“Dear Sister” Explores “Twin Darknesses of Private Violence and Carceral Violence” https://ift.tt/l8GsIdn
Michelle Horton was a newly-single mom headed to her job at a retreat center north of Poughkeepsie when a knock from the police upended her family’s life. Horton’s sister, Nikki Addimando, had been arrested for the murder of her partner, Chris Grover. Addimando and Grover’s children were waiting at the police station for Horton to pick them up.
That September morning becomes the fulcrum of Horton’s debut memoir, Dear Sister: A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds. Horton’s story extends backward in time and forward, through Addimando’s glacial court case, the grim reality of raising a two- and four-year-old forcibly separated from their mother, and Horton’s thick guilt of having missed the signs that Chris Grover had been brutally abusing her sister for years. Horton describes herself as one of many “good, loving people who […] don’t see the red flags of domestic violence” and she describes her sister as “just one of a staggering number of women who survive domestic violence only to face State violence.”
In New York prisons, two out of every three women who killed someone close to them had been abused by the person they killed. After enduring “unthinkable violence behind closed doors,” writes Horton, these survivors disappear anew into State custody. “Many of them,” she continues, “are enduring the most unbearable punishment imaginable: being separated from their children.” Horton writes Dear Sister into the twin darknesses of private violence and carceral violence. Prisons are full of survivors like Addimando, who had to make the worst choice imaginable, for themselves and for their kids: kill or be killed. Most of these women do not have the resources Horton marshaled around her sister. Most of their cases do not attract media attention. Most do not have a memoir written about how their decision to live rather than die ruptured their entire lives.
Horton reveals her sister’s horrors to us incrementally, just as they were revealed to Horton. Soon after the arrest, Horton meets with an investigator and her sister’s therapist. They tell her about the time Grover heated a metal spoon over the gas stove and pressed it to Addimando’s vulva, “burning her inside and out” and sending her to the hospital, where she submitted to a full forensic exam. “Is this the worst I’m going to hear?” Horton asks. The answer from the therapist: “no.”
Addimando’s case is full of documentation like the forensic exam. Therapy records, hospital records, prenatal records, danger assessments and lethality assessments, photographs and screenshots all point to Grover’s abuse. Even before his death, her case was flagged by the county’s coordinated domestic violence response team “including the District Attorney’s Office, Family Services (where [Addimando’s therapist] worked), the courts, probation, Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, local and state police, and several domestic violence shelters,” Horton writes. And Grover broadcasted Addimando’s repeated rapes online. “The abuse was recorded and uploaded in videos that were so violent and disturbing that a police officer in our hometown had tracked the porn site where Chris had posted them, taken screen shots, and compiled a report for the DA’s Office,” writes Horton. The police alert stated that Grover had a gun and that Addimando and her children were at high risk.
Horton writes backward in time from that September morning, through the generations of women in her family who were abused, raped, and silenced; through her own childhood and the open secret of what happened to Addimando at age five; through the culture of femininity into which she and her sister were raised. (“Learn to like it,” their mom taught them about sex: “boys have needs.”) Horton traces her sister’s revictimization, how her own family repeatedly disbelieved Addimando and habituated her to silence. Horton catalogs each time she herself avoided asking her sister an uncomfortable question, each time she ignored or excused one of her sister’s injuries: “Nikki hiding the most disturbing parts of her life, and my brain’s ability to unsee the evidence in front of me, grew from the same root.”
Again and again, she names and examines “a complex system of concealment and denial.” Concealment and denial: the organizing principle of her family. Concealment and denial: the propellant of private violence. Concealment and denial: the prosecutorial trial strategy in The People v. Nicole Addimando.
Days before convening a grand jury, Prosecutor Chana Krauss successfully petitions the court to remove Addimando’s entire legal team. In front of the grand jury, Krauss guides a detective into suggesting Grover’s gun may have been wiped clean of fingerprints, when, in fact, police know without a doubt that it wasn’t. Pre-trial, Krauss suppresses much of the evidence of Grover’s abuse. Addimando’s own defense attorneys decline to show the jury the most graphic images Grover recorded of himself raping and torturing her. “We don’t want to shock the jury,” Addimando’s lawyers explain. Meanwhile, Krauss interprets Addimando’s repeated victimization as evidence that she is a woman who invites sexual violence; she is a manipulator; she is a calculating murderer. “This truly was an abusive relationship,” Krauss declares. “Only the Defendant [Addimando] was the abuser.”
In her seminal book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman writes: “In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” After reading Dear Sister, we might add: if the perpetrator dies and his victim survives, the court will do this all for him. This is the clear-eyed indictment of the “justice” system Michelle Bowdler makes in her 2020 Is Rape a Crime?, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Dear Sister stands alongside both Bowdler’s memoir and Chanel Miller’s bestselling 2019 Know My Name.
It is a testament to Horton’s command as a writer that we do not look away from the horror. She buoys us with Addimando’s undying devotion to her kids, Ben and Faye. “I begged him to let us leave,” Addimando tells Horton the day she’s arrested. “And he wouldn’t […] he said, ‘I’m going to kill you and myself and your kids will have no one.’” In the end, the court, rather than Grover, robbed Ben and Faye of their mom.
Addimando is a joyful, honest, and deeply attuned mom, despite her trauma and incarceration. The county and state of New York utterly and gruesomely fail her kids, beginning with the CPS investigation that sends Grover into a homicidal rage the night before police knock on Horton’s door.
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