Emotional Mackinday recounts attack
penhaver wasn’t arrested until a month later.
Mackinday broke into tears several times throughout her testimony, which continues Thursday. Koppenhaver, now jailed and banished from the ring, occasionally glanced up at the witness stand from the defense table. But she never appeared to look directly at him.
Even when asked to identify him in the courtroom, her eyes were turned away.
The two had dated for a little more than a year.
Mackinday, known by her stage name Christy Mack, left the adult film industry in the summer of 2013, a few months into their ever-violent relationship, with the hope that he would stop slapping and choking her.
“I just wanted to make him happy,” she told jurors. “I figured if I stopped doing this, then maybe we wouldn’t fight as much.”
But the abuse continued, growing worse and worse as the relationship developed, with him often screaming at her, she said. He would take her phone away so she couldn’t call her mother, who might report the abuse to police.
She hid from her mother and friends “the best I could,” she said, because she felt embarrassed. “I never thought I could let that happen to me.”
She tried whatever she could to stop his attacks.
“I could prevent being hit, or him being angry, by doing something sexual,” she said.
She would post about the abuse on social media because she thought it would make her less likely to return to him. She saved photographs of her injuries to remind herself: “I’m not going to do this again. I’m not going back anymore.”
When she was wrapped up in the relationship, she thought the abuse would someday end, that he would change.
“Now I understand the manipulation and abusive relationships,” she said. “I look back, and I know that’s not how things should have been.” Contact David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Follow @randompoker on Twitter