Though the movie premiere had taken place more than six months prior to my finding the video, Aeron had never brought it to my attention—he’d never once mentioned dropping my son off at his friend’s house and taking two women on a date. Of course not. His disrespect was blatant and public and my complacency was stifling. Throughout my relationship with Aeron, he always knew about my ongoing dealings with Wayne and accepted it. I was always honest with him about Wayne and never tried to hide my relationship with him. That was one of the reasons I thought Aeron was right for me; he didn’t seem to want to change me. Everyone knew about my relationship with Wayne, as it made for interesting magazine copy. Wayne and I spoke about our love affair often in interviews and made no efforts to hide it when traveling together. Even though Aeron professed to be advanced enough to stomach being the underachieving boyfriend to a successful woman with an ultrasuccessful lover, obviously he wasn’t as equipped as he claimed.
I called Aeron and confronted him with the information. “Why am I looking at footage of you and two women going to this premiere while I was on tour last year?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he huffed.
“The Why Did I Get Married premiere! And where was my son?”
“I took him to my friend’s house! What the fuck is the problem?”
“What friend? Where? We didn’t have a conversation about any of this! Why would you drop my kid off at some random person’s house!”
“It wasn’t a random person, it was my friend, and I shouldn’t have to call you and get your permission about what to do with Naiim when he’s in my care!”
The truth was, our relationship was a power struggle.
Aeron resented everything about me, especially my authority. I was the breadwinner. Around the house, all decisions had to go through me and he couldn’t stand not being in control or feeling like a man. He was a loser and a has-been and my success only irritated him by reiterating that. He wished he were the one on tour, being paid to do what he loved. He resented my growing recognition and never missed an opportunity to ruin any positive experience in my life and career. This incident, taking two women out on a date while I was on tour, was no different. For me, a man who couldn’t be relied upon to pay his fair share of household expenses could never be the head. He would never be a man to me. A man just doesn’t seem to be a man when there is a woman taking care of him. Subconsciously, he would always be my houseboy, the guy who cooked and cleaned and unclogged the drains. In the beginning, Aeron showed me he was okay with this role and was very good at it, but now, with his true demeanor on display, he was rebelling against this role and against me.
The only way Aeron could fight against his inability to gain or earn my respect was to use his fists. He exacted his strength through the use of brute force and bullying. He needed to belittle and diminish me at every turn in order to make himself feel authoritative. He tapped into my fear, unable to earn my respect, and it was upon that fear that our entire relationship was based. Wayne offered me one thing, but Aeron knew the concept and public appearance of having a family outweighed being one of many lovers to some rapper. So, he dangled the possibility of having a functioning family just out of my reach and I was always chasing it.
After confronting him with the video proof, Aeron didn’t come home that night or any night that week. Incidences like this, especially those involving other women, were plenty—too many to recount as the tug-of-war between us waged on.
My nerves were wrecked.
Since being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder back in 2006, I had learned to control my nervous condition with prescription drugs, namely Xanax. Eventually, I hoped to wean myself off the drug completely and rely only on breathing and mind-over-matter techniques. I didn’t take the medication often, at first. I used it only during uncontrollable panic attacks and unnerving situations like traveling. A thirty-day supply would last me ninety days or more.
But that was before Aeron.
Now, with the constant abuse and abandonment and with my desperate need to make this mess into a functioning, normal family, I began taking the Xanax to keep sane, washing them down with alcohol. I would begin my mornings with a pill and a couple beers and every two hours, the same, from morning until night. I sat in my office, writing, and went about my daily household responsibilities, subdued. I was doing the best I could to remain calm, rational, and focused while meeting my contractual obligations to my publisher and trying not to argue with Aeron about whichever woman he was seeing or the number of days he’d gone missing that week. I just didn’t want to make things worse, so I self-medicated often.
It didn’t take long for a serious drug and alcohol addiction to form. My thirty-day supplies were lasting just over a week, so I began buying the drug from street dealers. But Aeron never noticed. He was never present, and now, neither was I. I dropped weight at an alarming rate and often went a full week without eating or drinking anything except alcohol. I turned down invitations to award shows, parties, and events and even missed a portion of my book tour, to my publisher’s horror, because of the issues at home and my ghastly physical condition.
My life was unraveling and I didn’t know how to stop the fray.
Aeron was constantly making promises he had no intention of keeping, disappointing me over and over again. But Aeron and I weren’t the only ones in this relationship. My son, Naiim, was always watching and he was seeing his mother deteriorate right before his eyes. When I was sad, he was sad, and though I tried to comfort him and reassure him that everything was okay, he knew nothing was. Still, he tried to make it work because I tried to make it work, and every time Aeron came home, Naiim would enjoy their brief times together. He would look forward to the visits, which they called Man Time, an experience that, since there were no other men in his life, Naiim never had before. In retrospect, I gave my son my disease. He was growing accustomed to the abuse I was taking, but also longed for a sense of family and counted his time with Aeron as acts of kindness.
So, one day in mid-2008, when Aeron called and promised Naiim he’d be home that night for some much-needed Man Time, my son prepared by setting up his gaming console and sitting on the edge of his bed—waiting. Hours passed. I called Aeron to see what was keeping him but he ignored my calls and subsequent text messages. It was after 10 PM when my son finally gave up waiting, turned off his bedroom lights, and crawled under the covers. I tucked him in and tried to make light of the situation, explaining that Aeron was caught up at work and would make it up to him. Naiim nodded his head and closed his eyes. I walked out of my son’s room, heartbroken, plopped into my bed, and began texting Aeron, again. From the other side of the wall, I heard my son wailing.
His heart was broken, too.
I ran into his room, scooped my son from his mattress, and held him, crying with him. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry I did this to you,” I mumbled through my tears. Watching my son fall apart was the last straw for me, that day. I held him until he fell asleep, laid him back onto his pillow, and tiptoed out of his room, closing the door behind me. I knew where Aeron was; he was just a few minutes down the road at a recording studio, trying to live out his dream of being a recording star and failing horribly at it. Though his love of music was genuine, recording was a hobby that garnered him no income and I begged him to treat it as such—to stop putting music before everything else in his life, especially his family.
He hadn’t been home in weeks and made a habit of leaving Jonah with his mother or sister or even taking the small child to studio sessions. A recording studio without drugs and alcohol is hard to imagine. He was only concerned with himself, and now the full weight of that and of my unfortunate decision to be with him was more evident to me than ever. I got dressed, grabbed my car keys, and headed to the recording studio to confront Aeron—and retrieve the twenty-five-thousand-dollar sapphire and diamond ring I’d given him. At this stage in our relationship, we were already calling one another husband and wife and I bought the rings to match the fantasy. Naturally, he took the jewels seriously but not the relationship.
Eight minutes later, I pulled into the driveway of the studio. There was a man standing outside the building, talking on the phone. As he saw me pull up, he ran inside to fetch Aeron. A few moments later, Aeron emerged and walked right past my car and toward his, which was parked tandem with a wall in front of it and another vehicle behind it.
“Give me back my ring, Aeron!” I yelled as I hopped out of my SUV and headed toward him. “Naiim waited for you all fucking day and you didn’t show up for him!”
“I’m working, Karrine. Leave me alone!” he shouted back, as he unlocked his car door and slipped into the driver’s seat.
“Give me back my ring, Aeron! We are over!”
“Fuck you! I’m not giving you shit!” Aeron closed the car door and started his car. I stood behind the vehicle, my arms folded, preventing him from backing up far enough to pull out. I was determined to retrieve the pricey ring before leaving the studio and Aeron. “Move!” he yelled out the window.
“I just want the ring! Give me my fucking ring!” I stood there in defiance as Aeron put his car in reverse and began inching back, threatening to pin me between his back bumper and the front bumper of the car behind his. I banged on the trunk of his car. “Stop! Stop! Just give me the ring, Aeron!”
A man came out from inside the studio and jumped into the car behind me, pulling out of the driveway and into the usually busy street just beyond it, before driving off. It was obvious Aeron had called him out to remove the car so he could make his escape. With the other vehicle gone, Aeron mashed on the gas and then the brake, over and over again. I banged on the trunk of the car, begging him to stop backing up and hand me the ring. But, still, he refused to do either. I took steps backward toward the street as he continued to back up, watching behind me as cars flew by the building. With one last mash of the gas, Aeron’s car pushed me backward, just inches from the curb and a car speeding by. Instinctively, I hopped out of the road and onto the back bumper and hood of Aeron’s car in order to not be hit by a passing vehicle. Aeron continued to back up into the street as I pounded on the trunk, begging him to pull back in and out of traffic. He refused. So, as I looked behind me and saw oncoming cars temporarily halted by a nearby stoplight, I hopped off and continued screaming at Aeron for my ring. He continued to ignore me, put his car in drive, and sped off, running over my foot.
And, with that, Aeron was gone.
A few days after the incident at the recording studio, police officers came to my home to serve me with a court summons. Aeron was petitioning for a restraining order against me. After everything he did to me—after the beatings and choking, after the times he literally hawked spit into my face, called me horrible names, after he degraded me, hurt my son, and after I saved his ass with the City Attorney, this is what he did.
But I didn’t care.
I was happy to accept the summons and just as happy to not show up in court to dignify yet another attempt on his part to make me look like the bad or crazy one. Over the span of our relationship, while living with me, happily spending my money, brutally beating me, and emotionally damaging my son and me, Aeron never missed an opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what a horrible person I was. Several times, I received phone calls from magazine editors wanting my side of the story after Aeron took part in an interview, bashing me—all while still living with me. When confronted, Aeron always claimed to be misquoted or coerced in some way. He wasn’t one to take responsibility for anything he did. It became obvious to me that Aeron was as focused on ruining me publicly as he was on doing so privately.
It was around this time that I requested copies of the injury report from my birthday in 2007, the night he choked me unconscious, as well as the photographic evidence of the attack. After being given the runaround when calling the Van Nuys police department, I was finally allowed instructions on how to gain access to the files, which had been moved to another precinct for some unexplained reason. Then, once I got my hands on the report, I was told that the Polaroid photos of my bloody face and injured body had been destroyed just thirty days after the incident. Though the injury report, with its diagram of my wounds, cuts, and scratches, was enough evidence, the photos from that night, the imagery of my battered face and bruised neck, would have been so much stronger. I wanted to have all the proof possible and to one day be able to show someone what Aeron had been doing to me. Alas, the report was all that was left and it would just have to be good enough.
Everywhere I went, people were protecting Aeron and I was being blamed for the abuse I endured—just as he wanted. He resented everything about me and would have killed me before he would have ever sung my praises or let anyone else do so. He clung desperately to his church-boy persona and deflected his deviance onto me. The world never heard about the things I learned about Aeron over the years, as I remained silent. But everyone heard from him as he berated me in public, beat me in private, and continued using me and depleting my finances.
Broken, I stayed through it all.
But something happened to me that night, the night I saw my son cry. I didn’t love myself enough to leave Aeron, and over time my incessant need to be part of a family, any family, wore on my son as much as it did on me. Finally, I reached the end of my tether for the time being and was relieved to see Aeron go. God knows I would have never left him; he had to be the one who walked away from our tumultuous, abusive relationship. But when he did, I had no issues with moving forward quickly.
It took exactly seven days for me to begin dating someone else, and though he was nothing like Aeron, the new man in my life would be very similar to Wayne. In fact, they were more than similar; they were friends.