Documenting Criminalized Survival

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Content note: This piece contains explicit descriptions of sexual assault, carceral and systemic violence, domestic and interpersonal abuse and child abuse, and gendered and misogynistic slurs and viewpoints. This excerpt has been adapted from the book’s introduction.

In December 2018, in a northeastern city seven hundred miles from Saginaw, I came upon an article about Nicole “Nikki” Addi­mando. Nikki was a young mother from Poughkeepsie, New York, a city along the Hudson River, and she had been charged with murder. Several advocacy groups were decrying her prosecution, while many community members supported it.

As I learned more about the story, the only mystery to me was why Nikki was being tried in the first place.

In the years before I met her in the third-floor hallway of the Dutchess County Court, Nikki was living with her boyfriend, Chris Grover, and their two young children. Chris was a local gymnastics coach who liked to wear jaunty caps. He played video games, visited his parents every Sunday, and taught girls backflips at Mr. Todd’s Gymnastics studio. He was like a “big kid,” his loved ones said: goofy, fun, creative. His phone search his­tory suggested he was also passionate about torture pornography, which he devoured with increasing zeal. If the subject of the image or video was bound or crying out in pain, that was preferable.

Nikki had grown up in Poughkeepsie, a good student and a competitive gymnast. She studied early childhood education at col­lege and worked as a preschool teacher. She met Chris in late 2008 when they were both coaches at the studio. She was nineteen and he was twenty-­one. Their friendship deepened into a romance, but they waited a year to consummate the relationship. Nikki was the one holding back. She hated sex.

At age five, Nikki had been sexually assaulted by an elderly neighbor, a man who abused at least one other little girl repeatedly, then retired peacefully to Florida and died with a clean criminal record and his wife by his side.

One difficulty in believing survivors, and incarcerated survivors specifically, is that in believing them, we must acknowledge the ugliest truths of our legal system and therefore our society. And in acknowledging these truths rather than denying or ignoring them, we must take on suffering and responsibility.

Initially, Nikki was grateful to Chris. He was very patient. But then one night, she woke to him finishing inside her. She thought maybe this was normal. Her mom told her not to be so dramatic: men were just like that. Soon, Chris always kept going, even when Nikki protested. He grew rougher; she had marks on her wrists and her chest. In 2012, she learned she was pregnant. Chris promised to change. They moved in together and painted a nursery.

Nikki grew more tethered to Chris: he was the breadwinner and the reason she could stay home with her baby. During the pregnancy, he was sweet, like he’d been before. For six weeks post­ partum, Nikki was instructed by her doctor not to have sex. At the end of that period, Chris approached her. She wasn’t ready, she said. He slammed her head against a doorframe and raped her. She was a good mom, he told her, but he had needs, too.

The abuse escalated sharply. Chris began to take pictures of Nikki tied up and naked and uploaded them onto the amateur porn sites. “4 hours of toys and torture tonight,” read one caption; another, “bitch begging for mercy.” Nikki was mortified: What if he showed the images around? Everyone would think she was a slut, an unfit mother. Soon, she was pregnant again. In 2015, their daughter was born.

Nights were twisted; days were wholesome. Nikki went all­ in at parenting, with sing­alongs, apple picking, and corn-­maze walking, always smiling and friendly. People in the community, and Nikki’s own family members, saw her bruises and they looked away. She was clumsy, it seemed.

In 2017, a local mom with a social work background, con­cerned that the children were witnessing domestic violence, finally called Child Protective Services. According to CPS notes, she re­ported that “on a weekly basis, the mother has had visible bruises to her face and chest.” CPS began an investigation. They visited Nikki and Chris at home and found nothing immediately worrisome, but they said they would be back.

That evening, Chris took his gun from the closet and cleaned it, showed Nikki diagrams of the human brain, and pointed out the place to shoot to kill, as well as the place that would allow her to live but without speech or memory. “Wouldn’t that be conve­nient,” he said. He raped her and told her to lie atop him. When she tried to slip away, he pulled the gun on her. Nikki pushed him and the gun fell. She grabbed it and pointed it at him. He wasn’t scared; she’d hand over the gun, he informed her, and he’d kill them both. “And then your kids will have no one,” he said. At that, she lunged, pressed the pistol to his temple hard and tight, and fired.

Nikki fled with the children. She was stopped at a green light when a police officer pulled up behind her. Assuming the driver had dozed off, he hit his air horn. Nikki, slight and shoeless, got out. She started relaying the events of the evening.

“It was self­-defense,” she said, trembling and standing on the pavement in her socks. “Oh my God, it’s over.” The officer, a rookie with a blond buzz cut, radioed a colleague and relayed that he didn’t entirely believe Nikki’s version of events. Nikki was taken to the station and charged with murder.

At the trial, which began in March 2019, I sat in the front row. Nikki’s lawyer showed documentation of the attacks on her, taken by trained sexual assault nurses. Nikki covered her eyes as jurors inspected close-­up images of her vagina, which had been burned by a metal spoon heated on the stove. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed. The photos were enlarged on a flat screen. Everyone in the packed courtroom could see.

A state expert testified that only Chris contributed any identifi­able DNA to the gun. A police officer testified that, for months be­fore the shooting, he was concerned that Nikki was at high risk of being killed. A trauma therapist testified that Nikki was a reliable reporter who tended to minimize, not exaggerate, the abuse she had endured. But the prosecutor called Nikki a “master manipula­tor” and suggested that she had hurt herself or had been playing kinky sex games. At one point, a juror nodded off.

On April 12, Nikki was found guilty of murder. She was hand­cuffed and led away to jail to await sentencing. 

Later, I tracked down several jurors.

“I’m sorry, you can’t go and kill somebody,” said one.

“None of it in her little timeline, none of it made sense at all,” said another.

I felt I had plunged into an upside­-down world: The state characterized Nikki as a crazy, conniving harlot, but everyone who knew her said she was neurotically modest. She lived an insular life devoted to her children, didn’t know who the musical artist Prince was, and had never seen a single episode of Law & Order. She was painted as a liar and a malingerer, though she had a mountain of documentation that showed she’d been injured. She was desperate for attention, the prosecutor implied—though Nikki had hidden her injuries, and, anyway, what is problematic about wanting attention, especially if you think you might be killed?

If it was so bad, she would have left. If she didn’t leave, it surely wasn’t so bad.

In February 2020, Nikki received nineteen years to life. Judge Edward McLoughlin told her that she “may have reluctantly con­sented” to “intimate acts you were very uncomfortable with” and “had the opportunity to safely leave.” He added that Nikki was a “broken person.”

Nikki stood before the court, shackled and shaking visibly. She was permitted to make a statement.

“I was afraid to stay, afraid to leave, afraid that nobody would believe me, afraid of losing everything,” she said through tears. “This is why women don’t leave. I know killing is not a solution and staying hurts. But leaving doesn’t mean living. Often, we end up dead, or where I’m standing. Alive, but still not free.”

I started calling experts: lawyers, activists, professors. They told me that women’s prisons are full of people in similar situations. This was common knowledge, apparently, but nobody had the numbers to back it up.

I found limited studies, conducted in single prisons or states, consistently showing that almost all the people in these facilities experienced physical and sexual violence prior to incarceration. In 1973, the political activist Assata Shakur sat in a Bronx jail bullpen and observed the women around her. Nearly everyone was Black or Puerto Rican. “There are no criminals here . . . only victims,” Shakur wrote. “Many were abused children. Most have been abused by men, and all have been abused by ‘the system.’”

That was often the way it went: The women took it, and took it, and then, one day, they didn’t. They resisted. 

A quarter century later, researchers confirmed Shakur’s assess­ment. A 1999 study found that 70 percent of the women newly im­prisoned for homicide at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where Nikki would later serve time, had experienced severe physical vio­lence by an intimate partner. In 2005, more than half those in New York State women’s prisons for homicide offenses reported having been abused in their lives, and nearly 25 percent had been abused by their victim. Surveys across several states found that most girls in juvenile detention had experienced serious sexual violence mul­tiple times before their arrest.

I also found anecdote after anecdote, throughout history, but I still couldn’t find systemic, nationwide data to support what outside experts and survivors them­selves told me, and what I witnessed while reporting: that women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors, but by people who have been imprisoned because they are abuse and assault survivors. This phenomenon is often referred to as “crimi­nalized survival.” And the difficulty in finding robust, reliable data on the span and structural nature of criminalized survival lies in the way such women are categorized by the system itself, which essentially erases their life stories and redefines them as criminals, first and foremost.

“We often say, the only correct battered woman when talking about self­-defense is a dead one,” a longtime activist told me.

One day, early in my reporting on the topic, I was interviewing Rachel White­-Domain, a Chicago­-based lawyer who had started a small nonprofit law project, representing survivors of gender­-based violence who were held in Illinois prisons. White­-Domain told me that every single one of her clients had been pipelined from sexual or domestic abuse straight into prison: “I see a lot of pleas. People who have lived their whole lives not being believed—if they are women, people of color, maybe also a sex worker, maybe a drug user—think they won’t be believed by a jury. And they are correct.” 

White­-Domain didn’t have statistics for me, but as we contin­ued to speak, she had an idea. “If you’re so interested, you could just ask the women directly,” she said.

I called a data scientist named Thania Sanchez, who was then a Yale University political science professor. I asked her if she could help me create a tool to understand the scale of criminalized survival. Within the week, I was in her living room.

We came up with sixteen questions. We aimed to assess the pathways of women into the system, as well as their backgrounds. We asked for basic demographic information, such as age and race, as well as sentencing information and the relationship with the person they were accused of killing.

Then we requested general accounts of the event that had landed them in prison, intended to draw out stories without prim­ing the respondent to give certain answers. Over the course of three years, I sent my survey out to more than ten thousand people in sixty women’s prisons in twenty-­seven states.

I signed every letter and filled in each salutation. Dear Monica, Natalie, Amanda. Laurie, Narjes, Rae. Sarah, Thuy, Maria. Soledad and Quinn. Brittney, Brittaney, Brittany, Britni. Delight, Lovily, Cherish, Dymond, Precious. All the Jennifers and Jessicas, Rachels and Rebeccas, Kimberlys and Stephanies. One Gregg, one Connor. Angels, Cassandras. Names bestowed upon the women eighteen, thirty­-six, fifty-­five, seventy-­nine years ago, linked now to a prison ID number.

After I sent the first batch, I waited for three weeks, check­ing my PO box daily.  Soon I had piles, then boxes full. They came in clusters, pouring in, dribbling in, a cycle that would ebb and flow as I made my mailings. 

People wrote reams, or they answered perfunctorily. They waited months or sneaked out emails from contraband smartphones within hours. Some photocopied entire court cases, and some sent autobiographies. They included essays, philosophical musings, political arguments, jailhouse datasets, poems, trauma theory, legal arguments, policy recommendations, research papers, CVs, and no small number of photographs: headshots in full hair and makeup, visiting day family portraits, pictures with assistance dogs they were training or lush window gardens they had tended. They often blessed me and rarely cursed me. Two tried to extort me. A number had prayed on whether to answer, but only three people tried to convert me.

Hundreds of letters were sent back unopened, stamped by a prison mailroom clerk; confiscated as unauthorized research; trashed. Still, all in all, 1,005 people replied. Though I hadn’t asked, to avoid prompting them, they none­theless reported a grim litany of childhood abuse. Then there were the accounts of sexual assault, a veritable cas­cade. 

The violence from childhood almost always continued into adulthood, a helpless cycle. It was as if every man would leave some type of substance in me to attract the very same man as the one before, wrote one woman. She had killed her boyfriend after he woke her up with a fist to the face. “I feel like beating a bitch today,” he said, and he did just that, until she finally swung back with a knife, and connected.

That was often the way it went: The women took it, and took it, and then, one day, they didn’t. They resisted. 

These stories can be hard to believe. A problem we women in prison face is our lives are complicated and “fantastic-sounding,” wrote one respondent. The way her abuser tormented her was “stranger than fiction,” wrote another.

This is not unique to women in prison. The widespread prob­lem of women not being believed is twofold. First: The things that people do when hurting others are often objectively bizarre; it can be easier for an outsider to assume it’s all made up than to accept that human beings could enact such perverse cruelty. Second: Since abuse almost always occurs in private, victims usually have no “proof.” Even evidence on a body, even photos and videos, can be explained away as kink, as happened at Nikki Addimando’s trial.

One difficulty in believing survivors, and incarcerated survivors specifically, is that in believing them, we must acknowledge the ugliest truths of our legal system and therefore our society. And in acknowledging these truths rather than denying or ignoring them, we must take on suffering and responsibility. Our culture’s worst impulses are exposed, and they reflect back onto us. The validation of these women’s stories destroys an illusion we cling to: that we live in an ordered world, where we all enjoy free choice and get what we deserve; that we are safe and protected; that our systems function to uphold principles and morals.

In the service of this myth, we blame each victim for personal deficiencies and failures, demolish her narrative, deem her actions unjustifiable, devalue her life, and remove her from the free world.

Nikki’s case was a relatively straightforward example of criminal­ized survival because she claimed self­-defense. In a court of law, if a person is found to have acted in self-­defense, then no crime has been committed. But how is such an act determined?

Laws vary by state, but typically, self­-defense is considered jus­tified in a court of law when the defendant believes that she has no other option but to use force to prevent an attack; when that force is proportionate to the threat at hand; and when that threat is perceived to be imminent. A jury must use a “reasonableness” stan­dard when assessing a case: would a hypothetical “reasonable per­son” have considered force the only way to respond, and the threat imminent? 

The same state that had so thor­oughly abandoned the women throughout their lives reemerged—suddenly well-funded and powerful, in the form of police and prosecutors and prisons. It fought for her punishment and won. She disappeared behind high walls, taking her narrative with her.

Until recently, legal texts referred to the “reasonable person” as the “reasonable man.” There was no reasonable woman. Since its introduction, this standard has made its way into all branches of law. The first reasonable person envisioned was a white landowning able­-bodied man, and things continued in this vein until, over time, landmark cases began to shift the standard. When it came to women, or people dealing with gender or intimate partner violence, there was, for a long time, no precedent that allowed for an altered interpretation of what might be considered reasonable.

But slanted self-­defense statute is not the only way in which survival can be criminalized—it’s just the most straightforward way. There are more nuanced methods. Court documents and news reports often paint a woman as a reprobate, but upon further inves­tigation, a different picture usually emerges.

That’s what happened as I was reading the surveys. While each woman’s life was distinct, their trajectories inevitably followed a familiar pattern: a girl violated; a pileup of failures to protect her; and a terrible, desperate act. Then, the same state that had so thor­oughly abandoned the women throughout their lives reemerged—suddenly well-funded and powerful, in the form of police and prosecutors and prisons. It fought for her punishment and won. She disappeared behind high walls, taking her narrative with her.

Yet she was still often eager to say her part, given the chance.

It takes endurance and stamina to tell one’s story, especially from within the confines of a prison, where you have neither privacy nor freedom, where your calls are capped by for-­profit tele­coms corporations, your letters read by state workers, your every word potentially overheard, and respite unavailable if you become unmoored. In my reporting for this book, I met many extraordinary women—but three stood out.

These three women were willing and eager to go forward with the project of this book. They were organized and determined, spending many years corresponding and meeting with me. They wanted a chance for their truths to be heard, but they also believed that in speaking out, they could help others. They were open, de­termined to talk about subjects that are often considered shame­ful. They had good senses of humor. They surprised me: They were brimming with hope.

Their names are Tanisha Williams, Jema Heffernan, and TC Brooks.

This excerpt, adapted from Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival by Justine van der Leun (HarperCollins, 2026), appears by permission of the publisher.

Justine van der Leun is a journalist, the author of several books, including, most recently, Unreasonable Women, and the host of the podcast Believe Her. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, among others. She lives in New York.