Schlesinger Twins: BBC interview with Beth Alexander

BBC Manchester radio   [...]BH : Let’s return to more serious and difficult issues. You told me earlier that you were suffering from domestic violence in your marriage, and that got pretty bad. Tell us what happened one particular night when you already had the children.

BA: After the birth things just escalated out of control. In February 2010 things were so bad I actually feared for my life. I fled the apartment and went to a women’s refuge overnight. I came back the next morning hoping and praying that things might have calmed down and we could discuss the situation, but when I got to the apartment my husband had called the police and paramedics. His mother and aunt were there and he was throwing me around. He said “I was going to have had you committed to a mental hospital, you’re a psychopath, you’re a terrible mother, you’re a terrible wife, you’ll never see your children again, nobody will know where you are. I’m not even going to tell anyone that you’re in this mental hospital.” [...]

BH : I think you told me that he set up a psychiatrist over the telephone who decided that you were mad (over the phone)…

BA: A colleague of his, a Jewish psychiatrist, the head of psychiatry at the same hospital where he worked who claimed that yes, this woman is mentally ill and he then came to my apartment and backed up my husband and said “yes, she needs locking away” and then when he was asked by the police doctor “have you ever met this girl, have you actually diagnosed her”, he had to admit that actually “I’m sorry, I’ve never met her in my life, I’ve never even spoken to her, I’ve just heard the allegations of the husband”.

BH : Now, if I can put it crudely, you won this stage of the battle because the police evicted your husband from the marital home and you stayed there with the children for about 18 months and he had supervised contact during that period. [...]