Jonah Keri's former wife thanks the public for their support -- and wants others to have the same

For anyone who tweeted, posted or otherwise "cancelled" Montreal sportswriter Jonah Keri when his domestic attacks came to light in summer 2019, his ex-wife has a message: it helped.

"I'm really lucky that I was in a position where, because Jonah wrote a book about the Expos, this [situation] was made public and he was effectively cancelled immediately," said Amy Kaufman, who was married to Keri for just shy of a year.

It "was a huge support to me to feel like I had, you know, the Twitterverse and baseball people as allies," she said.

Keri is currently behind bars for his violence towards Kaufman, and she went public this week about her experience, something she says she was always planning to do -- partly to pay it forward after the general public, despite not knowing who she was, seemed to have her back.

"That's not the way the average person gets to experience this," she said in an interview on TSN 690 radio, though in her opinion, they should.

"I was horrified at first when it went public and that it was on Twitter, and then quickly realized how supportive everyone was being, and that was something that was really comforting to me," she said.

"I think that's something that a lot of survivors of conjugal violence or survivors of any sort of trauma [should have] -- you know, it's nice to be able to log on to Twitter and see that someone's talking about, you know, how they hope you're okay and things like that."

Instead, now that she works as a co-ordinator for a peer-support group for other victims of violence at home, she knows all too well that that's not usually the case.

Kaufman is the sister of Montreal local radio host Dave Kaufman, of CJAD 800, and she comes from a family of sports fans. That's how she met Keri, she said in the interview.

After Keri was arrested and charged, not only did the public condemn him, but all the top-tier outlets that had published his work cut ties. For her, it meant a lot.

"A lot of people face this by themselves, without anyone to help them and without a brother to move into their house and all of these things," Kaufman said.

"They still find ways out. But if society stopped accepting these people, and abusers received the same treatment that Jonah received, this might finally stop."

'THERE IS NO TYPE'

Kaufman said that the whirlwind nightmare, which escalated quickly, taught her a lot, and she wants to pass on some of those lessons.

"I certainly never thought it could happen to me and had the same reaction as [many] people, which is 'why did she stay,' when I heard about other cases," she explained.

Keri didn't seem the type, she said, but "there is no type." Conjugal violence is not about someone losing their temper but about control, she said.

"The guy that gets into the fight at the bar is not generally the guy that's abusing people," she said.

"These people are really charming. This is not an anger management issue."

Keri "was not fighting with people at work. He did not have road rage. He was not getting into fights at baseball games. This was reserved for people in the home."

There were a few smaller signs -- such as Keri intervening in a low-key argument she had, to "handle" it for her unnecessarily -- but over time, a relationship that seemed "great" at first turned strange, then violent.

"Slowly... he insisted on becoming my entire world and didn't want me to have a life without him and didn't want to have a life without me," she said.

"My thinking, and a lot of people in my situation's thinking, is that there must be something wrong: 'They love me, they would never do this. I have to get them as much help as I can,'" she recalled.

"So I spent a good chunk of time taking him to psychologists and psychiatrists, trying to understand what was going on, thinking that something could stop it."

But she couldn't stop it, she said, and after she became pregnant, within a few weeks things got much worse.

"From that point on, he vacillated between the nicest, most helpful partner in the world, and the most terrifying person I've ever spent time with," she said.

At the time, she tried to record his actions and also kept a journal of the attacks. She now encourages other people in the same situation to keep the same kind of records.

"Get as much evidence as you can, because as the judge [in her case] said, if I didn't have it, I probably would not have been believed," she said.

They showed Keri slapping, biting, pulling her hair, and even head-butting her once so hard that it broke her nose. He also threatened to kill her multiple times and threatened to kill people close to her.

In public, he would seem completely normal and calm, she said -- "it can be turned on and off in in a second. Which a normal person can't do... and it was horrifying."

When she went to his family, "I was told, sort of, that he was sick, don't ruin his career," she remembered.

But support came from other quarters, including from strangers who had simply spoken publicly about what they'd been through. Kaufman remembers scouring the internet for first-person accounts of conjugal violence.

"Just like, 'Is there anyone that I can relate to?'" she remembers. That also convinced her of the importance of doing the same "if given the opportunity."

'IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT TO MAKE PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE'

Keri pleaded guilty and was given a 21-month sentence, which to Kaufman "is still not long enough for attempting to kill somebody, which is what effectively happened," she said.

But she also considers herself incredibly lucky that he was sentenced to jail time and that she had an "educated" judge who already understood, and was willing to learn more about, intimate-partner violence.

In many cases, the assailant goes free and the victim can "end up being destroyed," she said.

Just recently, in court for her peer-support work, she listened to a Quebec judge "call the victim provocative and give the person an absolute discharge because he worked in the health-care industry, and he felt that it wouldn't be fair to ruin his career," she said.

"You can have a judge who was an aviation lawyer who understands absolutely nothing about the dynamics of conjugal violence."

Doing the peer support work recently gave Kaufman the best kind of chance to try to pass along some of the support she got.

A woman who called the crisis line, whose call Kaufman answered, described horrifying violence at home and "she was wondering if she should go to the police," Kaufman said.

But the woman, not knowing who she was talking to, said that "when she thinks about it, she wonders what happened to [Jonah Keri's ex-wife] -- is she in a mental institution, did she lose custody of her child and can she function?" Kaufman said.

"It was really cool to, at the end of it, be like 'by the way, you're speaking to the person who survived Jonah Keri and my life is not ruined. I'm really happy and I love my work and I'm doing really well,'" she said.

But it's perhaps even more important for others, people without that experience, to keep listening too, she said.

"As uncomfortable as this all used to make me, and I might have changed the channel, it's really important to make people uncomfortable when it comes to things like this," she said, especially with "women being murdered in our city at the rate that they are."

The organization and crisis line that Kaufman now works with can be reached at 514-489-1110.

The full interview can be heard here.