RACHAEL Taylor has broken her silence on her experience as a victim of domestic violence three-and-a-half years after the breakdown of her relationship with Matthew Newton.
In an interview with The Australian Woman’s Weekly, the 29-year-old Aussie actress says despite her glamorous Hollywood lifestyle she was living a private nightmare behind closed doors.
The pair’s relationship ended in 2010 after an altercation in Rome in which court documents revealed Newton allegedly left Taylor with multiple scars as well as “neck injuries” and “bruising” consistent with having her head “bashed against the floor and walls”.
She was later granted an apprehended violence order against her fiancé which detailed claims that she suffered almost a year of physical, verbal and mental abuse in which he “threatened to end her life” on a number of occasions.
Taylor says in the candid first-person piece in The Weekly that one woman per week in Australia dies at the hands of her current or former partner and one in three women will be affected by domestic violence in her lifetime.
“I don’t think any woman thinks that they will become an addition to these statistics,” Taylor writes. “I didn’t. I thought I was exempt. I thought I was the exception to the rule. I was not. I am a survivor of domestic violence.
“At first, my reasons for keeping my experience of domestic violence to myself were very simple. I felt ashamed. I felt stupid. I felt very sad. And there was another reason. Domestic violence is not very nice to talk about. Not for the survivor of it, nor the community at large.”
Taylor says she clocked some warning signs, but ignored them because she didn’t think she was the “type” of girl to fall victim to domestic violence.
“My life got very small. To me, it felt like my entire social network had shrunk to the number of one and one-quarter of a person. It was as if one whole person was allocated for my abuser and the other quarter was me. I’m not sure where that three-quarters of me went exactly.
“The quarter of me that was left was ducking and weaving on a day-to-day basis, frazzled and stupefied, and very busy lying to myself and everyone around me.
“Imagine having to think this way: he knows where I work, where my friends live ... where I pray, which bus I take, the passwords to my computer, the code on my phone, where my parents live.”
Taylor described the fear that grips a woman who is the victim of domestic violence as “paralysing”.
Newton was never charged with assault despite four seperate incidents against both Taylor, ex-girlfriend Brooke Satchwell, a Sydney taxi driver and a Miami hotel worker with reports citing his mental health as one of the major reasons the charges were dropped.
Taylor along with White Ribbon Australia and The Weekly are launching a “Secrets” project where that are inviting more women to share their personal story of domestic violence in the hope of raising awareness.
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