WH aide’s case dredges up ’ 80s trauma
Ex- wife of prominent abuser sees parallels
The domestic violence news out of the WhiteHouse this month was all too familiar to Charlotte Fedders.
Thirty- three years ago, she was the wife accusing her prominent spouse of serial abuse. Her then- husband, John Fedders, chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, was a tall, handsome lawyer with a very different public image than the one his family saw at home. Like Jennifer Willoughby, ex- wife of President Trump’s former staff secretary Rob Porter, Charlotte Fedders said she was regularly called an abusive name “to the point where it didn’t mean too much anymore.”
Fedders’ 1987 best- selling book, Shattered Dreams, became a TV movie starring LindsayWagner.
“It has just brought too many memories with all the similarities,” Fedders said, citing black eyes and a broken window. “It’s been hard.”
Back then, Fedders said, no one talked about that kind of abuse in the upper- middle- class, country- club world she inhabited.
She stayed for 17 years after her wedding in 1966, through the belittling, the physical abuse — including during her first pregnancy — and the weeks of silent treatment she and their children often got. Fedders said she thought things had changed. “I thoughtwe had put a lot of this stuff behind us, us as a country,” said Fedders, 74. “And it’s very disturbing to knowthat someonewould be in the WhiteHouse that close to the president without a full security clearance with this past that people knew about.”
Porter denies the allegations against him.
“I thought we had put a lot of this stuff behind us, us as a country.” Charlotte Fedders, who married John Fedders in 1966. Charlotte says the abuse started a few months after their wedding. She says people didn’t talk about abuse back then.