Tiffany: “I’m not a liar, you can look on Facebook. The pictures are on Facebook.”
He was choking the shit out of me, my eyes like went red, and I was just looking at him. I didn’t try to hit him back or nothing. I was just like . . . I couldn’t believe it. I thought to myself, This is how I’m going to die. I’m going to die, because I was having fun with my classmates. That’s what I was thinking.
Then he just dropped me.
Ex-Husband: “Anytime you just change your mind about what you’re going to do, when you get sidetracked, you call me and you tell me where the fuck you at, because I need to know. It is my job to protect you, and you have to tell me where you at, and what the fuck you’re doing, because I have to protect you. It’s my job as your husband to protect you.”
Tiffany: “But I was safe. I felt safe. I didn’t need you. I don’t need you to protect me.”
I slept in the guest room for like two weeks after that. I thought I was going to leave, but I didn’t. Once I had taken him back after the first incident, I guess that was it. I accepted that this was part of our relationship.
A few months later, I had to go to Montreal to do the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. I was scheduled to be there for two weeks. I had a great time the first week. The second week, he came to visit me.
He would not leave my side, and all I wanted to do was hang out with all the comedians down in the lobby. We’d be talking and cracking jokes and stuff, up till like three, four in the morning, just hanging out, laughing, and talking. Dom Irrera was there, and he and Dom were talking, and he basically spent an hour telling Dom how everybody’s fake and phony. Saying stuff like he knows they’re all trying to fuck me and all this stuff.
Tiffany: “What if they are trying to fuck me? I’m not going to fuck them. They would have to like gang rape me to get me. Like, I’m not going to do that.”
Ex-Husband: “Yeah, bullshit, bullshit. You’d probably like it.”
Then Tom Green comes over, and he is talking to me and making me laugh so hard. I was just laughing and laughing, and that shit was making my ex-husband so mad. He grabbed me by my collar, he was like, “It’s time to go to the room now,” in front of everybody. Just snatched me by my shirt, and pulled me to the elevator, and threw me in it.
Jo Koy was in the elevator, and I think Adam Ray was, too.
Jo: “You all right, Tiff? Is everything okay? Are you good? Are you good?”
Ex-Husband: “She’s fine. She’s just fine. You all stop fucking talking to her. Getting tired of everybody talking to her motherfucking ass.”
Tiffany: “I’m okay guys. I’m okay. I’m all right.”
I was just trying to make a silly face, trying to be cool, or whatever. Anything to avoid the mortifying embarrassment I was feeling.
Once we got to our hotel room, he was so quick. He snatched me by the neck and slammed me into the wall.
Ex-Husband: “Don’t you ever fucking embarrass me like that again. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I had a knot on the side of my head from where he slammed me into the wall, and all these marks on my throat, where he had dug in his nails. I’d had enough.
Tiffany: “Look, straight-up you need to leave, or I’m going to call the police on you. You’re going to go to jail in Canada. I’m going to call the police.”
He refused to leave, so I go to grab the phone, and he rips it out of the wall.
Tiffany: “You really need to leave or I’m going to the police. I haven’t been to the police before, but there’s nail marks on my throat, I’m getting a knot on the side of my head. You need to leave. You really need to go back to California, get the fuck up out of here, because I’m calling the police.”
Ex-Husband: “I ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t going no-motherfucking-where.”
Then I just got really quiet, really calm, like just curled up in the corner, just got really quiet. I let him yell at me. He went into the bathroom, and I bolted out the door, down the stairs, and now I was running around the streets of Montreal.
I was running past the other comedians—full-on running. They were calling out, “Yo Tiff, where are you going? What you running for? What you running from?”
I wasn’t about to stop and talk to them. I was too embarrassed, too scared, too upset, too fucked up to talk to anyone. I needed help, but I wasn’t about to ask for, or take, any.
I roamed the streets of Montreal till about eight o’clock in the morning. Just walking around. Just roaming. Anything I saw that looked like him, I ran down another street. I was tripping. When I got back to the room, about nine o’clock in the morning, he was gone. All his stuff was gone.
During this time in my life, I had dedicated myself to becoming a better wife, so I had started studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses. He liked that.
Ex-Husband: “Yeah, I’ll never be a Jehovah’s Witness, but you should be one, because they know how to be submissive. They’re submissive to their men. They do whatever their men tell them to do, so that’s what you should do.”
The Jehovah’s Witnesses do Bible study on Skype. When I got back to my hotel room at nine in the morning, they hit me up on Skype for our regular Bible study.
JW: “What happened to you?”
I hadn’t even looked at myself, and when I saw myself on the Skype . . . I saw there was a knot on my forehead, there were all these welt marks across my throat.
Tiffany: “Oh man. My husband came out here, we got into it, he choked me.”
Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in divorce. Not for any reason. They were all like:
JW: “You need to get a divorce. You have to get out of this.”
Then the lady leading the Bible study calls her husband. Her husband’s an elder, but she gets him on Skype right away.
JW: “Look at Tiffany. Look at her. She needs to get a divorce. Don’t you think?”
He is an elder, he is big-time. At first, he started off with the normal lines:
Elder: “Nobody gets divorced. We could talk through this. You could work it out.”
JW: “LOOK AT HER FACE!”
He got real quiet. Then he said in a solemn voice:
Elder: “You have to get a divorce. When you come back from Montreal, you’re staying with us. You have to get a divorce. You cannot be in a relationship like this. This is not going to work, Tiffany. This man is not godly.”
They started reading all the Bible scriptures to me about it. I was crying and stuff, and I had a show to do in a few hours.
Tiffany: “I really need to take a nap. I got a show.”
I went to sleep.
I woke up confused about where I was. I had forgotten that I got my ass whipped by my husband. My reflection in the mirror was a shock.
I put makeup on my neck and pulled my bangs over the knot on my forehead.
When I got to the stage, the lights were unexpectedly bright. They were hot. When my makeup started running, everyone there could tell I had been beaten. They could see the marks.