Jan. 6, 2026
102-From Fairytale to Coercive Control: Grooming & Domestic Violence with Becca
In this episode of 1 in 3, Ingrid sits down with Becca to unpack how reconnecting with someone from her past quickly escalated into coercive control, domestic violence, and physical abuse—and ultimately led to the devastating discovery of grooming and sexual assault against her child.
Becca walks us through the timeline in clear, unflinching detail: intense love-bombing and a rushed marriage, early red flags during pregnancy, isolation and alcohol-fueled conflict during COVID, and the shift from gaslighting to physical violence. Everything changes when her child discloses the abuse—forcing Becca to make urgent decisions to protect her children and involve law enforcement.
From there, we go inside the criminal justice process, breaking down what survivors rarely hear explained: investigation barriers like hospital privacy laws and unstable housing, how missed leads can stall cases, and how a single Facebook message helped police locate the suspect. Becca explains the long months of court delays, mental health evaluations, a public defender change, and what a tier three sex offender designation and no-contact orders mean for long-term safety.
Beyond the courtroom, this conversation focuses on healing and prevention—how to recognize coercive control early, why abuse often escalates during pregnancy, and what grooming can look like when it hides behind “friendship.” Becca also shares why she’s working to terminate parental rights, how therapy is helping her children regain confidence, and the truth every survivor needs to hear:
It’s not your fault.
If any part of this story mirrors your own, you are not alone.
Subscribe, share this episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help more survivors find the language—and courage—to act.
1 in 3 is intended for mature audiences. Episodes contain explicit content and may be triggering to some.
If you are in the United States and need help right now, call the national domestic violence hotline at 800-799-7233 or text the word “start” to 88788.
Contact 1 in 3:
- Send your emails to 1in3podcast@gmail.com
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- Check out the website https://www.1in3podcast.com/
Thank you for listening!
Cover art by Laura Swift Dahlke
Music by Tim Crowe
00:00 - Framing Abuse And Introducing Becca
01:30 - Becca’s Background And Career Path
03:28 - Reconnecting With A Teenage Boyfriend
05:43 - Marriage, Pregnancy, And Early Red Flags
08:58 - Escalation During COVID And Financial Stress
11:53 - From Gaslighting To Physical Violence
14:23 - Protecting The Kids And The First Police Call
16:58 - Grooming Revealed And The Night Of Assault
19:33 - Reporting, Investigation, And Finding The Suspect
22:23 - Court Delays, Plea Deal, And Sentencing
25:03 - Safety Orders, Parental Rights, And Healing
26:53 - Lessons, Validation, And Closing Support
WEBVTT
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Hi, Warriors.
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Welcome to One in Three.
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I'm your host, Ingrid.
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Abuse doesn't happen because of who the victim is.
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Abusers abuse because that's what they do.
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It's far too easy to place the blame on the victim when, in reality, anyone in an abuser's path can be harmed.
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My guest today, Becca, is here to bravely share her story with the sole intention of helping others who may be suffering in silence.
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Here's Becca.
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Hi, Becca.
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Thank you so much for joining me today, and welcome to One and Three.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for having me.
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I really appreciate you letting me share my story.
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Just kind of a little background about me.
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I am a mother of three.
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I have two teenagers and a six-year-old.
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I am, I work as an accounting professional.
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That's something that I actually got away from for a little while because of what happened to me.
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But I did recently this past June get back into it.
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So that's been really nice.
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Otherwise, I just like I'm really into podcasts, um, music.
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I love all kinds of music.
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Um, always listening to something in the car.
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So um I think I'm pretty, you know, like standard mom and professional.
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Yeah.
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Do you have a favorite genre of music?
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Um not really.
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I mean, I'd say like a lot of times I gravitate towards like folk indie kind of sounds.
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Um, but recently I've been listening to a lot of rap and hip hop, which is not my usual thing.
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Yeah.
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Um, but it's been a lot of fun.
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So yeah, my my playlist, my kids rarely listen to my playlist.
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We usually have to listen to theirs, but it has the weirdest range of the same kind of thing, like folk.
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I have some hip hop, some 90s music, and I think Ozzy Osborne is even in there.
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So it's like it's all over the place.
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So I'm always interested to hear what people are listening to.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So you wanted to come on today to share your story because there are so many people out there that even if it's not the exact same story, it's a very similar path that so many of us have have gone down.
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So uh sharing your story helps kind of I think people recognize what they're going through and to understand that uh this isn't just an individual thing that happens, that it happens to quite a few people.
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So, do you want to go ahead and get started?
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Um, yeah.
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So I I um I started dating um someone when I was a teenager.
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I was um a senior in high school, and it was kind of like the first love kind of thing, you know, really intense.
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Um, but you're just kind of stupid teens, right?
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Um and that kind of it was a really short-lived relationship, just kind of the typical first love, really intense, but really quick.
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Um, and then I kind of I lost touch with him a little bit for a couple years.
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Um, but he was always kind of like once in a while he'd reach out and say, hey, um, especially because now we have, you know, Facebook and all that.
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So everyone, you know, people don't really stay in the past the way that they used to.
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Um, but I did move on.
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Um, I met someone, um, got married, had my two older kids um settled down.
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Um, but that didn't work out.
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I did get divorced from my first husband in 2015 when our kids were um five and three.
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Um so then I was a single mom for a while, just um dealing with that with the kids um on my own, kind of figuring out the whole custody thing between um my first husband and I.
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And I was working, I was doing freelance writing um at the time.
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I would write website content mostly and like blog posts for small businesses, things like that, um, because I had gone to college for accounting, but I graduated in 2009, so it was a really bad economy, and I was pregnant with my first daughter at the time, so I didn't get a job in accounting, so I kind of went off in a different direction and did the freelance writing for a while, which worked really well when my kids were little because it was on my own schedule and it was from home.
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Um, but I decided after I got divorced from my first husband that I wanted to go to grad school um for an MBA so that I could get into accounting because I did really enjoy it.
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It just never happened.
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Um, the timing didn't work out for me.
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So I went back to grad school and I worked as a graduate assistant.
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Um and I actually a friend of mine had a position.
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She worked in premium audit, which is kind of a niche, like no one's really heard of it unless you're in that industry.
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But it's basically auditing payroll records and like business operations for workers' comp and general liability policies.
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So temp position that my friend had available that she said, Hey, I think this would be a good fit for you.
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And I started in premium audit then and found out that I really love it.
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So I got I kind of started my career from there.
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Um so that was in late 2015 and then 2016.
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I got a job as an auditor.
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I was just being doing admin work in premium audit until then.
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And that kind of launched my career.
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And I was I was in a relationship at the time.
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I did have like a serious boyfriend, um, but it was like we weren't really on the same page.
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He was kind of he didn't have like the same kind of career aspirations as I did, and it was kind of um more into like kid stuff, and I was, you know, like I had kids and and I was you know focused on them.
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Um, so that relationship didn't work out, but that was um, so that was 2017 that that relationship ended, and at that time, um my ex-boyfriend from when I was a teenager um reached out to me and we started talking.
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And at the time he was living in Seattle, and I was in Pennsylvania, so it was just kind of long distance chatting at that point.
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Um but he really like kind of pursued me and made me feel like he was really uh interested in in starting a relationship with me.
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So I guess just based on like those teenage feelings kind of being brought back up, things escalated really quickly.
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Like we reconnected in July of 2017, and then he moved to Pennsylvania in September, and we got married in April of 2018.
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Um, so at first things seemed really great, and I knew him, you know.
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I had so this was 2017 now, and our relationship when we were teenagers was 2003.
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Um, so I knew him for a long time.
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I thought I knew him pretty well.
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At one point, we had been regularly talking.
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We hadn't seen each other since 2003, but we were regularly talking.
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Like after I um I left my first husband, we chatted a lot, but as friends, and we kind of considered each other really close friends, sometimes called it best friends.
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So I thought I knew him really well, so I felt comfortable moving quickly because I felt like we kind of get into this.
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Um how do I want to say this?
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We kind of are programmed to believe that like the fairy tale, you know what I mean?
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Like that that's um, you know, there's gonna be a happily ever after.
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So when we reconnected, I thought, oh, this is my chance, like this is gonna be this great love story because yeah, we were we were kids in love and now we reconnected after all these years.
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It's like a Hallmark movie.
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Yeah, yeah.
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It really felt like like something good was happening.
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So I guess in the beginning, of course, everything was great.
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Um, things don't start out bad, obviously.
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If they did, we we wouldn't start them in the first place.
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Um, so there were some disagreements we would have.
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Sometimes we would fight about like because when we were teenagers, he had broken up with me.
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So I would be like, well, obviously he never cared about me.
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Because you, you know, like there were these kind of immature fights based on our teenage feelings.
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Um but for the most part it was good, like he kind of presented it as wanting to make up for lost time and like he was gonna do all these nice things for me.
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And he he did um he did kind of I don't know, like in retrospect, I realized that he was doing it on purpose to make me think that that things were good and that he was changing and and trying to make up for lost time and and trying to make it up to me that he had broken up with me, that kind of thing.
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Um like he he did a really he proposed to me on my birthday in 2018, and it was very like um emotional and heartfelt, and like he he practiced the words and everything, um, and got me like the exact ring that I wanted.
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Um, and I thought it was gonna be really good.
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My my girls were our flower girls at our wedding.
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It was really cute.
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They really took to him and they started, you know, like they have their dad is very much a part of their lives, so they have a dad, but they still they wanted to call him dad.
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Um so I thought things were really good.
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And for the first couple years, I would say 2018 was good.
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2019, we decided that we wanted to have a baby, so we started trying for a baby, and um that did take more time.
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My my older two girls, I didn't have to try to have them, so this like the whole having to, you know, like keep calendars and um try for months and months, that was different for me, but it took about six months, and then in January, that was actually late 2019 that we started.
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January of 2019 is when I found out I was at the end of January that I was pregnant with my youngest.
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Um and things started changing when I got pregnant.
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Um it just seemed like just little things, you know, like you don't notice it right away.
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But for example, I think the first time I really started noticing things changing and him not being as nice or maybe getting into like gaslighting territory or um guilting me, things like that, is we decided to go, we hadn't had a honeymoon.
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Um, so we decided to go on a baby moon, and we went to Paris in April of 2019.
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And it was it was like right after because all of my pregnancies, I have like an eight-week span where I'm just sick all the time, towards the beginning in the first trimester.
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And the Paris trip was right after the first trimester.
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So I was just starting to feel good again.
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Um and we went and I was the only one working at the time, which was very typical.
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I was usually the only one working.
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He he had jobs, but didn't keep jobs.
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There would be a lot of jumping around.
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Um, so we were married, so obviously it was our money, but I had budgeted the trip because we we weren't rich.
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So I would, you know, I had this is the amount of spending money we had, and I got the Euros, so we had the spending money on us.
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And anytime we went to a store, he would just spend a whole bunch of money, and it would be on things like beer, like things that like I obviously wasn't drinking, I was pregnant, so it was just things like that that were expensive and unnecessary.
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And then I voiced concern about it because I was like, you know, like I want to have a good time, but let's, you know, we need to be a little bit reasonable about our spending because we're here for a week.
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We don't want to run out of money halfway through.
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And he got really upset with me and kind of said, Well, you're ruining my good time.
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I'm trying to have a good time here, and and you're ruining it.
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And I was just like, I didn't really know what to say, so I let it go.
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But that was the first time I was like, that was kind of a weird thing that happened.
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I don't really understand why he reacted that way when I was just voicing a concern.
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I wasn't even because I like to give people like the benefit of the doubt.
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So I was just kind of saying, hey, remember, we have a budget, just so you know, let's rein it in a little bit.
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And he just kind of blew up on me.
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And I didn't know what to do with that.
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So we just kind of trudged through the week, but things were weird between us after that.
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And there was another incident on that trip when we went to Versailles, and it's very crowded.
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And I was pregnant, and I would, you know, I was just getting over the morning sickness part of the pregnancy, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the crowds there.
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So I was just kind of trying to stand off to the side and catch my breath.
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Um, and I get overwhelmed in crowds anyway, so it was like extra stressful.
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And he got angry at me for just standing over to the side because I wasn't like going with the flow of the other tourists, and I was holding him back from getting to see things in the palace.
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Uh, it was just a very odd reaction because like your pregnant wife is feeling overwhelmed and a little bit ill.
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Maybe you should be concerned, not angry, you know?
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Right, right.
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Yeah.
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So those were kind of just the first little things that happened that I I kind of thought, what what's going on here?
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This is kind of weird.
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Um, and I will say the other thing during my pregnancy that was concerning was he did not have a driver's license.
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Um, and he chose not to get a driver's license while I was pregnant.
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So when I went into labor at two o'clock in the morning, oh no, we had to call a lift.
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So a lift had to take me to the hospital.
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And since it was my third, um, my labor was really fast.
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So I basically got to the hospital and had her about 20 minutes later.
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And because he didn't drive, he missed the birth of his daughter.
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Um, so that was oh because he was home with the other two?
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Or okay, okay.
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Yeah, so he had to be so because it was the middle of the night, so we did call my parents to come watch the kids, but it happened everything happened so fast that they didn't get there in time.
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Oh, to begin a lift by yourself in the middle of the night in labor, how awful.
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Yeah, yeah, it was a really bad experience.
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Um yeah, so I I always kind of gave him like I I know he does have a lot of like anxiety and things like that.
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So I kind of felt like, well, maybe he just can't drive.
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Maybe it's too, maybe he's too anxious about it.
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Um but after uh the end of our relationship, he got his license right away and started door dashing.
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So um I don't that was the issue.
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I think it was just not having the um concern or care for me, or I don't know, because he missed the birth of his child too.
00:19:17.900 --> 00:19:23.420
So you would think like that part of it would make him like compel him to get his license.
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Yeah, maybe it was some weird control thing, like you're not you can't go anywhere without making sure he doesn't need to go somewhere or I don't know, weird.
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I thought maybe I thought maybe he like legally couldn't have his driver's license or something, but it was just his choice.
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Yeah, there was, um, so he did have like so he did have his license in he's from California originally, and then he lived in Seattle.
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Um, so he did have his license out there and he did lose it for um, I don't remember some stupid reason, but so he was going through, like he would call because the license was suspended in two states, because it was suspended in California and Washington, he had to go through one and then get it cleared up there before the other one would consider clearing it up on their end.
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So he just kind of gave up.
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But then once our relationship ended, he didn't have a problem going through those steps.
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So of course not, yeah.
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Yep.
00:20:35.579 --> 00:20:45.180
So that was that was kind of the things that happened during my pregnancy that gave me some inklings that maybe things were not good.
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Um and then so my youngest daughter was born in October of 2019.
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So I don't I don't really remember how I think that that, like the winter after that, and this well, not the spring, because that was 2020, but the winter was good.
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Um, you know, we were just focused on the baby and and obviously really busy with her.
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So that was okay.
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He was working at that time.
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He actually had a decent job at that time, um, but he had just started there.
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And then when COVID hit and everything shut down, he was laid off and then he stayed home because I still worked my I didn't have to go in.
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I was working from home, but I still had to work.
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And he we decided since he got laid off he would watch the kids because the older kids were doing school from home, of course.
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So he was just kind of in charge of the kids at that time.
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And I don't know, I don't know if the stress of that was just really triggering to him, if it was the isolation from COVID, just the I mean, obviously it was hard for everyone's mental health.
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We all struggled, but it seemed like it just kind of made him snap, like something in him snapped.
00:22:21.180 --> 00:22:35.339
He started drinking, he started drinking a lot, and he was really mean when he would drink and he would pick fights, and you couldn't walk away from a fight with him.
00:22:35.740 --> 00:22:41.660
If there was a fight and I said, I need space, I can't, this is not going anywhere.
00:22:41.819 --> 00:22:48.220
We need to come back in a you know, in half an hour once we cool down, that was not an option.
00:22:48.539 --> 00:22:54.380
If I tried to go to another room to get away from him so we could cool down, he would just follow me.
00:22:54.859 --> 00:22:59.740
And if I refused to talk to him, he would start to cry.
00:23:00.700 --> 00:23:04.380
So I I couldn't stop a fight.
00:23:04.859 --> 00:23:08.940
It was not an option once we started a fight.
00:23:09.019 --> 00:23:10.380
It had to just continue.
00:23:10.460 --> 00:23:19.740
And it would never, it wouldn't really resolve, it would just escalate, you know, like we weren't talking, we weren't having a conversation where we could be adults and figure things out.
00:23:19.980 --> 00:23:23.180
We were just fighting, we were just yelling at each other.
00:23:23.500 --> 00:23:26.779
So that got really difficult.
00:23:26.940 --> 00:23:38.059
Um, when he when his drinking got really bad during COVID, and we started fighting a lot, and there were the fights um where I I couldn't step away.
00:23:38.299 --> 00:23:40.940
I started drinking a lot too to cope.
00:23:41.339 --> 00:23:44.700
Um so it was just a really bad situation.
00:23:45.579 --> 00:23:51.180
Um and during all that, so that was um when COVID started.
00:23:51.339 --> 00:24:03.900
During all that, I changed jobs, partially because he wasn't working and I had an opportunity to take a job that would it would be a significant pay raise.
00:24:04.140 --> 00:24:07.819
Um, so I did decide to take that new job.
00:24:07.900 --> 00:24:14.940
And it was the same kind of thing that I was doing before, but it was kind of a more like a step up.
00:24:15.099 --> 00:24:17.660
It was more intense, longer hours.
00:24:18.059 --> 00:24:25.099
Um, I was working in compliance before, and then I I kind of got into the commercial side of it.
00:24:25.180 --> 00:24:30.619
So I had like customer interactions that I wasn't used to, which is stressful for me too.
00:24:30.940 --> 00:24:39.819
So I got in that high stress job, making more money, um, and we decided to buy a house.
00:24:40.380 --> 00:24:44.059
Um, so because we weren't stressed enough at that time.
00:24:44.380 --> 00:25:21.500
I was gonna say, just we bought a house in October of 2020, is when we closed on the house and we moved um right at the beginning of October in 2020, which was really hard for the kids too, because they were already doing COVID schooling and couldn't see their friends, and now we're moving school districts to a new school where they didn't know anyone, and they started um they started it was all still all um virtual schooling, so they didn't really get to meet anyone.
00:25:21.660 --> 00:25:23.500
Um, and that was difficult.
00:25:23.660 --> 00:25:32.140
And and my husband wasn't working at the time, he he was still not working, so it was just me with all the bills and a mortgage.
00:25:32.380 --> 00:25:36.140
So um it didn't help, obviously.
00:25:36.779 --> 00:25:46.460
Yeah, yeah, it made things worse, and that is really when things started to get bad.
00:25:46.859 --> 00:25:50.299
I mean, they were already bad, but when they got really bad.
00:25:50.539 --> 00:25:57.180
Um so October 2020, we moved in here.
00:25:58.220 --> 00:26:13.259
Um between, I would say between October of 2020 and November of 2021, it was a lot of those arguments where I couldn't get away.
00:26:13.579 --> 00:26:16.940
But at that point it was still all verbal.
00:26:17.339 --> 00:26:37.099
Um there was a lot of, I will say it was kind of I I guess I would say emotional too, because I there were a lot of times when I felt crazy because I would say I didn't say that, I said this, and he would say, No, you didn't.
00:26:37.339 --> 00:26:47.819
And I just I thought I okay, I must have forgotten, you know, like I I I couldn't understand why someone would say that if that wasn't true.
00:26:47.980 --> 00:26:54.140
So I thought, oh, I must have forgotten, or I must have, and uh we were we were having issues with drinking too.
00:26:54.220 --> 00:27:00.619
So I was like, did I drink too much and forgot what I said, or yeah, and stress, probably not sleeping well either.
00:27:00.779 --> 00:27:01.259
Yeah.
00:27:03.099 --> 00:27:06.779
So that was kind of the way it went for that year.
00:27:06.940 --> 00:27:25.500
The first year that we were in this house was a lot of fighting, some drinking, a lot of gaslighting, where I didn't say that, or you didn't say that, or that wasn't what you meant, or a lot of times um calling out my tone, even though I wasn't upset.
00:27:25.660 --> 00:27:32.140
Like he would say, Well, you sound you sound mad, or don't use that tone with me.
00:27:32.299 --> 00:27:38.779
And I'm like, I'm not using a tone, I'm talking normally, I don't really understand what's happening.
00:27:39.099 --> 00:27:48.299
Um but after that first year, that's when things escalated to physical abuse.
00:27:49.339 --> 00:27:55.819
Um oh, I should actually, I forgot something really important.
00:27:56.299 --> 00:27:59.579
Um, so we moved here in October 2020.
00:27:59.819 --> 00:28:08.059
Um he was having a lot of issues with his mental health at that point.
00:28:08.859 --> 00:28:24.059
And one of the things that he started doing was on more than one occasion, I think not regularly, but on more than one occasion, probably two or three times, he had slapped my older daughters.
00:28:24.380 --> 00:28:27.420
And I told him he can't do that, it's not okay.
00:28:27.579 --> 00:28:30.299
And they actually talked to my parents about it too.
00:28:30.380 --> 00:28:36.539
Like when they went and slept over, and my parents came over and said to him, Don't lay hands on my grandchildren again.
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