"I really thought he would kill me": Erin Molan opens up about abusive relationship
Warning: This article contains discussions of domestic violence which some readers may find confronting
Radio and TV presenter Erin Molan has opened up for the first time about horrific abuse she endured at the hands of an ex-partner.
Speaking candidly to the Sunday Telegraph, the 40-year-old presenter recalled many of her "worst" moments with her former boyfriend, sharing how she feared for her life when he became physically abusive.
'“He came in drunk and dragged me out of bed and started stamping his foot into my head over and over and over,” she told the publication.
“I was lying on the floor screaming and normally if I screamed really loudly he would stop because neighbours would hear. But that time he just kept going and going and it felt like my skull was going to crack open.”
She said the relentless physical violence became a pattern of behaviour, and she would regularly be brutally injured.
“One time he smashed a bottle over my head,” she says. “Another time I was terrified he’d throw me off a balcony. Once I ran to hide in my car and he got a rubbish bin and started smashing it against the windscreen and I feared I would be killed by glass shattering over me.
“Another time he covered my face with a pillow so I couldn’t breathe. I was crying for my mum. I really thought he would kill me.”
Molan said she chose not publicly discuss the abuse while her beloved dad, Senator Jim Molan, was alive because she didn’t want to break his heart, but now she wants others to know what she went through.
In sharing her heartbreaking story, she also hopes she can give other victims of domestic violence the courage to come forward.
“I’m not sharing my story because I want to. My preference would be for this part of my life to never be shared but with every single death I see in this space, a part of me wonders whether I could have made a difference,” she says.
“Could my experience have made these beautiful, innocent women feel less alone, less ashamed, less scared and could that have been the tiny thing that may have empowered them to ask for help, the thing that might have helped to save their lives?”
Molan added that while it’s confronting for her to speak out, she wants things to change, not just for her generation but for her daughter’s.
As she says, “I want to worry about my daughter’s first boyfriend breaking her heart, not her bones.”
Image credits: for AWAPAC/Shutterstock Editorial