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Content Warning: This essay has nightmare fuel. It contains visceral descriptions of physical and domestic abuse. It is my past and my life, and also in the strongest terms possible, DO NOT READ this if the above will cause you harm, or even if you don't want to.
The third thing to understand about my first marriage is that with opposition research, I could make the truth hurt for others like it did for me. This is the story of how it went wrong.
There are no rules in professional politics. The pay is always bad, and the hours are always worse. There are no human resources departments; complaining about mistreatment gets you fired, scorned, and blacklisted. Harassment and abuse is the norm, even and especially with those who say they’re fighting against it.
In other words, it was my natural state of existence when I applied for an entry level opposition research job in late 2005.
My new career had several benefits to someone in my position, and not just because I was great at research methods in general. The hours were long, so I was at home with X1 a lot less. Combined with her own job frequently taking her out of town, the heavy workload gave me a measure of domestic peace. Additionally, my alcoholism blended in well. Most of my coworkers drank excessively, often on the firm’s credit card after hours. Political fundraisers are a staple for consultant networking, which usually had open bars, and subsequent bar hopping. And if it kept me out late enough that X1 was asleep when I finally got home, so much the better.
Of course, as a consequence the time I did spend with X1 grew worse. Our offices were close together, and we frequently joined each other’s after work happy hours. One night I excused myself early, so drunk that I was having trouble walking. I made my way home and passed out on the floor of our apartment in the Chicago Loop. A few hours later, I woke up to X1 savagely kicking me, screaming that I had abandoned her. In a blind panic, I staggered to my feet, shoved her into the bedroom, and braced myself against the door until she passed out herself. After that, whenever she got angry I would gauge where I was relative to the nearest door I could lock against her or hold shut.
By far, the biggest draw of my job was that in the hands of an opposition researcher, facts are weapons. It was tested in polls and focus groups, of course, and applied for one-sided results. But that was my entire life: X1 mined my experiences, my memories, anything I ever put into words for ways to hurt me. No argument was too small to twist an emotional knife, and no detail couldn’t be twisted into a reason I was a monster who deserved to be hit.
Every new target was a chance to drag someone else into my world where nothing was right and everything was wrong. There is very little I cannot slice and dice into an indictment. “Voted to raise taxes, but didn’t pay their own.” “Voted themselves a pay raise, but against the minimum wage.” Change a position, and you’re a flip-flopper; don’t, and you’re a fanatic. If you’re good at fundraising, you take money from bad people; if not, you don’t pay your staff enough. Every action has a consequence, given patience and a Lexis-Nexis account.
My research developed a reputation for being especially vicious, the “Kaz Ballaski special” as one former business partner put it. I didn’t just want to beat my opponents; I wanted to see them cry. One of my hobbies was collecting media photos of concession speeches, ideally with the losing candidate’s families standing around on stage looking heartbroken like Rick Santorum’s in 2006. When my friends felt sad, I would often ask “is there any way I can please you by hurting a politician?”
Most people who get into politics have a partisan edge: I’ll go out and kick the shit out of Republicans/Democrats/etc. But the more I worked, the more I reveled in working against Democrats, especially self-styled leftists and progressives.1 Republicans were bad, but Democrats dared claim they were better. Ideals were lies, and idols like pre-White House Barack Obama were bad liars. My first client on my own was a Republican running a Democrat’s campaign, and as time went on I worked for more super PACs than candidates. Greed and thumbing the scales of government made sense; it was the pretense that it was good that I found intolerable.
Of course, X1 noticed my conflicts over my job. If I put it into words, she picked up on it; if it was important to me, she used it to hurt me. As time went on, she threatened to tell my colleagues I abused her if I told anyone that she hit me. Her kitchen sink approach had some comical misses; one time she threatened to call someone who already didn’t like me and used other researchers, only to fume as I brought up his number on my phone and told her to dial away. But for the most part, her intimidation worked. There was never any shortage of supposedly progressive men exposed as predators, even before Me Too entered the social lexicon. I played a part in exposing some of them. “Believe women” was a mantra I lived by, and I had little doubt X1 could bring me to professional ruin if she committed to it. She also did her best to keep me isolated. Having a female friend meant I was cheating on her; having a male friend meant I was gay, and also cheating on her.
My attempts to avoid X1 with work travel, combined with my spiraling alcoholism, meant that almost all of the time we did spend together was explosive and violent. Anything could set her off, including my attempts to placate her once her temper rose. We went to Greece for our five year anniversary, in part because I wanted to reclaim the experience of the country after what my father did to me in childhood. On our anniversary night she flew into a drunken rage at an impending transit strike that forced a change in our itinerary, then turned it on me, hitting me and calling me “Captain Nutless” when I locked myself in the hotel bathroom to get away from her.
A month after that, we had just gotten home from a fundraiser when X1 lost her temper yet again. This time, it was because I had gotten a new gym membership without canceling my existing one first. In seconds, I went from rubbing her feet on the sofa in our living room to reeling as she kicked me in the head. I stumbled into the kitchen while she screamed that I had wasted money, didn't care about her, and didn't love her. She rushed at me, and I shoved her away, shouting, “Leave me alone!”
Then she punched me in the face. She kept hitting me until I went down on one knee, my vision going dark. When I could see again, she had a handle of Maker's Mark in her fist, and said that if I didn't get out, she'd hit me with the bottle next. Sobbing and with my head spinning, I stuffed a change of clothes in a duffel bag and left.
I still wonder what might have happened if I'd stayed gone. In a certain sense I came close to leaving her: I briefly stopped drinking, reconnected with friends, and spent the summer sleeping in my office. We owned a condo together, but didn't yet have kids.
But I didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. It was 2010, and Democratic fortunes were plummeting all over the country. In Illinois, the governor's ticket was upended after a pawnbroker with a domestic violence record won the lieutenant governor primary. One of my clients was so cartoonishly corrupt that I spent twenty percent of his fee on a lawyer to ensure I wasn't caught up in any of it. My biggest client dropped me for a competitor shortly after I helped them win the primary.
More importantly, while I was briefly sober, I was still unmedicated with severe depression. A string of therapists had sporadically nudged me to recognize I was being abused, but I had a lifetime of experience running in aimless circles in therapy. Even my close friends expressed skepticism X1 had truly crossed a red line; when I told one I was thinking of ending the marriage, his first words were “Kaz, that dog has barked before.”
X1 managed to soften her behavior towards me for about two weeks, and we started couples therapy. That turned out to be a mistake: couples therapy doesn't work with abuse.2 X1 shouted down my attempts to talk about what she had done to me, and within a month she was hitting me again, despite the “anti-violence compact” the therapist suggested. When I went to see the movie Inception by myself, X1 raged over a dozen texts and voice mails that she was going to “walk through Humboldt Park until I'm raped and killed and it will be all your fault.”3 When I brought this up in couples therapy, the therapist said that X1 “is clearly in a lot of pain” and I should be more sensitive to her feelings.
And that was that. If I couldn't convince a couples therapist something was fundamentally wrong about how X1 was treating me, I didn't see any other options. There was no hope in my job, and no help from paid professionals, and no past where I'd known anything better. Within a month, I had moved back in with her. Within a year, X1 was pregnant with our first child.
Having kids with X1 was one of the worst mistakes of my life. It was also the only reason I finally managed to leave her. It wasn't until I stopped drinking in solidarity with X1’s pregnancy that I confronted that I'm an alcoholic. It wasn't until I hit bottom with kids that I was shocked into permanent sobriety. And it was only once I became a father that I found a reason to live.
But the end would take another five excruciating years. During that time my faltering consulting practice slid through my fingers with every election cycle. I withdrew from almost everyone in my life as X1 relentlessly bullied me out of interacting with anyone I'd told about what she'd done that night in 2010. Her abuse would escalate, using pregnancy hormones as an excuse.
It took sobriety, anti-depressants, a nightmare election cycle in Chicago, and being pushed to the point of almost hitting her back before I finally left never to return.
Even now, I’m fond of reminding progressives that their movement historically started with virulent xenophobia.
Nor does divorce mediation, as I would go on to discover.
Ironically, I now live in Humboldt Park, which is a fine neighborhood; it's just majority minority, and X1 is also racist.
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