If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence and would like to talk with an advocate, call 866-834-4357, TTY 1-800-437-1220. This free, confidential service is available 24/7 and is accessible from anywhere in Maine.
To her surprise, a man answered when Marjorie Apsega called the hotline run by the domestic violence resource center in Ellsworth last May to talk about what she described as an attack by her husband who has extensive training in martial arts. She hesitated.
The voice at the other end immediately offered to find a female advocate for her. But Apsega, who had called at the urging of her hairdresser, said she knew she wouldn’t be able to gather her resolve again.
“I said, ‘I need to talk to somebody because I’m not calling back,’” she said. “‘I will talk to you.’”
When Apsega, 44, of Orrington, finally hung up with NextStep Domestic Violence Project, she said she was overwhelmed with gratitude to have been reminded that men can be kind.
But the organization that helped jumpstart Apsega’s healing process is one of many facing steep funding cuts that threaten their operations. Local domestic violence and sexual violence resource centers are among the many victim-assistance groups that once again will lose about 60 percent of their funding from their primary federal source, the Crime Victims Fund, because the money is tied up in federal litigation.
So, as she did last year, state Sen. Anne Carney, D-Cape Elizabeth, is sponsoring a bill to use state dollars to fill the federal gap annually, which is estimated to be about $6 million next fiscal year, said Elizabeth Ward Saxl, executive director of the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The money would provide no extra; it would only prevent “catastrophic cuts,” Ward Saxl said.
On Friday, Gov. Janet Mills’ proposed budget offered $3 million in ongoing funding, about half of what agencies need to preserve current services. While grateful for the funds in a tight budget year, Ward Saxl said “we will continue working with her and the Legislature to ensure that we receive enough funding to maintain core victim services in Maine.”
On Tuesday, dozens of people packed the staircase leading down to the Hall of Flags at the State House in Augusta, holding signs in support of increased funding and featuring messages such as “Save DV Services.” One woman at the rally, Natasha Ricker of Pittston, said domestic violence advocates “helped calm my mind” and called their services “an essential part of my life.”
Mills’ supplemental budget last year approved $6 million in one-time funding to fill this year’s gap but not ongoing funding. Legal challenges to the payouts of two settled federal cases are still putting millions of dollars in the Crime Victims Fund in limbo. So Ward Saxl said having ongoing state funding is key to ensuring that basic services continue to exist.
Crime Victims Fund money comes not from tax dollars but the deposits of fines and penalties paid by convicted federal offenders. Terrorism victims have sued the U.S. Department of Justice, arguing that they — not the Crime Victims Fund — are entitled to the fines of two big cases involving British American Tobacco and Binance, preventing the funds from being distributed for the time being.
Apsega’s experience shows the power of outside support. In June, Apsega also called advocates at the hotline run by Partners for Peace in Bangor, another organization supported by the Crime Victims Fund, that helped her file for a protection from abuse order to prevent her husband, Stephen Apsega, 52, of Newburgh, from contacting her.
She wouldn’t have gone to court alone because she was embarrassed and also scared that someone would see her and tell her husband, she said. She was terrified to anger him. As the owner of Maine Traditional Karate and Fitness in Orrington, he is a sixth degree black belt, Apsega said.
But Debbie Otis, a legal advocate with Partners for Peace, got a private room at the judicial center in Bangor, and they filled out the forms together. Apsega got the temporary protection order that day, June 24.
“I would not have gone in there and done it by myself. I know that for a fact,” said Apsega, who has a background in social work and has run a daycare center.
Otis also connected Apsega with Kirsten Torres, an attorney with Pine Tree Legal Assistance, another agency that receives Crime Victim Fund money. Torres represented Apsega in her contested civil court hearing for a two-year protection order, which she won on Oct. 31 when a judge decided that her husband presented “a credible threat” to her safety.
In addition to domestic and sexual violence resource centers and Pine Tree Legal, a number of other organizations also rely on Crime Victim Fund money: district attorney’s offices, the attorney general’s office, the judicial branch, Immigrant Resource Center of Maine, the Elder Abuse Institute of Maine, Legal Services for Maine Elders, and children’s advocacy centers, which interview children who have been abused.
Domestic violence advocates instilled in Apsega the idea that she didn’t have to carry her experiences alone, telling her “it wasn’t my responsibility to keep my story quiet,” she said. That’s why she decided to speak publicly for this article.
On May 8, she and her husband had a conversation that upset him, she said. To her shock, he came up behind her in their kitchen at their rural home in Newburgh, grabbed her and picked her up to take her into the bedroom, she said both in an interview and wrote in her filing for the protection from abuse order.
“While doing so, he threw me into the kitchen table and split open my shin. I screamed in pain,” she wrote.
After falling to the floor she said she went into their bedroom to get a phone and call 911. But he wrestled the phone out of her hand and smashed it, she wrote. He then grabbed her and threw her onto their couch, towering over her on all fours, screaming inches from her face about how he was going to demolish her and kill her, she wrote.
“I was so terrified I thought I was going to die,” she said.
“I just kept screaming, ‘Please stop, please stop. Why are you doing this?’” she said.
Eventually he did. She packed her things, making several trips to her car, she said, and then she left. They are now divorcing.
In written messages to his wife, Stephen Apsega said he would take that night back if he could, that he would get help for himself, and “it would never happen to you again.” He emphasized that he didn’t hit her but was sorry for picking her up “aggressively.” He asked if he needed to be prepared to be “dragged off by the police.”
In an interview, however, Stephen Apsega’s attorney, Mike Harman, refuted all allegations. Harman questioned whether Marjorie Apsega was truly afraid of her husband because the two continued to communicate for a while after May 8; they even met in person one night. Then she filed for the protection order soon after receiving divorce papers.
“It raises the possibility that your motivations were something other than fear,” said Harman, of the law firm Russell Johnson Beaupain.
Looking back, Marjorie Apsega said she wished she had called the police that night. She had many bruises, she said, and felt stunned. But with time she grew angrier, she said. Her husband also stopped communicating with her, causing logistical problems for their work and also making her worry more for her safety. So six weeks after the incident, on June 17, she reported it to Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Cameron Fowler.
Fowler was kind, Apsega said, but he said there likely wasn’t a case, even though she had photographed her bruises. She also still had her broken phone. According to Fowler’s police report, he told her “it would have been much easier if she had called right after the incident and that I didn’t think we were going to be able to pursue charges where there would be little evidence left.”
Penobscot County District Attorney Chris Almy agreed. He declined to bring criminal charges against Stephen Apsega, saying a defense attorney could have argued her delayed report to police was retaliatory. It is more difficult to get a criminal conviction, which requires showing something happened beyond a reasonable doubt, than a protection order, which requires a preponderance of evidence, a lesser standard.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘This is an awful event,’ and another to say, ‘How do you prove it, and can we prove it?’ We have to make those judgments thousands of times a year,” Almy said. “We decline cases quite often, and victims are upset. That’s just the way it is in the process.”
Stephen Apsega’s attorney said his client didn’t cause any bruises. “He doesn’t know where those came from, but he knows he didn’t put them there,” Harman said.
Apsega doesn’t agree with the district attorney’s decision not to charge her husband and said she was not trying to somehow get even by calling police. She also had been planning to file for a protection order before she learned of the divorce, she said.
It is common for victims of domestic violence to delay calling or even never call police due to their own concerns about retaliation, stigma and problems within the reporting system itself, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. What’s more, turning to the police doesn’t always help. A recent survey of callers to the National Domestic Violence Hotline found that 39 percent of those who also called police actually felt less safe after calling them; 40 percent said they believed it made no difference.
“A survivor who is looking to make a police report is not only weighing what’s going to happen when their abuser finds out that they’ve made this report, they’re also thinking about: How am I going to survive?” said Amanda Cost, executive director of Partners for Peace. “There’s often some really important rationale behind it, and it comes down to safety.”
In lieu of a criminal case, Apsega is glad she connected with victim assistance services that pointed her toward other options to stay safe. While she said she is exhausted, she is focusing on the positive and the people who have supported her.
“I don’t know that I could thank them enough,” Apsega said.
The last eight months have made her stronger, she said, and she is proud of who she has become. A counselor put a name to her feelings of gratitude and resilience: post-traumatic growth.
“I want people to know there are resources out there, and I want people to know that it’s incredibly healing to use those,” she said, “and to not be ashamed.”
Bangor Daily News reporter Billy Kobin contributed to this story.
Erin Rhoda is the editor of Maine Focus. She may be reached at [email protected].
