The woman who started #WhyIStayed on Twitter:

Beverly Gooden is one of the few people on the Internet who hasn’t watched the graphic, grainy video of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Rice assaulting his wife (then fiance) Janay Palmer in an elevator. After all, she was in that situation herself four years ago. She knows what domestic violence looks like well enough not to need this disturbing reminder.

What got her blood boiling wasn’t this new video footage, but people’s response to it.

“The overwhelming tone was, ‘Why did she stay?’” Gooden, a human resources manager from Charlotte, N.C., told The Washington Post. “I felt that people just don’t realize, asking ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ is such a simple question for a very complex issue.”

Gooden should know. She survived a violent relationship with her college sweetheart, a man she describes as “attractive and talented, who could romance me and say all the right things,” but who regularly verbally and physically abused her.

Isolated from her family, feeling responsible for her husband’s anger and still desperately in love with the man she had met at school, it took her a year to realize that the relationship might kill her and another two months for her to plan her escape. She can understand why Palmer has stayed with the man who knocked her unconscious in an elevator in February — why she might have shouldered the blame for that violent incident. But as she saw it, the commenters on television and Twitter didn’t seem to.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/09/whyistayed-she-saw-herself-in-ray-rices-wife-janay-and-tweeted-about-it-so-did-thousands-of-others/?tid=trending_strip_4