My Story

For most of my life, I said yes to every possibility, whether I knew how I’d get there or not.

I grew up on the beach in Florida and after college, I somehow found myself a nationally ranked mogul skier, chasing dreams of competing in the Olympics.

Then a drunk driver hit me head-on.

My lower body was broken in pieces. I would have to learn to walk and eventually run and ski again. A week after leaving the hospital, I started law school in a wheelchair.

I thought I knew what resilience looked like.

I had no idea.

I went on to build the life I wanted. As an attorney, I set a federal precedent in an unexplored area of law. I built my own practice where one day I would run million dollar cases from terraces in the South of France and beach cafes in Greece.

I married, and we had a son. What began as a one year adventure in France turned into a life there.

From the outside it looked extraordinary.

And in many ways, it was.

But what no one could see was that inside my marriage, I was slowly disappearing.

I had spent years trying to solve the problems in our marriage. I explained away the contradictions and repeatedly ignored my intuition. I was intent that if I could understand, then we could fix it. Eventually, I questioned my expectations and myself.

Believing it was me giving up, I asked for a divorce.

Then, everything I thought I knew about my marriage and the man I married, unravelled.

What began as an amicable separation turned into a years long psychological and legal war. There were betrayals, false allegations, police complaints, a criminal investigation, a child services investigation and finally an attempt to remove my son from my care and placed in foster care.

I was an attorney. I understood the courts.

But I did not understand what happens when someone decides to weaponize the system.

Ironically, it was what happened after I left that finally allowed me to see the reality of the marriage that I had spent years trying to save.

The lies. The revelations.The contradictions. The manipulation. That constant feeing that something wasn’t right. The years I’d spent believing the problem might be me —it had a name. There was a coherent explanation.

Extensive research led to discovery of the terms coercive control, gas lighting, love bombing, narcissistic abuse and post separation abuse.

But understanding what had happened to me and recovering from it were two very different things.

That is where Rebelle emerged.

A memoir I never expected to write —about the life I thought I had that collapsed, and what it took to find myself again.

Today, I write and speak about psychological abuse, coercive control, high conflict divorce, and weaponization of systems and family courts. I offer private conversations with people trying to navigate these relationships that have left them questioning themselves.

REBELLE is ultimately about something bigger than what happened to me.

It’s about what happens next.

Because rebuilding isn’t about becoming the person you were before everything fell apart.

Sometimes you become the person you never would have discovered otherwise.