Four Women Accuse NY AG Eric Schneiderman of Physical Violence

Ken MeyerMay 7th, 2018, 7:25 pm
 

Four women are accusing New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of nonconsensual conduct and physically abusive behavior.

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow spoke to two of the women – Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam – who claim that Schneiderman hit them, often after drinking and in bed, without their consent. The two women did not report the assault to the police, but they did seek medical treatment for how they were treated, and Selvaratnam claims Schneiderman made several ominous comments to her. Not the least of these alleged remarks was that Schneiderman claimed he could have their phones tapped, and he threatened both women with death if they ever broke up with him.

Two other women have corroborated Barish and Selvaratnam’s claims, but have declined to come forward for fear of Schneiderman. One of these women, a prominent New York attorney, reportedly gave Farrow and Mayer a photograph of herself after Schneiderman slapped her face after she refused his advances.

Barish, who dated Schneiderman from 2013-2015, said that she first noticed his controlling behavior when he demanded that she have surgery to remove a tattoo on her wrist. “Taking a strong woman and tearing her to pieces is his jam,” Barish said, and she also offered her account of a rough night she had Schneiderman.

One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”

Barish said the injuries to her ear lasted for months, and she had to seek medical attention after starting to bleed out. She continued to have an on-off relationship with Schneiderman, but she told friends about her distressing experiences, and she described how he would drink “a lot” while making her drink excessively too.

Barish offered this tweet following the story’s release.

Selvaratnam’s experience with Schneiderman draws parallels with Barish, telling reporters that the AG would drink excessively, act physically and emotionally abusive towards her, and try controlling her life to varying degrees.

“I’ve never seen anyone that messed up,” Selvaratnam said. “It was like sleeping next to a monster.”

“The abuse escalated. Schneiderman not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back and forth, with his open hand; he also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually, she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.” In her view, Schneiderman “is a misogynist and a sexual sadist.” She says that she often asked him to stop hurting her, and tried to push him away. At other times, she gave in, rationalizing that she could tolerate the violence if it happened only once a week or so during sex. But “the emotional and verbal abuse started increasing,” she says, and “the belittling and demeaning of me carried over into our nonsexual encounters.” He told her to get plastic surgery to remove scars on her torso that had resulted from an operation to remove cancerous tumors. He criticized her hair and said that she should get breast implants and buy different clothes. He mocked some of her friends as “ditzes,” and, when these women attended a birthday celebration for her, he demanded that she leave just as the cake was arriving. “I began to feel like I was in Hell,” she says.”

Schneiderman attracted significant media attention earlier this year after filing a civil rights lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein over his sexual abuse scandal. So, in light of this new reporting, these old Schneiderman tweets just got a lot more interesting.

[Image via screengrab]

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