Speaker 1:

We've been talking this week about guns and domestic violence and we bring you the third piece in our series today with the stories of two women both say they shot and killed their abusers in self-defense.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

Nicole Addimando is a young woman, mother of two children in Duchess County New York, who had suffered years of abuse from the father of her two children, Chris Grover. In 2017, child protective services got involved with her life because she had people around town and people at her kid's preschool had seen injuries and bruising on her repeatedly over the course of several years and they were concerned for the children. And so child protective services had gotten involved and started an investigation. The evening after they had both had been interviewed by child protective services and learned they were under investigation, they had a fight. He had brought his gun out to the living room, which scared her and she got the gun away from him, picked up the gun and shot and killed him.

Speaker 1:

That's Rachel Louise Snyder, the author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. Nicole was convicted of second degree murder and second degree criminal possession of a handgun for the shooting death. A new law in New York from 2019 did make her eligible to have her sentence reduced as a victim of domestic violence, but a judge ruled this month that she didn't meet the requirements for a reduced sentence saying she had opportunities to leave her abuser. She was given 19 years to life in prison. Meanwhile, in another part of the country, a very different case is raising many of the same questions as Nicole Addimando's.

Elizabeth Flock:

Brittany Smith is a woman in Jackson County, Alabama, who in January 2018, shot and killed a man who she said had raped her, threatened her life in her own home, and then attacked her brother after he arrived to help. The man who attacked her had recently sold her a puppy, had been drinking and taking large amounts of methamphetamine, and yet about 48 hours after the shooting, Brittany was charged with murder.

Speaker 1:

That's Elizabeth Flock, a journalist and author focused on gender and justice who's been covering Brittany's story. Brittany's alleged rapist, Todd Smith, had been arrested some 80 times in the years prior to the incident, many for domestic violence. This month Brittany had a hearing in hopes of being protected under the stand your ground law in Alabama. She lost and now faces life in prison if convicted.

Speaker 1:

There are a lot of things separating Brittany and Nicole. They come from different parts of the country. One face years of abuse. One was raped and violently assaulted on one night, but both women endured physically documented abuse. Both were arrested for murdering their abusers and both now face lengthy prison sentences. And just a warning, there are some graphic descriptions of violence in this conversation that some listeners will find disturbing.

Elizabeth Flock:

It seems like a clear case of self-defense. She said she had been raped. There was a clear sexual assault kit documenting 33 injuries on her and and that this man had also attacked her brother and that she shot him in self defense and yet experts I spoke to said that she would likely lose a stand your ground hearing. And stand your ground being the statute that says that you can defend yourself in your home with no duty to retreat, meaning you can stand there and face your attacker. And so I was curious why, if her case was really clear self-defense, she would lose her stand your ground. And I think we've heard a lot about racial bias and self-defense law and I was curious to see if there was a gender bias as well and particularly when it came to domestic cases.

Speaker 1:

What was the court's perspective on her case?

Elizabeth Flock:

Well, the court basically said that they did not think it was justified self-defense. They basically said that they did not believe her story. There was clear documentation of the assault, but she said that she shot her attacker in the moment when he sort of assaulted her brother who came over to help. And the judge said that she simply did not believe Brittany story. And so despite this documentation that the person who had entered her house had already assaulted her, that documentation really wasn't enough to convince the judge that he was a threat.

Speaker 1:

So that's Alabama. Rachel, you've been covering the case of Nicole Addimando in New York State. Tell me a little about what sticks with you with her situation.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

What really stuck out to me was that she had so much more documentation than any domestic violence victim I've really come across, and I've been researching this topic for more than a decade now. She had two forensic nurses exams that showed her partner, Chris Grover, would burn her with a heated spoon, burn her internally in her genital areas. She had bite marks on her shoulder blades. She had forced sex that really was torture. He would strangle her, he would tie her up, and then he would upload these to PornHub, the website for pornography.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

And what really struck me was that in some ways her case was sort of equally clear that she had really all this documentation of years of abuse and yet so much of it was not allowed in court. So for example, when the jury would see pictures, still pictures of these images on PornHub, any kind of context was taken from them. So there was no clarifying material that said who uploaded it, the fact that it was even on PornHub, I mean they were just still photos her in very compromised positions. The cards were kind of stacked against her and it was really pretty shocking to me because very few domestic violence victims of this kind of extreme torture have this kind of documentation.

Speaker 1:

So Elizabeth, are there any women who've been helped by stand your ground laws in Alabama where Brittany Smith was arrested?

Rachel Louise Snyder:

Yeah, actually. So I worked with the University of Chicago researcher who I wanted to look in to this and try to get hard data because something that was recurring in the story was the lack of data. A lot of folks that nonprofits for domestic and sexual violence were frustrated that no numbers really exist to tell us exactly how many women have been criminalized for what they said was self-defense.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

And so what this researcher found was actually that there is a gender bias when it comes to justified homicides. Homicides that have been found to be without criminal and malicious intent. He found that men were 10% more likely overall to get justified rulings. But when he looked more specifically at stand your ground, he found that stand your ground has helped both men and women overall.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

However, in some States, stand your ground has done little or nothing to protect women. One of those States is Florida where there's a really interesting study that was done that showed that women were almost twice as likely to lose their stand your ground as men. And when he looked at Alabama where Brittany Smith's cases, he found zero cases of women winning their stand your ground hearings. Now, Alabama stopped reporting its data around 2010, so his research was not looking at that. I know that since 2010 some women have one stand your ground rulings in Alabama. But as far as I can tell the number is very few.

Elizabeth Flock:

If I can just jump in for a second, the whole idea of self defense laws, which include stand your ground, come out of really medieval England, they come out of something called the castle doctrine, which is that a man has the right to defend his castle. And at the time wives and children were possessions. They were owned by men. And so the gendering of this has a long complex historical tale to it that doesn't really get addressed.

Elizabeth Flock:

Part of the problem is that understanding the psychological dynamics of someone like Brittany Smith or Nicole Addimando, what they were facing in that moment is that context is left out entirely. The context is almost never allowed in court. And because self-defense laws have in the United States anyway, they have this idea that it's two men in a bar fight, right? Like that's the image you get. Someone of equal size, equal gender, equal intent, equal physical capability. And that is not the dynamics of someone like Brittany Smith or a Nicole Addimando.

Speaker 1:

Rachel, based on what we're seeing nationally in terms of the shifting political climate on issues of gender, do the outcomes of these cases surprise you?

Rachel Louise Snyder:

Well, there's how I want to answer that and how I have to answer that. No, they don't surprise me at all. Domestic violence homicides, for example, are up by 33% in this country since 2017. There isn't solid data yet on what the correlation and causation of that is. But as someone who has studied this for 10 years, there's really backlash that happens with most social movements, right?

Rachel Louise Snyder:

There was a big backlash during the civil rights movement. There was a backlash during the early days of the feminist movement. And so I think this is somewhat of a backlash against me too. But what's different is that we have the normalizing of this really deep, deep misogyny that is in this kind of very fiber of our country's formation that is being normalized by people at the top.

Elizabeth Flock:

Yeah. I mean I think it's something that is domestic violence. People who work in that field would say is not surprising at all. I mean, I think as I was reporting this story in Jackson County, I haven't been reporting on domestic violence for nearly as long as Rachel. And so I found that the stories continually shocked me in terms of their just level of brutality and the horror of it really. But those in the field will say like that's not surprising.

Elizabeth Flock:

And I think what also surprised me but doesn't now after reporting on the story for nine months, is that many of the women I spoke to in Jackson County basically felt that they could not fight back, that they did not have options. One woman said that a police officer told her if you retaliate against your husband's abuse, because he'd been called there multiple times, you're going to be the one going to jail.

Elizabeth Flock:

And so certainly many of the women there felt like they didn't have an option and that if they protected themselves, that they would be the ones that would be criminalized. Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association and obviously a big proponent of stand your ground laws, he sort of famously said that the one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun. And I think Brittany Smith story really disproves that.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

Yeah, absolutely. Every time I hear that, it just makes my blood boil.

Speaker 1:

This is a real recruiting tool, isn't it?

Rachel Louise Snyder:

It is. This is the NRA's argument all the time. Women need to arm themselves. And the fact is there's two ways I would refute that. One is the research actually doesn't bear out the fact that a woman with a gun is any safer. In fact, guns escalate the danger in any domestic violence situation. The research asks, does a gun in the home create a bigger threat and a higher potential of lethality for women or for victims and the research all points to yes.

Rachel Louise Snyder:

It doesn't actually matter who owns the gun. But the other way I would answer that is that when you are telling a victim to arm herself or arm himself, you are telling someone who has, in a sense already lost all agency in the relationship, right? The scales are so imbalanced. One is the aggressor primarily, and the other one is slowly been whittled away. And you're asking that victim to embody the psychological, the somatic, the emotional experience of an abuser. That to me is the biggest barrier against any kind of realistic vision of the idea that more guns will somehow solve this problem. It won't, it exacerbates it.

Speaker 1:

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. And Elizabeth Flock is a journalist and author focused on gender and justice. And if you or someone you know is affected by intimate partner violence and needs help, you can call the national domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE for support in both English and Spanish. That's 1-800-799-7233.

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