Episode 44: Michelle Horton, Author of Dear Sister

Miranda: Hello and welcome to Truth and Consequences, a podcast about trauma and its aftermath. We talk about what happens, what hurts, and what helps us heal. I’m your host, Miranda Pacchiana. I am a social worker, writer, and personal coach, and the creator of the website, The Second Wound. My guest today is Michelle Horton, author of the gripping and beautiful memoir, Dear Sister. To quote from the website description, Dear Sister is a breathtaking memoir about two sisters in a high profile case, Nikki Addimando, incarcerated for killing her abuser, and the author Michelle Horton, left in the devastating fallout to raise Nikki’s young children And to battle the criminal justice system.

But of course, Michelle, this summary only skims the surface of the saga that Nikki and your entire family have been through. The violence and abuse Nikki’s late partner inflicted on her, the criminalization of her survival that kept her locked up for seven years away from her young children, and the enormous effort you galvanized to free Nikki while caretaking her kids as well as your son and your ailing parents.

So first I just want to say welcome and thank you so much for taking the time out to talk with our audience. 

Michele: Yeah, I’m so happy to. Thank you. 

Miranda: So If it’s okay, I’d like to start by asking you to tell us about the story behind your book, as briefly or as extensively as you would like to, for those listeners who have never heard of Nikki Addimando or followed some of her story and don’t know where things stand today. 

Michele: Sure. So, the saga of this particular story starts in September 2017, and it was one of those moments where it’s like, there’s a before and there’s an after. And that happened when police knocked on my door and I opened it, and they told me my sister was at the police station. And, in the moment, it seemed like an eternity to figure out what was going on, but within hours, it became clear that my sister was, who is my little sister, she’s the kindest, person, she’s never been in trouble in her life…she killed someone who I knew very well, who I trusted, her partner of nine years. 

And her kids, who were two and four, were suddenly at my house and I had to get emergency custody and figure out what the hell was going on because nothing made sense in that moment. 

Miranda: Mmhmm. 

Michele: And I was brought into a circle of women who had been trying to get my sister to safety. They taught me not only what she was going through but what women just like Nikki go through every day in these highly lethal domestic violence situations. I had to confront all of the red flags I missed, all of the signs I misunderstood and, um, kind of put my own guilt and shame aside and figure out what the next step was to get her home.

And it was many, many steps. And it was, you know, a few steps forward, many steps backwards throughout the process. It took many years. And, I learned a lot about the legal system, about domestic violence, about our family’s patterns, um, childhood trauma from raising these very traumatized children, and ultimately the power of hope and resilience that we all are capable of.

Miranda: So do you mind going into some more detail about what led up to that day? And then we can talk about the legal struggle to get Nikki out. 

Michele: Yeah, so what led up to it in her life? 

Miranda: Mm hmm. Yeah. 

Michele: From what I learned from her therapist and a friend who, there have been a few friends who had seen signs and tried to help, but, you know, the victim has to be ready to leave. And there’s a lot of safety calculations. And by the time her friend Elizabeth came into the picture, I mean, she was in a really dire situation where, um, the violence escalated so significantly. 

With each pregnancy, the violence increased. She got pregnant very young, she was just out of college, it was like their first real serious relationship, and by the time they were living together she was pregnant, so, they didn’t know each other too too well prior to that. 

Miranda: Okay. And when a woman is pregnant, in addition to when she may make an attempt to leave, that does really raise the danger in a coercive control or domestic violence situation for that woman. 

Michele: Yeah, prior to this I didn’t know that the number one leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide, and that’s by their intimate partner. 

Miranda: So shocking. 

Michele: It didn’t make sense. to me, you think, like, well, there’s honeymoon periods in domestic violence relationships and I remember sitting with her therapist when her therapist was laying out the whole series of escalation and saying, I don’t understand why pregnancy, that is when the violence increased and she was the one who said, statistically, that is what happens.

It’s one of the warning signs, you know. There are these lethality assessments that were created by Dr. Jackie Campbell, and the assessment was given to Nikki twice, and she scored in the highest lethality both times, and one of those factors is, is she pregnant, because that increases lethality. It’s against common sense, but it, in a way, it also does make sense because the abuser doesn’t have control over the woman’s body.

Miranda: I’m also just putting myself in your position and imagining how you went from really having zero information about this and not being educated in these signs as most of us are not and going from that to not even knowing what was happening to Nikki at home to all of a sudden now you find out that she has taken the life of her partner really to save herself to not leave her children without a mother. And that was the only choice that she had, but here you were, getting this knock on your door and you didn’t even know about the whole lead up to it.

Michele: I think I thought prior to this that if someone was being abusive, you would know it because they would be out of control in other aspects of their life and they would be showing signs of violence and aggression, but I have since learned that’s often not the case. It’s the charismatic, very controlled people who present one way in public and then in private are very different.

Miranda: it’s such a key thing to know. 

Michele: yeah, so I think it was kind of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like you just don’t see the signs because they don’t behave that way in front of you. And that’s a tactic. 

Miranda: And you would think that your sister would confide in you, but that’s also not necessarily how it works at all. 

Michele: I was taught very, very quickly that this is typical, that victims will hide it from the people closest to them for a variety of reasons. and in the book, I do kind of poke at it with Nikki and we both kind of tug at the threads of, how didn’t I see and why didn’t I tell you and why didn’t I think you’d believe me? And am I not a safe person for you to tell me? 

And there are a lot of reasons, survival being one, that she didn’t want to leave him. She wanted the abuse to stop. She didn’t want to break up her family. She wanted it to get better and if she said it to me or to you know her closest friends, to family then it becomes real and we would have probably forced her, which is not the right thing to do, but to leave or to insert ourselves in a way that would not have been safe for her. 

And also, it’s not just the victims who are in danger, it’s anyone close to them who can be hurt, killed. And it’s another safety choice, is to not tell people because you don’t want them to get hurt.

Miranda: It also speaks to, and I’d love to hear you talk more about this, how Nikki did reach out for help. She did confide in certain people and the authorities knew this was documented. and that is one of the reasons that this story is so shocking, that Nikki really tried to do everything right, leading up to that moment, and the victimization that she experienced at home became re-victimization over and over and over by the system.

And I think that is what is one of the most outrageous parts of understanding this story. And unfortunately, she’s not unique at all. 

Michele: Yeah, the shooting happened in 2017. And if you rewind two years back to 2015, the violence escalated even more sharply during her second pregnancy, where partner Chris, was, um, violently sexually abusing her, filming it, and uploading it, potentially for profit. So now we’re in the realm of sex trafficking.

And, Nikki, which I talk about in the book, has a history of child sexual abuse, which is just like her core wound. So when I heard that somebody that I trusted was violating her in that way, which is her, like, biggest humiliation, shame part of her, and then uploading it for other people to see, I truly couldn’t think of a more cruel thing to do to her in particular.

Um, but that’s a very serious crime, and to the point where her therapist did get authorities involved, and a police officer was tracking the site, was taking screenshots, compiled a report, sent it to the district attorney, and said, I want to arrest this guy. And what it came down to every single time was Nikki has to consent to that. She has to sign a paper saying, yes, you can arrest him. And she was never willing to do that. 

First, because she didn’t want him to get arrested, she wanted him to stop, and it would expose a lot to the community that she was embarrassed about, and Chris always said, I will say it was consensual, I’ll paint you to be a slut, I’ll take your kids, she knew that was a very real possibility, what happens in family court, um, you know, abusers use family court as a tactic of abuse, and it 

Miranda: That is Absolutely. true. I can affirm that. The family courts are a mess, and they can be very discriminating against mothers. 

Michele: Very, which you wouldn’t think that’s the case, but it is, it’s shocking the things that I’ve seen since all of this has happened. 

Miranda: It is shocking. It needs reform very, very badly. 

Michele: Yeah. So she had a very real reason to want to keep it quiet. Her kids were at stake. and also she was scared that she would have him arrested, he would go away, he’d be released, and then she would be killed, which is also what happens.

So she had a very real reason to fear getting the police involved, but because she wouldn’t prosecute, they all just kind of sat back and, I guess, waited to see what would happen. You know, the police officer knew There was a legally registered gun in the house, registered to her abuser. there were very young children in the house, and there was escalating violence that was horrific, like, truly horrific, the videos that he was posting. 

And It’s a, a genre of Pornhub, these videos where people assume they’re consensual, but you’re really watching women get raped. And, um,

Miranda: absolutely true. There are thousands of them, and that is another area that we need serious reform in. I know there are a lot of people working on it, but people should be aware of this.

Michele: Yeah. So, the system knew about Nikki. They had records of her as a victim in two separate police departments. The district attorney knew. At the time, the bureau chief of the district attorney’s office was a man named Edward McLaughlin, who, fast forward two years later when the shooting happened, was now the judge who was presiding over the case. 

The district attorney’s office recused themselves. They didn’t have to give a reason why. We knew, the closest, people closest to us knew, they recused themselves because they knew she was a victim, they had evidence that she was a victim, and they didn’t act on that. So they couldn’t ethically prosecute. 

Miranda: So were they essentially covering their own butts?

Michele: I mean, that’s my assumption, the assumption of pretty much anyone who’s looked at the situation. Um, I can’t say for sure, but I can’t imagine any other reason. They just kind of backed away from the case instead of saying, Wow, what did we do wrong here? How can we do better in the future? How can we take accountability? They kind of washed their hands of it and just stepped away and handed it to a different county, Putnam County. 

And all of this, by the way, is just dragging out the timeline where my sister’s sitting in jail saying, I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s okay to save your own life. I mean, at the time she was highly traumatized and feeling a lot of guilt and everything.

But, you know, in the larger scope, it’s not a crime to save your own life. And she needed to be reunited with her incredibly young children who needed her. And each day that there’s this kind of political, like, what do we do? Are we gonna prosecute? Are we gonna pass it to another county? Now it’s passed to Putnam County. Oh, okay, we need to get our bearings. We need to do our own investigation, which takes months and months and months. All of this time, the children are separated from their mom. They haven’t even seen her face. It’s just trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma which is instigated and perpetuated by the system.

Miranda: Exactly. And you illustrate that really well in your book. It’s just so poignant and in some places just hard to read when you describe the responses of little Ben and little Faye and them, missing their mother so much. They’ve been through a trauma as well. They’ve had all of this upheaval and loss at once. 

You are stepping up and doing your very best. You also have a son at home that thought he was gonna have you all to himself. So everyone is adjusting. But you include this dialogue, the little things that the kids say to you, and it so well illustrates the suffering that was chosen to inflict on this family by the prosecutors in my view, because they had enough information and they were compounding the tragedy by hurting the lives of Nikki and her children. And there’s so many ripple effects that affected you very deeply as well. 

Michele: Yeah. I think that was a huge motivation for me to write the book. Because the facts of the case are shocking, and people need to know them, but there are other places you can learn about it, you know, there are journalistic things that have been done as far as a documentary, a New Yorker article, a podcast called Believe Her, there’s a lot of ways you can get the injustice of her story.

But there was nowhere to be found the real undercurrent of the ripple effects, like you said, which show that domestic violence and incarceration do not just affect a person or two people, it affects an entire community And it’s generations of trauma that we really need to zoom out and look at the full scope. So we take this step. Yeah.

Miranda: Yeah. And there is also the trauma of Nikki being in prison or being in jail. And the way that you describe how often they subject her to strip searches, knowing what she’s already been through about just the inhumanity of the way that they don’t control the temperature or the humidity in the prison, it’s almost unfathomable. And yet this is happening all the time. And I really appreciate you shining a light on it. In some ways it is hard to read, but I really couldn’t put this book down. I felt like I was following you from your drop-offs of the children, driving them to school and daycare and going to work and just talking with your son at night and all of these little moments that really illustrate what this did to all of your lives.

And I think it’s a gift because it zeroes in on the personal impact of these wider decisions that are made. And if you could talk a little bit about how many women end up being convicted or charged when their only crime is saving their lives.

Michele: I think people would be shocked to know the full scope of it, and it’s hard because there’s not real data like studies are just starting to be done. But when people start to look into it, I mean, I don’t know how many people are at Bedford Hills alone, a maximum security women’s prison, but the vast majority are survivors.

There are some statistics that say as much as 90% of women’s prisons–and it’s like the majority of women who are there for killing someone are there because something to do with abuse–whether they were coerced into it, or they were killing their abuser. It is the common story in these prisons. And in New York, we have something called the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which is the reason Nikki was sent home early, which really just lowers the sentencing structure it doesn’t save women from doing prison, time, which is, re-traumatizing in its own way. It was important for me in the book to illustrate how the courts and the prison, they use the exact same tactics as abusers, so like you mentioned strip-searching, monitoring their every move, the degradation, shackling, their property of some larger entity, Nikki calls them abusers with badges, that’s just what they are, it’s just another abusive entity in their life. 

It’s really horrifying that these women, even if there is something like the DVSJA which New York has, and they come home after, Nikki’s 7 years, some women it’s 20 years, they get some of their life back. 

They not only have to heal from the abuse they suffered at home, the abuse and degradation they suffered in a courtroom, but then everything they experienced being institutionalized, shackled, handcuffed, yelled at, being regarded as property for so many years. It’s just so many layers of trauma for these people to heal from. And the prisons just kind of like spit them back out and say, good luck. Now you’re on parole and, hopefully, you don’t mess up and get right back into the system.

Miranda: And I have to say that there is such an element of misogyny running through this in my mind. I can’t help but think back to, the Trayvon Martin case and how there are states that have these laws where you’re allowed to defend your property at the expense of someone’s life. and yet, when it’s, in Nikki’s case, it could not be more clearly documented and yet she fell into this category that is so vast, if not the norm when women try to defend themselves against not just abuse but being killed. 

And I got the impression from the book, because you portray Nikki as such a devoted mother that this is what her whole life was about nurturing and bringing up her children in the most loving way, that she took action because she was protecting them from losing her.

Michele: Yes. I’m 100 percent sure that was her motivation. And also, as she describes it, because I wasn’t there that night, it wasn’t even a decision. It was a body instinct. It was a split-second instinct. She didn’t even have a second to really, like, do the pros and cons and think about what could happen. It was just, he said he was going to kill both of them. She had very good reason to think so because CPS had just opened an investigation and everything was ready to come up to the surface, he was going to be exposed, he had nothing to lose. 

I know from looking at his search history, because it became part of evidence, that he was researching suicide for months prior to this. I always think he was planning to die either way, that’s my theory, I didn’t really I put it in the book because I wanted people to make their own conclusions, but I also needed to be careful. But, you know, between us and anyone listening, I’m sure that was what was happening. He was prepared to die that night and kill her, too. And she had every reason to take his threats as being serious. She had a gun in her face. She had kids sleeping in the other room. And he said, your kids are going to have no one. And the odds that she could even get the gun, I think, because, he was planning to die anyway. But, the fact that she could even get the gun, most, victims can’t and they end up dead. That is, that is the norm, is that women are being killed every single day. And children, I mean, we see these murder-suicides all the time in the news, and the news kind of makes it like, oh, another senseless tragedy, instead of connecting the dots. Yeah, 

Miranda: and you look at the headlines too. If you just look at them a little bit carefully, you realize there’s always this sort of implied blame and this kind of sympathy for how he just lost it. And yet, we don’t make those allowances for women who are actually just trying to save their lives and not have their families wiped out.

Michele: There’s this, philosophy professor and author named Kate Manne, and she wrote a book called Down Girl, which I think is just so crucial to understanding misogyny. And she called it himpathy, our societal, sympathy we afford men that we don’t women. I mean, yeah, you read these articles and it talks about like, how he was such a family guy and his professional accomplishments when he just took out his family.

Miranda: Exactly. How is that relevant? And you are so right. Laura Richards, coined the term mantrams which I love, because also there’s this whole accepted idea that women are too emotional for fill-in-the-blank, but we don’t count it as emotional when a man, commits a murder, suicide, or wipes out his family or repeatedly abuses them. That is a lack of regulation of your emotions, and to your point, often, it isn’t necessarily out of control, it’s very controlled because they do hide it very well in public, but, I just think it’s time to reexamine all of these kind of assumptions that we make, right? 

But let’s get back to Nikki’s story. One of the things that I found so hard to understand was how the prosecutor could move forward and make the claims they did about her motives. They actually said that she caused her own injuries and bruises and, I don’t remember the exact details, but was somewhat responsible for these videos. So tell us more about that and their decision to prosecute and how successful they were at doing this.

Michele: Yeah, it is so multilayered and complex. And I lost so much sleep trying to assess the prosecutor’s motivations. Where I am now is, prosecutors’ jobs are to convict. The prosecutor in Nikki’s case was a woman named Hannah. She’s kind of like a main character of this book of our lives (not just a book, it was our lives.) And she is still a very villainous figure to us in our family, in the trauma Nikki has suffered. It’s like her voice that she hears in her head, rewriting her life and spreading all of this crazy mischaracterization and just true character assassination publicly. 

But she also has a boss. And he’s elected based on conviction records. He’s a conservative man who believes very strongly in the prison system, as far as I can understand. And for him to do his job well, they need to put quote unquote bad people away. So I think there’s that aspect of it where if your livelihood and your entire professional image is based on putting people in prison, maybe you have blinders that you can’t see.

It’s just very easy to kind of, especially when there’s a woman involved, it’s very easy to make a case where she’s crazy or she’s, I don’t know, a liar, or attention seeking, or all of these misogynistic things that are embedded in our culture. 

And we are a culture that victim-blames, that’s not up for debate.

We have, a rape culture where it’s okay for partners to do whatever they want to women, and we just assume it’s consensual. She must have been asking for it. All of that is in play, and you know what, I can’t even pretend to get in the head of this woman, honestly, but what happened happened, and every piece of evidence was either suppressed, or certain things were redacted, it was twisted.

Before trial, I knew of medical records, because there’s like a certain period of time where the prosecutor has to hand over all of their evidence, and so I saw what they had as far as his phone records, what he was searching for on the computer, all of the medical records that were truly horrific, and I include some of them in the book. I know they’re hard to read, but it’s important to see what I saw and what we knew to be true to understand how absolutely atrocious it is that so much of it was suppressed.

The jury never saw medical records, they could only hear from the midwife who made the records. And the way that courts are, it’s just question and answer. And I don’t think her trial attorneys did a really great job at eliciting certain answers. 

And then when it’s cross-exam time, it’s again about character assassination, distraction, kind of just like confusing the jury. That seemed to be from people in the room, the tactic of the prosecutor was just kind of like throwing random theories at the wall, see what would stick. 

And prior to all of this, the first few days after my sister’s arrest, I was told of a story which was documented by a forensic nurse collecting evidence for, you know, um, a sexual assault. And he burned her internally and externally with a hot spoon for talking back to her. And that was like, put that in front of a goddamn jury. Like, tell me that you can explain that away. So, those pictures of like close-ups of her, naked body, the worst thing you could do to my sister were blown up and put on a huge screen in front of the jury and in front of her family and friends and everyone. And the prosecutor argued that they were just bug bites, they weren’t burns. And it’s like, what do you, what do you believe? 

Miranda: We’re going back to the lack of credibility that we give to women as well about their own experiences, right? And I’m thinking about, what you said about the prosecutor going after bad people. And that also makes me think about, this story was in the papers immediately. It was in the news as soon as she was arrested, right? And So, now it’s out there and now the prosecutor perhaps decides that they have pressure on them to prosecute because everybody knows that this happened. But even that pressure itself is based in misogyny and sexism because a different kind of culture would look at this with a wider lens and understand. You know, you and I have all this information that informs us when we read these stories, but the public doesn’t. And by prosecuting her, she is perpetuating that problem. So it’s just a vicious cycle.

Michele: She really exploited all of the domestic violence myths that we have in a setting that is supposed to be sacred. It’s supposed to be about justice and truth and people trust it. People trust their district attorneys, they trust the police, they trust the judicial system, and it was such a violation. To see how truth could be so manipulated and so calculated to put a woman, a mother, someone who, by all accounts, you can’t argue any other way, was a victim into a system that was going to victimize her again, just so they could pat themselves on the back and say that they did a good job. It’s unconscionable to me.

And this was happening in a time where true crime as a genre really exploded. It was on the eve of the Me Too movement as well. So, there was a lot of cultural things happening in 2017. But, you know, the papers itself, which it’s a small town. So, the journalist is married to a former detective who is best friends with the former district attorney. You know, like there’s all of these connections that’s there. You watch it from the outside and go, huh, this is interesting. Of course, I can’t say anything for sure. 

But, under the guise of neutrality, They just publish both sides without any context, and, it’s, it’s great for clicks, because it makes people go, well, what is it? You know, is she a murderer, or is she a victim? And it gets people hooked, and it gets people reading and gets people talking, which is good for the paper, but it’s not so good for our family trying to exist in this small town.

Miranda: Yeah. You describe in the book about how while you’re so worried about Nikki and supporting her emotionally as best you can and taking care of her children and your son, trying to kind of keep it all together, you also galvanized this major effort to support Nikki legally and be there for her emotionally.

You had a whole community of supporters behind you, but despite that, and I think you were really smart and worked so hard to, channel these efforts into helping Nikki in every way that you could, and yet she was still convicted. 

She was convicted of murder? What exactly was her conviction?

Michele: Yes, she was convicted of second-degree murder, and she also had a gun charge. For using her partner’s legally registered gun. 

Miranda: And so, even though New York has this law that mitigates sentences for survivors of domestic violence, she was deemed as not qualifying for that, right? Which was just such another layer of injustice and another block in all of your efforts to protect her.

Michele: For a long time it felt like all of our efforts of advocacy, which we navigated very carefully, because when you’re in the legal system, they don’t want you to be loud. They don’t want you to talk. They don’t want you speaking to the press. There’s very good reasons that they want people to be quiet.

They say because they want it to be seen in the court of law before it’s decided in the court of opinion and they use very real threats like if you do then we’ll give you a gag order so that you legally can’t say anything and if you do then you’re legally in trouble. Um, it will hurt her in some proceeding like, a ruling the judge is going to have because they’re just humans and if they get mad they can take it out on the defendant.

So, you know, you don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt her. So we were constantly navigating that in the beginning, it was all very quiet, kind of word of mouth, we were so strategic in how we operated, and by the time trial came around, we were much more visible, certainly by sentencing when everything went sideways, but it felt like everything we were doing was hurting her, at the time, is what it felt like, that’s not how I feel now, at the full scope of it, I actually think all of the advocacy is what saved her life.

But the court is really good at silencing. They’re really, really, really skilled at that. And by the time she was denied the DVS JA, it was kind of like, what else could we possibly do? She had all of the evidence, she had all of the support, she had all of the organizations signing on saying she should be, sentenced under this law, and it still failed. And not only did that affect Nikki, saying, you don’t qualify for this law, but because Nikki had so much evidence and, was such a kind of a poster child for this law, it would then hurt other women who did not have as much evidence. They will, if she didn’t qualify, then certainly you’re not going to qualify. So that was our big fear at the time, was like, not only are we hurting Nikki, but now this law as a whole is diluted and, all of the years of advocacy it took to get this law passed and all of these other women who are sitting in jail trying to get out, it hurt everybody. so it was very demoralizing at the time.

Miranda: Michelle, I don’t know how you just got through one day to the next at certain times. I’m sure it was a real struggle. So her original sentence was how many years? 

Michele: 19 years to life. 

Miranda: How devastating. So what happened next? What happened between then and January when she was finally released from prison and was able to come home and be with Ben and Faye and you? 

Michele: So the book kind of ends around sentencing because I started writing the book in 2020, she was sentenced in February 2020, which is right before the pandemic. Like, she was brought to prison, and then a couple of weeks later everything shut down, and there’s not many places on earth more unsafe during a global pandemic than a prison, a true nightmare, and so I kind of get to that a little bit at the end, but The bulk of it, I really wanted it to end around sentencing, because where we are present day, Nikki is a success story, but that is so rare, and it’s important that people know that you can do everything we did; we had a defense committee, we coordinated with other organizations, I left my job and did this full time.

 It was just an enormous effort, enormous amount of money, fundraising, everything. She had everything that you could have and she still went to prison. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s like reality and I needed people to understand that that’s where it typically ends. Even with all of the evidence and all the righteousness, prison’s typically at the end of the road, whether it’s for a few years or a lifetime. So, I put basically like the entire transcript of her sentencing in because I was careful not to like…I don’t think I need to villainize the prosecutor and the judge. I think their words kind of speak for themselves. So I put basically everything that the judge said, which was a lot. 

He could have just said, you were convicted by a jury. So sorry. You wouldn’t qualify for this law. What a bummer. You’ll get a life sentence. Nothing I can do about it. Instead, he chose to say a lot. A lot of words. And all of those words he said, such as the only motivation he can think of is that she’s a broken person, that it’s clear other men abused her, but there’s no way to know that it was Chris, which is complete bullshit.

And saying that she must have reluctantly consented which was a phrase that we wanted to just scream. 

Miranda: So ignorant and dangerous. 

Michele: The fact he was so able to say this on the record shows he doesn’t know any different. Like, that is really what he thinks, which is, really concerning. 

Miranda: It is. 

Michele: Um, so, and he’s still on the bench, by the way, still deciding futures.

So after he sentenced her to 19 years to life, the chances of an appeal, we were told are less than 1%. We thought this was it. We just exposed all of it and used their words and really ramped up our social media in a way we couldn’t do prior and our community, which was very strong and robust, considering that we’re a small town, it really rippled out nationwide, even internationally.

And we got a lot of support. And there’s an organization in New York called Sanctuary for Families. And someone on their board, who’s just a very brilliant attorney, agreed to take Nikki’s appeal pro bono so we didn’t have to fundraise anymore, which was a blessing, and used a very resourced firm to help Nikki.

They poured, millions and millions of dollars of pro bono work into her appeal. We, as a committee, got even more organized, and went even bigger, and really, got more press. And, that was really our work, between sentencing and then her coming home, was really like telling her story and getting people to know it to the point where we were hoping the people who sat on the appellate division might hear about it.

And also just getting public support to write letters, to sign petitions, and then we were hoping maybe Governor Hochul in New York would give her clemency which did not happen. But that was our work, was getting the story out there. And the appeal happened in the middle of COVID which was just, everything was so sluggish during COVID, everything took longer, and the appeal, there were many, many points in the appeal, were all elements I put in the book because I wanted people to see how many constitutional violations Nikki suffered by the prosecutor and by the judge, but the only one that the appellate division commented on was the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act and they said there was more than enough evidence that she was a victim and the crime stemmed from that abuse. That this man did abuse her that it is not undetermined, as the judge said. It’s very determined that he did abuse her, and she should have been sentenced under the law, and they resentenced her from 19 years to life, down to seven and a half years. 

Which one could argue seven and a half years for saving your life is still insane considering a large swath of her children’s childhood have come and gone, but much better, obviously, than spending a lifetime in prison. 

So, she was slated to come home in July 2024. So that hasn’t even happened to this day. So she technically should still be in prison. But Nikki was involved with a nonprofit organization called Puppies Behind Bars. And it’s really truly an incredible non-profit, and they raise service dogs, certain incarcerated women and men in different facilities raise service dogs to then go and help society. So it’s their way of giving back, and they also have dogs, which is much better than other areas of the prison. 

Miranda: I’ll just, throw in that as a resident of Sandy Hook, who has lived here for 30 years and lived here during our tragedy, I’m so familiar with therapy dogs. I know there’s many kinds of service dogs, but boy, do they make a difference. Just something about their energy and putting your hand on them in the midst of pain is just so important. So I love that she did that. So, so keep going.

Michele: Yeah, and the Puppies Behind Bars dogs are truly remarkable animals. You would think incarcerated people are like monsters, but they’re not. And the love that they infuse into these dogs, and they’re able to do it 24/7 around the clock because they have nowhere else to be, these dogs are just like absolutely incredible. And they’re everywhere from colleges to police departments to, emotional, um, the bomb-sniffing dogs, like they’re just everywhere. And, at a certain point, you’re allowed to take a dog-raising certificate course like you take a test to be certified as a dog raiser, and it’s a very difficult test, and she wasn’t sure she’d pass, but she did. I knew she would, but she passed, and so she got six months off of her sentence. 

So she was able to come home in January, which was so incredible to tell the kids. That moment of telling the kids that she was coming home in January instead of July was like a core moment of my life. And, we did it quietly because everything had to be so public in order to get her home. We did have to be really public, but we wanted something that was just for us. So we were hoping we could transition her home and then tell people, the papers ended up reporting it pretty quickly. We didn’t have as much time as we wanted, but we did have that moment of just us and our committee and Nikki’s attorney and our family bringing her home.

We closed on a house the next day, just the craziness of life, so now we all live together. 

Miranda: So wonderful. 

Michele: We co-parent together. And everything is much much better than when she was in prison. 

Miranda: Hallelujah. And I heard you say that you also adopted a puppy? 

Michele: We rescued this lab mix. The puppies behind bars are labs. So we thought we would get a lab. This dog just, , found us and is the best dog for Nikki I could ever imagine. Nikki’s doing really hard healing work right now, which is another chapter of her, life. And this dog is a huge part of her healing process.

Miranda: And I will tell our listeners too that there’s a photograph, I’m going to get choked up just even talking about it, of Nikki reuniting with her children the day she came out. That’s on the We Stand With Nikki website and social media pages. It’s, it’s just so, so moving and so beautiful. And she should never have gone through all of this. But it’s so good to know that they’re back together and that you’re all together. It’s really heartwarming. 

One of the things that I most admire about you, Michelle, is the awareness that you have contributed to about the fact that there is a disproportionate number of women who are incarcerated for surviving abusive men who are women of color.

Michele: I was going to actually bring that up earlier when we were talking about the advocacy and the community that we built because I always try and make the point that, you know, we put together this defense committee, which really in a lot of ways felt like lightning in a bottle as far as the people who came in to do this. Like we have social worker, trauma therapist, someone who is like a doctorate in group dynamics, all of these things that really helped make our committee cohesive and work so successfully. But we were using a model that was really designed by black women. And I think a lot of people look at us like, Oh my gosh, we like invented this way of advocating and this grassroots organizing but we were just building on a template that has existed for decades. 

So not only are the women who are incarcerated for killing their abusers mostly black women or women of color in general, but the freedom fighters, the liberators, the women who have been building this movement on the outside to liberate these women have also been black women. And they often don’t get the credit or the recognition that they should. 

Nikki is a white woman and a lot of the other women who get their cases at a national level, like Brittany Smith, in Alabama has a Netflix documentary about her. Right now there’s a woman in Florida that we’re trying to raise awareness for, she is also a white woman. All the laws that are being changed, and like the DBSJA, even if the faces of it aren’t black women, the women who are benefiting from it are black women. And people need to know that. It’s not fair that white women are the ones who are getting the most sympathy and getting the most movement around them.

That’s something larger that we can’t change right now. But any progress we make in this arena is affecting black women and women of color. And, they need just as much support as anybody else, if not more, because society itself doesn’t support them. One I always point people to is an organization very aptly named Survived and Punished. And that is where we learned that they have a toolkit on their website about defense committees, which is literally what we downloaded and learned how to form a defense committee. And they’re also doing really on-the-ground work as far as mutual aid.

So, the money that people donate goes directly to incarcerated women. I know a lot of women who were with Nikki, they don’t have me. They don’t have a sister on the outside. They don’t have parents. Their kids aren’t communicating with them. They’re completely alone and the only way they can have commissary money or have money to put on, you know, phone calls and emails to connect with their kids is through Survived and Punished. Sometimes the only visits they get are from folks at Survived and Punished. So I always want to direct people to them because they are really doing life saving important work. It was co-founded by a woman named Mariame Kaba who is also an extraordinary voice in the abolitionist movement that I encourage people to look into. She’s done op-eds. She has a book out. Her work is really important. I think that’s the one if people are going to feel mobilized to put their money and their time towards something. I really think Survived and Punished is the way to go.

Miranda: Great. And how can people support Nikki? I forgot, I was going to wear my We Stand With Nikki tank top because I donated back when I listened to Believe Her several years ago and I was just so upset and moved by her story, and I’m obviously happy for all of you that she’s out now. But the challenges are ongoing for all of you, really. So how can people contribute to making her life a little bit easier as she heals from all these layers of injustice that she’s endured through no fault of her own? 

Michele: Yeah. Thank you. We did set up a trust for her so that when she came home, she would have a source of income. And the links for that are still on our social pages. We stand with Nikki and our website. And now, she is going to have to get a traditional job because of the parole stipulations, but her work right now is healing and the more that we can support that, the better it is for her. So, that money goes directly to her for her healing and for whatever she needs so that she’s not forced to feel like she has to go get a nine to five or something.

Miranda: Yeah. And how are you doing? You’ve been through so much too. 

Michele: Yeah. Thank you Um, I have been through so much and I, Feel so much more stable, I feel like, than I’ve ever been in this situation. Having her home alleviated a tremendous burden and also having written the book, I put it all on paper and then I released it and it really isn’t in me anymore. The way that I used to get triggered a lot, just like body triggers. All the time. I also started Lexapro, which I think was a huge thing for me. I can’t believe I did all of this without any kind of medication help. 

Miranda: Me neither. 

Michele: I went on it right before Nikki was going to come home because I was like, I need to do this well. And I was getting really anxious with the book coming out and just like having panic attacks. And I was like, I can’t. I need to try something. I resisted it for a long time and It’s truly the best thing I ever did for myself. I feel so much more stable. 

Miranda: Thank you for sharing that.

Michele: I don’t have to talk about it much, but the people close to me, I’m like, I know everybody’s different and everyone’s biology needs different things, but for me, for right now in this season, it is exactly what I needed. So I do feel very steady and I feel happier than I’ve ever been. 

And I’m really enjoying connecting with people and talking about this and educating people. I feel like for me, I have had to keep so much in and so many times my words have hurt her and were threatened to hurt her. So to be able to speak is, for me, for what I have been through, very healing.

Miranda: Wow. That’s really incredible. It seems like you have built these muscles through all of this, and you wouldn’t have chosen it, of course, but I can just see the strength that you exude now and what a strong voice you have. And it’s rooted in who you are and it’s so authentic. I think it comes through in your writing and in your speaking. And I’m a fan. 

Michele: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Integrity is a very high value for me, and I do feel that I live in integrity and I’m proud of that.

Miranda: You should be proud of that. That should be all of our goals. So good for you. Is there anything else that you want to mention before we wrap up?

Michele: Not that I can think of. I think we hit the larger contexts and the organizations and all that’s really important to me. 

Miranda: Good. This was such a pleasure. I’m so excited to put this episode out. I just know my audience is going to be riveted by it and it’s a great public service too. 

Michele: Thank you. I’m really, really grateful that you’re doing that. 

Miranda:  And please give my best to Nikki and tell her how much I stand behind both of you, okay? 

Michele: Thank you. 

Miranda: Alright, thank you.