Lacy MacAuley a self-avowed anarchist and card-carrying member of Antifa. On Saturday afternoon she showed up in Washington to counterprotest the pro-Trump “Mother of all Rallies.” After causing a disruption, MacAuley was forced out by organizers and police to the chant of, “USA!”

MacAuley is also a bleeding heart apologist for Islam. So strong is her conviction that Islam is a religion of peace, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she ran off to Turkey to cohabitate with a Muslim man who raped and abused her constantly, a story told in Lacy’s own words, which I copied from her blog, below the following video below. Some people can’t learn from seeing bad things happen to other people, they have to experience it first hand for themselves.

My experience of intimate partner violence, trapped in Turkey

Maybe I reached too high, and had too far to fall. It has been two months since my return to the US. Intimate partner violence, or domestic abuse, was something I never imagined that I would stumble into. But misogyny and patriarchy run deep, especially in Turkey, and I found myself in a bad situation.

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I am a radical activist based in Washington DC. I fell in love with an energetic, charismatic activist I met in November when I was present to write about resistance to the G20 Summit, a global event in Antalya, Turkey. After I came home to the US, we talked every day. He was lovely and charming, I thought at the time. He offered a ready smile, engaging kindness, and intelligent conversation. He said all the right things to convince me that he cared about women’s rights and activism. In February, I decided to return to Turkey with the promise of love driving me forward. I couldn’t have known things would turn sour.

I thought that even if this were not going to develop into a deeper relationship, it would be an opportunity to learn more about this Muslim country during an interesting political moment, and I could do some work around refugees. I also thought, hey, at least I would probably make a dear friend.

The first two weeks were quite the love story. I observed that he was drinking heavily, and called him an “alky,” but it was just a joke at first. We went to the beach and historic sites, and he introduced me to his friends. All seemed to be going well, and I felt that the romance was solidly moving forward.

Then came our first fight. I had wanted to interview a local woman for an article on Syrian refugees. He did not approve. He knew the woman and did not like her, so he strictly forbade me from speaking with her. After I questioned his rationale, he yelled and stormed out of the room to go smoke a cigarette. I just stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do. Of course, as a Western woman, no one had ever forbidden me from speaking with anyone else. It was a strange feeling: Don’t I have a mouth to speak? Why can I not use it as I wish?

This is elementary feminism. No man has the power to silence a woman, just because he is a man. How far backwards things would slide in the coming weeks.

What I found over the next few weeks was absolute frustration of my efforts to do my advocacy work. I had put myself in a place of dependence upon a person who, as it turned out, would have liked to keep me by his side and control my every move. He hindered, rather than helped, the work I tried to do there.

After the first few weeks, I thought about leaving every day, but I had not budgeted for hotel rooms, flights, or buses, nor done the groundwork needed to act effectively there. I had assumed, based on things he’d said, that he’d be helping me with translation and navigating the system. But our conversations made it clear that he had no intention of helping, and was more interested in guilt-tripping me for wanting to do anything else than just spend time with him. I felt stuck.

Things deteriorated rapidly. His insecurity and childishness got worse. In the following weeks, I was violently pushed, blocked from leaving freely, and repeatedly told not to speak. If I spoke anyway, anger erupted. I endured threats that I would be burnt with cigarettes, flinching as he “faked” with his lit cigarette. I had to duck to avoid having sharp objects thrown at my face. I had water angrily poured over my head.

On one occasion, he threw my iPhone angrily to the ground (luckily it did not break) while I was trying to exchange contact information with an Irish woman. He had such a strange look about him that I feared for my safety when I got into the car with him to go home. He proceeded to drive like a maniac, accelerating menacingly towards a wall and recklessly endangering both of us. This was such a strange evening that the Irish woman I’d met earlier in the night actually sent a text message after I’d left, checking to make sure I was okay. Yes, I was, I told her, even if that wasn’t entirely true.

Another drunken, angry moment came after my abuser had arranged to borrow a car from his friend in order to drive across Turkey to visit a refugee camp and get an interview with a certain aid worker. (He did so only when I told him that I would take a bus alone.) The night after the interview, my abuser, holding my recording device in one hand and a beer in the other, threatened to delete the audio interview that we had both worked so hard to get. What triggered his anger that night? I had (politely) corrected him on a fact about the refugee camp that we had learned earlier in the day. I guess he couldn’t accept that his maleness did not equal permission to be right every single time. (I tricked him into giving me back the device, and I backed up the file immediately.)

Earlier that day, he had delayed our arrival at the interview, after pulling the car to the side of the road and irrationally threatening not to drive for another hour. He then decided to steer far out of the way in order to get a beer, despite my urging him to just drive straight to the interview site and get a beer later. We were in danger of missing the interview completely, if we did not arrive before the aid workers left for the day. But his anger had been triggered when he interpreted a vague, unimportant comment that I made about a road while looking out the window and away from him as “not listening” and “disrespecting” him. So thin and frail was his confidence.

Unwanted sex? Rape? All the time. He did not stop to determine whether I consented to sex. Several times, he turned off my wifi and lied about it, a modern-day form of gaslighting. He verbally criticized me for using social media, my main link to the rest of my life back in the US, and tried to discourage me from using it. He forced me to unfriend one Turkish man on Facebook, and wanted me to unfriend many more.

All the while, he drank heavily every day. I tried to pretend that everything was okay, that these challenges were minor, that I just needed to grin and bear it and try to get my work done. I told myself that this would not be permanent, that I just need to endure. Even though things got progressively worse, each time I looked to the horizon. I put silver linings on all of the clouds.

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Not a real smile. This selfie was taken a few moments after my abuser stormed away from me, when I refused to do cocaine with him and his friends. We were on a farm near the town of Serik, far from anything I’d known. I tried to just take solace by the river.