she will be killed. And if she uses the gun to protect herself, she’ll likely be prosecuted and told that the abuse never happened. Even in a progressive state like New York, our women’s prisons are filled with survivors who were not protected by the current laws on the books. 

Where New York is ahead of other states, is that we have the Domestic Violence Survivors' Justice Act. I go into detail about this in the book, but it’s basically a law that gives victims of abuse a lower sentencing structure if they’re convicted of a crime connected to their abuse. It’s the only reason that Nikki is home right now, instead of serving a life sentence in prison. And New York is one of the few states that has a law such as that one (and it took 10 years of advocacy to accomplish). So if you feel compelled to join the advocacy fight in your own state, a similar “survivor’s justice act” is a good place to start. And your state representatives, local domestic violence organizations, and any community justice centers can help point you in the right direction. 

We, as a society, need to be more focused on mutual aid and community building because what happened to Nikki is happening over and over in homes and courtrooms across the country, exponentially to women of color. None of us can tear down systems with our bare hands, but we can each start where we are, and do what we can — whether that’s checking out books at the library and discussing them at book clubs, volunteering at your local domestic violence shelter, or donating to help other criminalized survivors who have much less visibility and support than Nikki ever did. 

As for organizations, I always like to point people toward Survived & Punished, a remarkable grassroots organization with chapters across the country. I’ve been lucky enough to learn from the advocates that have paved the way for this kind of mass support for criminalized survivors. And I know that all of the money raised through Survived & Punished is going to help support survivors in prison who are less fortunate than Nikki. 

One of the important themes of Nikki's story is that she was abused by a few men before Chris, starting when she was young, and that many involved during the trial made it clear that this was either A: not credible, or B: some sign of her fault. This was, again, enraging. Can you talk to us about the psychological truths behind abuse that begins young and repeats, and why it's actually common?

Anyone who studies the literature around domestic violence — or, in the case of the prosecutor in Nikki’s case, handles sex crime cases — will learn that sexual victimization in childhood and adolescence statistically increases the likelihood of sexual victimization in adulthood. Especially when the early childhood sexual abuse was never treated, like Nikki’s. This is well documented.

The problem is that the average person, and therefore the average jury member, isn’t well educated on the realities of domestic violence and trauma, and is therefore walking around with all sorts of misconceptions (which are perpetuated by our misogynistic culture). In Nikki’s case — and in virtually every single court case I’ve seen where the defendant is a survivor — those misconceptions and myths are exploited in order to “win” the case. It is VERY easy for women to be condemned, blamed, and buried in our culture, which is why so many criminalized survivors end up getting convicted. If you want to learn more about domestic violence, I highly recommend that everyone reads No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder.

What was it like writing this book? What does Nikki think about it?

The book was indescribably difficult to write. I knew I had a story to share, I knew I was theoretically capable of writing it — given the many years I spent writing and blogging about motherhood, which is how I met you, Maggie. But what I came to find out, quite quickly, was that my brain didn’t want me to write the book. My body had no interest in revisiting some of the hardest moments of my life, and feeling all of the emotions that I had compartmentalized or intellectualized, or were numbed from adrenaline and shock in the moment.

It took me about a year to realize that my inability to sit down, focus, and write a coherent sentence was a trauma response — and so writing this book required weekly therapy, as well as a freelance editor, Becky Cole, who helped me work through it all with immense compassion and wisdom. 

About halfway through the three-year writing process, I seriously wanted to give up. It felt unhealthy and retraumatizing, to keep reliving it all through every draft. But once I was finished — once I made sense of the narrative, and put it all to paper from beginning to end — I was able to release it from my body. Writing the book was terribly hard, but having written it is profoundly healing.

To answer your question about how Nikki feels about it now: I know she’s proud of me, and she’s proud of how I wrote the book. She was involved in every draft, even though we had to get creative about how to safely get her pages without causing problems in the prison. I took all of her feedback into account, we fact-checked the entire thing together, and I made sure she was comfortable with every word before it went to print. When she finished the advanced galley in prison, she told me that she felt relieved when she got to the end; she said that she felt humanized. And that’s the highest goal I could have had for the book, after all of the dehumanization and exploitation she faced in the courtroom and media.

In some ways, I know the added spotlight while she was transitioning home was difficult. We certainly didn’t plan for her early prison release to coincide with my way-later-than-originally-contracted book release. When I first got the book deal in 2020, she had a life sentence. And at the same time, the book’s release has helped give an even wider platform to the advocacy work that we’re both committed to doing in the long-term. 

Toward the end of Dear Sister you address, briefly, your sister's boyfriend’s life, abuse of Nikki, and his death. It was incredible to see you give some grace and acknowledgement of societal factors to his behavior, while still holdling him accountable. How hard was that section to write, or those conclusions to draw? Do you still feel the same now?

Thank you for saying that. I included that because it was, and still is, true for me. (When I had initially sent out early drafts of the book, that was one section that rubbed people the wrong way; I think it’s easier for people to categorize people as “all bad” or “all good,” instead of seeing the grey.)

I don’t think affording Chris his humanity, and looking at the societal factors that shaped him and so many like him, excuses the sadistic abuse that he exerted over my sister. Maybe that’s partly because I’m raising his children, who are part him, and I see so much goodness and innocence in them. Maybe it’s because compassion comes easily to me — sometimes too easily, I’ll admit. But the bottom-line truth is that the system knew that Nikki was at a high probability of being killed, that there was a legally registered gun in the house, and there were two young kids in the home — and this was years before Nikki defended her life and was arrested. No one had to die, if the system worked. And the truth is that so much of the abuse that Chris exerted over Nikki was rooted in misogyny, pornography addiction, and the patriarchal notion that men can use violence to assert authority and dominance. We can’t prevent this from happening in the future if we don’t acknowledge the full context. 

What's next for Michelle Horton?

I have no idea what’s next. I learned not to plan too far in advance, I’d rather take each day as it comes and believe that the next right thing will show itself. As for right now, I’m enjoying talking about these issues — on podcasts, at book events, during speaking engagements. I’m grateful to connect with people over these issues, and continue to support and advocate for other criminalized survivors and their families. For now, that feels right.