I wish you could be inside my head right now and know what it feels like to have a six-foot-three-inch, 225-pound male beating your skull into the floor. I wish you could see the blood I tried to wash out of my hair in the shower. I wish you could understand the fear of being confined to a space by someone who is double your size. Why, in wrestling, do we put people in weight classes? Women can't fight this. I asked my stunt double: I said, “You're a black belt in all the millions of things. Would you have been able to take him on?” She's like, “Not a chance, Cait.”
For an abuser in that mindset, with the adrenaline and the testosterone running through them, if they want to kill you, they will. I'm alive, by the grace of God, because of my friends, who got a two-word WhatsApp message. I'm alive because I let him beat me. I had to just let him because, if I fought him back, it got worse: So I just took it and, somehow, survived. I wish you could understand that. I'm not allowed to bring props—I got in trouble for that last year—but I can show you the videos and photos of him doing this, and the blood splattering. I can show you my black and blue body.
I need you to understand that, when you're making policy choices, this is not a joke. It's real, it affects your system for life and it rips families apart. It's actually more expensive to do what we're doing right now, on a financial level, because there are so many financial consequences for abuse. You can't work or function properly, and it costs billions of dollars to not deal with these individuals properly.
We need to do better, because this is real. I'm alive, by the grace of God. Unfortunately, Breanna and Madisson are not. However, I know what their daughters went through. I just lived to tell the tale. I want you, everyone in this room, to understand that, take that and get over your partisan bullshit. Get over it.