The police offered me a ride down to the station. When one of the detectives was filling out the report, I told him my full name. They paused, confusion blanketing their faces. “If you are Mrs. Maher, then who is the other woman in the station?” one of the detectives asked.
“What other woman?” I shot back.
Kevin’s other wife, Beth Maher—who I believed was his ex-wife—came down to the jail. I found out later from Kevin that he’d married Beth under the name Edward James Maher, and he married me under Kevin James Maher—while he was still legally married to another woman. At that moment I found out Kevin was a bigamist.
Shocked, I immediately walked out of the precinct.
I found out later that Beth resided in New Jersey, and Kevin helped lock up her previous husband, the father of her son. Kevin preyed upon Beth—much the same way he preyed upon me.
After the incident at the club, I quickly moved to Brooklyn and left no trail. However, it didn’t take Kevin long to find me. One day, out of the blue, he showed up on my doorstep, claiming that he had broken up with Beth. In truth, she had ended it with him. He also said that he had stopped using. It was a familiar story, but for some reason I bought into it one last time.
Kevin wanted to get back together with me and suggested that we move to the Poconos in Pennsylvania for a change of lifestyle and a fresh start. It wasn’t as if we had many choices of places where we could live, and the landlords in the Poconos were not exactly discerning. Our track record as tenants was pretty pathetic: we had moved eight times in a year and a half because we were kicked out of so many apartments and two-family homes in the tristate area. The problem was never that the rent was unpaid. I always paid it on time and in full. But we were always fighting loudly and violently, which, plus the occasional visits from the police, prompted several landlords to ask us to leave. They were sick and tired of trouble. Therefore, getting a reference from any of our previous landlords was not an option.
The gated community that we moved to was called the Pocono Country Place. Visitors had to go through a security checkpoint to get inside—this was a world away from where we had lived in the various boroughs of New York City—and the development was popular among families from Staten Island and Brooklyn, who could buy or rent vacation homes. The Pocono Country Place was equally busy in the warm months as in the cold; it manufactured snow that covered mountains in the winter and boasted a manmade lake with a beach for the summer.
I paid $1,400 a month to rent a simple yet pretty home for us. The houses were all brand-new, with tons of property and a great deal of privacy. You couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes. With this move, it seemed as if Kevin and I had finally achieved some peace of mind. Maybe this is what we needed, I thought. Maybe things will get normal.
Soon after we moved, I began working again at two different strip clubs: Shakers in Carlstadt and Satin Dolls in Lodi, both of which were in New Jersey. (Satin Dolls eventually became famous as the Bada Bing! club in the hit television series The Sopranos.)
The major difference between the exotic dance clubs in New York City and New Jersey is that New York City is topless and New Jersey is not. I disliked being topless. In the city, I often got into trouble because many times I didn’t want to take my top off. Even when I did take it off, I often had pasties on, which was something you weren’t supposed to do. The money was more or less the same, so going to dance in New Jersey was a welcome change.
Kevin would take me to work in his Porsche, driving all the way down Route 80 from the Poconos. Kevin started using drugs and drinking again shortly after we settled in. He became obsessed with every moment of my day and my total existence, going so far as to follow me into the bathroom. Then Kevin became fixated on the idea of my having a baby with him. It was just like when he was preoccupied with wanting to marry me—he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Getting me pregnant was all that he talked about. It seemed like just another way to control me.
The last thing I wanted to do was have a baby with Kevin, and I did my best not to. There is no foolproof means of birth control, but I was trying everything within my power to get my body to reject pregnancy. His obsession with me was only getting worse. As much as I dreamed of being a mother, bringing a child into our relationship would have been the ultimate crime.
Since I wasn’t getting pregnant, Kevin insisted we go to an ob-gyn to find out what the problem was with me. On examining me, the doctor didn’t see anything wrong with my reproductive system, but he did see a battered woman.
Kevin wouldn’t let me go into the examination room alone with the doctor, even though a nurse was present. He was completely paranoid. Kevin told the doctor that if I didn’t get pregnant it would be the doctor’s fault, and that if I went to see the doctor by myself and ended up getting pregnant, Kevin would think that the doctor was the father. In one breath he was asking the doctor for his professional help, and in the next breath he was accusing the doctor of having an affair with me. During one visit I said I was having bad menstrual cramps and had the nurse escort me to the bathroom. In reality I was creating an opportunity to get a message to the doctor through her that I didn’t want to have a baby with Kevin. After our conversation, she agreed to help me.
“You should come to our office every day,” the nurse said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we can give you a birth control pill every day if you come here.” She knew that if the doctor prescribed me birth control pills and Kevin found them, he’d be infuriated.
Per their advice, I stopped at the doctor’s office every day to get birth control pills. Kevin assumed that I was getting hormone injections to help me get pregnant. The doctor was giving me a combination of shots in my butt, but they were B12for energy as well as saline.
During my doctor visits, my trips to the bathroom with the nurse became more frequent. She began relating ways that I could escape from my relationship; she told me about support groups that could help me and said that if I came to their medical office alone, she and her husband would take me to the group meetings. I wished I had had the courage to go.
Things between Kevin and me got progressively worse. He took off at one point for a few days—for work or on a coke binge, I had no idea. It was a welcome relief, but I was waiting for the ball to drop.
Once, after I finished work at about 2:00 a.m., I drove back to the Poconos. When I entered the Pennsylvania side of Route 80, I looked in my rearview mirror and noticed Kevin tailing me. He began to follow me aggressively, and after a frightening cat-and-mouse chase on the highway, we both arrived home. I locked myself in the car and Kevin banged extremely hard on the window. I was terrified he would break the glass, causing us both bodily harm and enraging him further. I relented and unlocked the door, and he dragged me into the house. Kevin threw me down on the bed and said, “If you just make love to me, I’ll stop.”
Make love to him? I thought. Making love to Kevin was the furthest thing from my mind. My mind was twisting and turning. Would it be easier to just give Kevin what he wants? I thought. I gave in and stopped fighting it. During it, I began to cry—not the type of cry where you are bawling out loud. It was the kind of cry that you are not letting anyone know about. And yet, I was face-to-face with the person causing me to be upset. When it was all done, I put my back to him as I rolled over. Then I heard sobbing sounds. As I turned I noticed Kevin was sitting on the floor crying and looking at me apologetically. He kept telling me how beautiful I was, then asked, “Why do I keep hurting you? Why do I keep doing this? Help me. Please help me. I need your help.”
Although I didn’t know the exact psychological term, I thought Kevin suffered from a split personality disorder. I have to keep him from turning back into that other deranged person, I thought as he kept rambling on and on.
“If we just had a baby together,” Kevin pleaded, “then everything would be okay. Please.” At that moment I realized that I might have a chance to end this destructive rela
tionship. While Kevin was in his apologetic and sedate state, I decided to take a shot and let him know that we were finished. I simply couldn’t be with him anymore. I was crying as I told him our relationship was over.
Amazingly, Kevin seemed okay with it. He actually said that he was going to leave the house.
Really? That almost seemed too easy, I thought as it made me suspicious. I had never imagined that all I had to do was wait until he was on the timid side of one his mood swings and he would just leave. Before he left the house, Kevin said he had to go to the bathroom; a couple of minutes later I heard heavy sniffing going on inside. Kevin was snorting coke—big-time.
When Kevin came out of the bathroom, he immediately took me by the back of my neck and threw me up against the wall.
I prayed for an angel to hear me, because nobody else was going to hear my screams in the wilderness. The peaceful and isolated home that I had thought might change our relationship for the better turned out to be the most dangerous place I could have been in.
10
THE LAST DANCE
Ring, ring, ring…
I could hear the phone in the kitchen of our Poconos home, but I didn’t have the strength to answer it. I could barely move. I was lying on the floor near the staircase, terrified and in severe pain.
The brawl that had been going on for hours between Kevin and me had finally reached a time-out. Kevin was sitting on the floor nearby, confused. This was, of course, a now-familiar pattern to me—he would come on like a crazed animal and exhaust himself by beating the hell out of me. Then he would usually sit there crying, telling me how sorry he was, claiming that he couldn’t understand why he did these terrible things to me. But this time he wasn’t saying anything at all. Kevin just stared straight ahead with a blank look on his face.
The police arrived and tried to enter the house a few times by knocking on the front door, but to no avail. Eventually they went to the back sliding-glass door, and they could see through the window that the house was in disarray. They forced their way in and discovered me at the bottom of the steps. I didn’t have the strength to say much, but they could tell that I was pretty beaten up. They asked me who did it to me and I told them that it was my husband.
Kevin was still sitting near me in a daze when the police arrived. He admitted to the authorities what he had done. What choice did he have but to confess? From the way I looked, it was clear what had happened. Kevin was put in handcuffs and was cooperative with the cops—a much calmer scene compared to the time that he was arrested at Gallagher’s.
The officers helped me to my feet. Suddenly I heard my name called out by my mother: “Beverly!” At first I thought I was imagining things. Then my mom appeared before me with my cousin Barbara, who was quite a bit older than me. She immediately wrapped her arms around me, so happy to find I was still alive.
My mother had been phoning the house, trying to reach me. She had become extremely concerned because she hadn’t heard from me in a few days because, the last time we spoke, I had told her that things weren’t going well between Kevin and me. Mom was aware of Kevin’s violent behavior, and my silence and her intuition about what it meant had prompted her to jump in the car and come to my rescue.
While they were driving en route, Mom and Barbara had kept stopping and calling my house from pay phones, desperately trying to contact me. But I wasn’t answering. Along the way, they checked the clubs where I had been working and learned that I hadn’t been seen in days. Mom was extremely worried and feared the worst, so she called the local police.
While Kevin was put in the back of a police car, I was put in the back of an ambulance and taken to the nearest Pennsylvania hospital. I spent a couple of days recovering from a concussion and assorted contusions. My cuts and lacerations didn’t require stitches, but my head was pretty banged up. The hospital did various CAT scans on me and conducted several blood tests; the doctors discovered my blood pressure was dangerously low and monitored me for a few days.
When I got out of the hospital, my mom decided that I should stay at her home for a while to regroup. When my mom finally divorced my dad, I wanted to help her so I bought her a modest home in Jamestown, New York, a small town close to Buffalo and known for being the birthplace of Hollywood legend Lucille Ball. My mother had since settled into her life there and was quite happy. She was working as an insurance agent and lived a modest but fulfilling life.
When I arrived in the town, located at the heart of a snow belt, it was winter with subzero temperatures, but everyone who lived there shared a closeness. On Sundays, we’d all pile into a house the size of my living room to watch a football game. The women weren’t catty and the men didn’t treat me like a piece of meat. Nobody was flashy. Everyone would just throw on a pair of jeans and snow boots—not Burberry or Gucci boots, just boots—and go about his or her business. It was a nice change of pace and the perfect place for me to finally get some much-needed rest and relaxation.
One night, I came home from a local pub with a group of friends. When we pulled up to my mom’s house, she ran outside, panic-stricken. She pulled me into the house and said, “He was here!”
Kevin had a restraining order against him. Maybe he thought that since I was now in New York State and not Pennsylvania it couldn’t be enforced.
My mom told me she had taken care of the situation. I didn’t ask her any questions. I didn’t want to ask questions. My mom had taken care of me—her daughter. It was rare for me to relinquish all control, but I was exhausted and gave in.
After some time, I left Jamestown and headed back to New Jersey. I moved into an apartment with a couple of friends in Parsippany. My next step was to divorce Kevin. I didn’t think Kevin was going to sign divorce papers, so my attorney advised me to file for divorce due to abandonment, which didn’t require Kevin’s signature. He informed me that if you’re seeking divorce on the grounds of abandonment, you have to make it seem as if you’re actively looking for your spouse, so we ran a “missing person” ad in the local newspaper every day for eighteen months. With Kevin in jail, the plan worked.
I started dancing again and was making good money. I moved into my own place and things finally started looking up. One afternoon while working at Shakers, I met a customer named Tom. I didn’t pay him much attention, but I must’ve certainly caught his eye because he tipped me extremely well. The next afternoon he came back, and the day after that and the day after that.
Tom had sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and looked to be in his thirties. He told me he was recently divorced with no children. He worked in the area and would come to Shakers on his lunch break. Tom was a successful businessman; along with his brother, Jerry, he owned and ran a lucrative family business that manufactured the best-selling in-home treadmill unit in the world. Tom made a good living, to say the least.
Tom began coming to the club more and more often and giving me expensive gifts—TAG Heuer watches, diamond rings in the shape of the letter D in script, and other lavish items. The other dancers saw how Tom treated me and tried to make their own moves on him, but he would brush them aside. His focus was on me.
Tom told me that he fell in love with me at first sight. Love? More like lust, I thought. Even though I wasn’t really buying it, he did seem genuine. Tom wanted to take me out on a date, but he was a customer and I didn’t want to go there. Plus, for the first time in a long time I wasn’t in a relationship, and I was enjoying my newfound freedom.
While the abandonment papers were being processed, I went to therapy. During my probation, I went to group counseling, but I’d never attended a one-on-one session. I knew I had a lot of unresolved issues in my life, and I realized that I needed to work on myself before I could be good for anyone else.
While in therapy, one of the issues I tackled head-on was my previous nineteen marriage engagements. When I talked about being engaged nineteen times on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, people immediately jumped to conclusions and thought, Oh, my God, Dan
ielle slept with all of those men! Did I have sex with some of them? Absolutely. Did I sleep with all nineteen? Absolutely not. Some of these men asked me to marry them after just one kiss. Some after just two dates. For me, it was all a big, twisted game—a contest within myself to see how fast these men would ask me to marry them and put a ring on my finger.
Looking back, these nineteen men loved me enough to marry me and spend the rest of their lives with me. In return, I took a major chunk of their hearts, ripped them out, and stomped all over them. I didn’t stop there. I allowed these guys to take me home to meet their families, even though I knew that I had no intention of marrying them. Their mothers would ask me a series of questions, mainly regarding devotion, dedication, and wifely duties, and I would always respond enthusiastically. I told them anything they wanted to hear to secure their blessings, and once I got the ring, I handed it back to the guys and said, “Bye-bye.” It was a sick cycle and a nasty thing for me to do. I’m not proud of it. I wasn’t proud of it back then. I was just caught up in it.
Through therapy, I realized that my putting these men through this rejection and heartbreak was a direct result of my being sexually abused as a child. I felt that by hurting these men, I was punishing the past abusers. But what I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t punishing anyone except myself and these innocent young men who were falling in love with me. I wanted to see them suffer. I wanted them to feel pain. That’s what made me feel good, until it didn’t feel good any longer. I don’t remember what triggered me to stop this horrible behavior, but one day something clicked and I realized that what I had been doing was terribly wrong. Although I didn’t understand yet why I was doing it, I did have an epiphany of sorts. That was the beginning of my realization that you need to do unto others as you see fit for yourself.
The Naked Truth: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewife of New Jersey--In Her Own Words Page 11
