“You have to leave. I can’t live this way any longer. Maybe if you get some help, we can talk about it, but I just won’t live like this any longer”. After 5 ½ years of marriage and yet another argument, John decided it was time to end the marriage. John is a financial consultant and his business was set up in the addition they had just added to the home, so it made sense that she be the one to vacate.
The prior 3 years had been very unhappy ones. For a long while, he made allowances for Barb’s behaviour, due to her illness; she had endometriosis and was unable to carry any of her multiple pregnancies to term. She desperately wanted a family, but for a long time she was in and out of hospital, until they finally did a hysterectomy because she was either to live with chronic pain or have the surgery. He understood why sex was not a part of their marriage during this time; after all, she was in pain. However, 2 Years post-hysterectomy, things weren’t getting any better. In fact, things began to get much worse. Sex was still non-existent because she was apparently still in pain. She laid on the sofa the majority of the day every day, watching TV. She refused to work, even after John had put her through Esthetics School and set up a salon for her in the home (her dream, she had said, was to have her own nail salon). She claimed to be depressed, due to the fact that she couldn’t have children, but was unwilling to seek counseling or any sort of help for the depression. In a desperate attempt to lift her spirits, he took her to the local Honda dealership and told her to pick out whatever she wanted. She drove home in her brand new, fully loaded SUV. It didn’t help and he quickly realized that nothing he did was going to make a difference. She was angry and began acting irrationally, blaming him for her health problems; she would later tell a judge that John had made her have a hysterectomy. She wasn’t too depressed or in too much pain however to get off the couch, cake on the make-up, don revealing clothing and go out to the bar with her girlfriends until 4 & 5 a.m., 3 – 5 nights a week. Her behaviour was becoming ever more erratic and irrational. He caught her in lying about her whereabouts often and began to hear rumours that she was having an affair. She seemed to make a point of starting fights regularly. Usually, the complaints were that John was not supplying her with enough money. It seemed that when she wasn’t either lying on the couch or out at the bar with her friends, she was shopping. She just couldn’t comprehend that the money was running out. John’s business had suffered while he was helping Barb deal with her illness; often times, she would wake him at 2 and 3 in the morning to take her to hospital because she was in pain. They had just recently renovated the house, he had bought her the new vehicle, and she absolutely refused to work. Something had to give, but she just couldn’t see it. On this day, April 28, 2002, Barb was once again angry because he refused to give her more money. He’d finally had enough and told her it was time to go. Her response was “if you don’t take me back I’ll go to the police and have you arrested”. Due to medications Barb was on, she bruised easily and she often referred to her bruises as ‘trophies’. He insisted she leave and began putting some of her belongings ~ suitcases full of clothes etc. ~ into the garage. Barb called her sister Linda, who came to help her remove her things. Barb and Linda spent the next hour gathering Barb’s belongings, all the while yelling obscenities at John, making sure to damage a few of his belongings in the process. A few hours after they left, while John was bar-b-q’ing his dinner, 6 police officers arrived at his front door. When he answered the door, an officer said “Mr. Harper, you’re under arrest for spousal abuse.” Barb had made good on her threat. They sent 6 officers to arrest John because Barb made a point of explaining that he is a big man, who was once a professional fighter. John stood there mouth agape, stunned. He was only wearing white shorts (intended only for home lounging), a t-shirt and no shoes. A male officer stepped forward and turned him around in order to place the cuffs around his wrists. “Can I at least get my shoes?” he asked. “No” was the reply. Two officers steered him toward the vehicle making sure to bang his head on the way into the car. The cuffs had been placed so tight that John’s hands were blue when they arrived at the police station 10 minutes later. He was shocked, numb; he had always been taught that you never lay a hand on a woman unless you’re invited and certainly would never have hurt his wife. This had to be a mistake. Once at the station, they read John his rights and proceeded with the booking process. John had never had his fingerprints taken before and didn’t know the procedure. The officer kept squishing his fingers down on the paper, unable to get a proper print. He bent his fingers back and threatened to charge John with resisting arrest. John insisted he had no intention of resisting, to which the officer replied “go ahead, hit me, I won’t do anything. Take your best shot”. This is so absurd, John thought. How can the police behave this way? It turns out that BC law states that an accused abuser is guilty until proven innocent. A woman simply needs to suggest that she has been somehow abused and that is enough for the police to make an arrest. John spent 4 hours at the police station, answering questions and going through the process. He asked to make a phone call. He was told he was not allowed to use the phone. When he was released 4 hours later, he walked barefoot and humiliated across the street to a pay phone and called a friend, who came to pick him up.
The next day John hired a lawyer, had a legal separation agreement drawn up and braced himself for the fallout of these false charges. He was told to expect a long and expensive road ahead. The consequences of Barb’s actions could potentially have catastrophic effects; he could lose his business. His responsibility was to report these charges to his licensing bodies.
The next day Barb showed up at the house. When John told her to leave, she walked to the middle of the driveway and just stood there sobbing, yelling up at the house about how sorry she was for going to the police station. She had gone to the police station, she later said, because a friend told her she should ‘open a file on John, just in case things got ugly’, which made no sense, but Barb had been doing a lot of things that made no sense, so this was par for the course he thought. According to the story she later told John, while sobbing and repeating how sorry she was, was that she was standing at the front desk of the police station, asking if she could ‘open a file’ on her husband, who had asked her to leave their home earlier in the day. She told John that while she and Linda were moving her things, she had sustained some small bruises on her arms. She had worn a short sleeve shirt to the police station, and they noticed her bruises. Barb claimed that they asked her if the bruises had been a result of abuse by John. She said that she told them no, but they wouldn’t believe her and set out to arrest him. BC law allows for the police to lay charges, even if a ‘victim’ says otherwise, ostensibly to protect the ‘victim’.
The next year would be spent fighting the false charge of spousal abuse, among the other chaos resulting from John’s decision to end his marriage…
