Front Burner - Front Burner Introduces: Welcome to Paradise

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Anna Maria Tremonti has been keeping her past a secret for over 40 years. As one of Canada’s most respected journalists, she has a reputation for being fearless. She’s reported from some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. But there’s one story she’s never made public: when she was 23 years old, she married a man who became physically abusive. This is the first time Anna Maria has told anyone—including family or close friends—the details of what she endured. Working with her therapist, she reveals the intimate details of a past she’s kept to herself for most of her life. If you or someone you know is affected by intimate partner violence, you can find a list of resources at cbc.ca/WTPresources. More episodes are available at: hyperurl.co/welcometoparadise

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, everybody. We have a special bonus for FrontBurners podcast subscribers today. It's the first episode of a brand new series from CBC podcast called Welcome to Paradise. Anna Maria Tremonti's name may be familiar to a lot of listeners. For years, she was the host of CBC's The Current. Before that,

she reported from some of the world's most dangerous conflict zones, and she has a reputation for being fearless. But there's one story she's never made public. When she was 23 years old, she married a man who became physically abusive. This is the first time Anna Maria has told anyone, including family or close friends, the details of what she endured. The result is this profoundly intimate portrait of a powerful woman confronting the source of tremendous pain and trauma of intimate partner abuse, and remarkably, freeing herself from a lifelong sense of shame. We have the first episode for you right now. Please have a listen. Hi, just a warning before we start. There are some references to intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and trauma in this series. Please take care.

you that went through all this hardship, suffered, does that part say, I'm allowed to do this, or I'm not allowed to do this? Yeah, a bit. I mean, it's funny, when I first pitched this podcast, I wanted to talk about this is a good news story. You know, I moved on, I've had a good life, and I have. But the fact that 40 years later, I am still struggling with how to tell it the fact that 40 years later, it's there's still a part of me that's bothered by it. That's the other thing. Like, really, do you really want to tell a 25-year-old that 40 years from now, she'll still be bothered by it? I don't know. And I internalized a lot of it for a long time. long time. I've done years of therapy. And most days, I feel like I've moved on. But lately, I've been feeling the need to talk about what happened to me. So I have a new therapist, Farzana. Like, why don't we just jump in there, the sticky? Why am I doing this? Okay,, why don't we just jump in there?

The sticky, why am I doing this? Okay. So why don't we just talk to the part that is protesting that says, stop it, don't do this. Yeah, I guess it's the idea that part of me is very private. I think there are things that, places where I don't want to go,

and I think if I'm really going to tell this story, I have to go there. It's not that I'm uncomfortable being public. I've spent decades reporting, going to dangerous places, confronting people in power, and then for years hosting one of the biggest radio current affairs shows in Canada, The Current. But the story I want to tell now hasn't been public. Sure, some people know a bit. Family, friends, a few colleagues. They were all surprised when they found out. They would never have guessed this thing about me. We can all hide things. And when I'm in

broadcast mode, this voice of mine has hidden my greatest secret. My name is Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is my story. Welcome to Paradise. This cart is full of little notebooks, like things that I was working with in the field, so I would have scripts scribbled in there. I've been going through my old notes, tapes, scripts. I've got a bunch of cassette tapes here. I never realized what a pack rat I can be. Frankly, I don't even know what's on them.

I'm going to have to sit and listen to them all. Lines are already forming, and the flurry at this postal station shows many people are doing their best to make sure their little bit of Christmas arrives on time. I've always loved being a reporter. When I first started, I covered small-town news. Listen, the tide is out. Starting on the east coast of Canada, moving west to Alberta,

right in the middle of her riding is the West Edmonton Mall. of Canada, moving west to Alberta, with lead stories on the national news from Ottawa. It is part of the scenery on Parliament Hill. Protesters march and wave flatters. They came to Parliament Hill beating the traditional drums of their ancestors. The cabinet has decided on a course of action to try to dissipate the criticism. Reporting was my ticket to go anywhere, ask anything, see everything. Maria Tromati, CBC News, Ottawa.

Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. And the more I covered, the greater my ambitions. They tore down most of the Berlin Wall, but they left some of the stands. Eventually, I got my first international posting in Berlin. It was 1991, and it was my job to cover the massive changes reshaping Eastern Europe. A lot of those countries shed the shackles of communism peacefully.

But in Yugoslavia, it was a vicious breakup. It was civil war. And I pushed to get in there. The civilians of East Mostar are trapped. On the one side, almost in a semicircle in the hills behind me, are the Croats. On the other side are the Serbs. I was with the first wave of journalists covering the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. For the children growing up here, a day of innocent play can turn to tragedy. He was playing out and then I heard a scream and I went out and see he was wounded. I went out and see he was wounded. On those trips, I'd stand in front of the camera in a dark blue flak jacket,

with my blood type written in white just above my heart. Another sniper in Sarajevo. A man on a bike, clearly an unarmed civilian, is shot at but pedals furiously and escapes unharmed. Pedestrians race in crouching positions through open spaces to shelter behind garbage bins and rail cars. Behind me, you'd see buildings collapsed in on themselves. Walls cratered and pockmarked by shrapnel and mortar fire. The battles on the streets and in the hills don't stop. The people in my stories are hollow-eyed.

They look overwhelmed. This situation was created by madmen, he said. But I seem pretty fearless. My voice steady and clear. There is no end in sight for East Mostar. The danger is constant. Anna Maria Tremonti, CBC News, East Mostar. That's the version of myself I've presented throughout my career.

Inquisitive. Unrelenting. Unafraid. The war in Bosnia was a pivotal moment for me. As a journalist, trying to understand layers of conflict, but also just as a human being, watching people trying to survive. Seeing how lives that until recently weren't so different from mine were now disrupted, ripped apart.

I kept trying to process it, scribbling observations in those little reporter notebooks of mine. This one says March 1993. The road to hell winds through significant portions of paradise, through sprawling snow-capped mountains, by cluttered farmyards, over bottle-green rivers. But there's always another checkpoint, another house ripped apart by shellfire. Maybe we all travel towards hell and are fooled, lulled by pockets of paradise along the way. pockets of paradise along the way.

Maybe the paradise is the devil's trick of keeping us on a steady path of certain destruction. Or maybe all war is a lethal mix of danger and paradise. How else could anyone be enticed to fight or to cover it. I went in and out of Bosnia for three years. I lost track of how many trips. I got so used to the booms of heavy artillery that I wouldn't even flinch at the sounds. But then I'd go home to Berlin, and there's a sound the buses there would make.

The brakes had this high-pitched whine. It sounded like incoming artillery. And then I'd flinch. I'd remember all those people stuck in Sarajevo and think, I have to go back. For the longest time, I told myself that I kept returning because I felt an obligation

to tell the story of ordinary people caught in violence that they couldn't control, couldn't be blamed for. But there was something else. The fact is, I didn't carry the trauma of violence home with me from Bosnia. I carried my own trauma into Bosnia. I love you. organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%.

That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I don't know if I've talked to you about the night I looked in the mirror. No. That was my moment of truth. My moment of understanding how nothing I was.

How nothing you were, were like in his eyes. No, in my own. When I was 23 years old, I married a man who beat me. That marriage lasted a year. But what happened in that short time changed my life and for a very long time it controlled the way I felt about myself the way I saw myself I looked at my face I looked into my own eyes, and I didn't recognize myself.

Who did you see? I don't know who she was. And it wasn't that I was bruised or anything like that. He hadn't touched my face. It was whatever was in my eyes. And it was just an affirmation that there was nothing there. an affirmation that there was nothing there. Anytime I've thought about telling my story, I've always returned to this particular moment, standing in front of the mirror. I wrote it down. I could read it to you, but I don't have it right in front of me. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me two seconds. I'll get it. That's all right. Take your time. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Give me two seconds. I'll get it. That's all right. Take your time. I've written and rewritten versions of this moment in my personal journals. Let me see. It was a Sunday night. He'd beat me up that afternoon. On and off for hours. Okay. Okay, so this is the... hold on, I'm all twisted here. This is, it starts

with, so it is late, dark by this time. I go to the powder room on the main floor. I look in the mirror and I cannot recognize the face looking back at me. I've been crying. My face is puffy. My hair is askew. But it isn't that which makes my blood run cold. I look into my own eyes and see absolutely nothing. No one. I am unrecognizable even to myself. It is as if he has taken whatever's inside of me and ripped it away. I have never felt such emptiness, such untethered unbeing. I look down and look up again and still see nothing. No one.

It is a moment of non-existence. I resolve nothing in this moment. I make no pledge to change my life. I make no promise to myself to cherish myself. I do nothing but stare. And then some deep survival instinct makes me step away and prepare myself in case he descends that staircase and comes after me again. It doesn't occur to me to leave, But then again, I have nowhere to go. So just pause for a second here. Your body can withstand a lot. But in that moment, something inside of you was breaking or had left, had dissociated or something.

Yeah. That's big. Yeah. Yeah. That year I was punched, kicked, choked, threatened with murder. The more I thought about it that first time, I remember thinking, one, it was an aberration. It was a one-off. This is a bad thing to happen to you.

This is a bad thing for someone you love to do to you. a bad thing to happen to you. This is a bad thing for someone you love to do to you. And I thought, oh, well, you know, had I acted a little differently, he wouldn't have responded that way. So I kind of triggered him to do this. And so when it happened the next time, and the next time, it was like this cumulative thing, right? Like suddenly it's not a one-off anymore. And, you know, I'm jumping ahead and I don't mean to. I'm just kind of processing. Like I knew this isn't right.

Like I knew this isn't right. And at some point I eventually realized you're one of those people you hear about, Anna Maria. What does it mean to be one of those people? Well, I think there's some denial. No, I'm not one of those people. It's not supposed to happen to you. It's supposed to happen to people who don't know better, whatever that means. And there's shame.

But I remember I was standing in a grocery store in Halifax, and I was standing behind this woman. But I looked at her and I thought, you know, they must have a nice life. They've got this grocery for their family, though, you know, they're going through a good life. They have no idea that I'm going through like this crap right now. But then I thought, well, they don't know about you. And you don't know, you don't know about her. You don't know what she's going through. Like it was my moment of clarity that you're walking by other women just like you. Yes. And you don't know what she's going through. Like it was my moment of clarity that you're walking by other women just like you. Yes.

And you don't know each other. And it's almost like I am one of these women too. Yeah. Even though I've never mentioned my own experience, what happened to me has always informed my work as a reporter. The morning of May 25, a truck came. They started collecting people. People who could not climb on the tracks were shot on the

spot. This is from a documentary I made about returning to Bosnia 20 years after the fighting there began. They took me to a room. Inside there was a couch and it was stained with blood. I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew what was going to happen to me. Part of what made that conflict so terrible was the systematic sexual torture of women. In the end, he raped me. For decades, I've pushed to cover gender-based violence. Girls subjected to female genital mutilation,

women forced into sexual slavery by ISIS, the staggering injustice around missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. I've thought about all these women a lot over the years. Their stories are so underreported that I think, who am I to focus on what happened to me when what happened to them is barely acknowledged? I've told myself that this is the way I deal with my own history. I use my own pain and understanding to help others who want to tell their stories of abuse.

Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is The Current. Around the world this weekend, people marked International Women's Day, a day to speak out against violence against women. marked International Women's Day, a day to speak out against violence against women. In this country, 25% of all women who are murdered by a spouse have already left the relationship. Today, the story of one woman who is out of her abusive relationship but still lives in fear. But then, a few years ago, I met a woman through the airwaves. Here is my conversation with the woman we are calling Naomi. We were in different studios. Hello.

Different cities. Hi there. You have been away from your abusive partner for more than five years. Yes. But you're still afraid. Yes, of course. There's always long-term danger, you know, especially with those of us with children. I'm constantly in a state of concern and worry.

And there isn't a day that goes by that I don't drop my children off at school and worry that they won't be there when I get home. Sorry. Well, don't apologize to me. I'm sorry. Well, don't apologize to me. I appreciate you talking about something which is obviously very difficult and very, very real. You mentioned that this is someone who keeps firearms.

Yes. The type of person that he was, I was already scared. I was already as scared as I could be. He didn't even need the gun. But it's not to say that it wasn't used and I didn't have it in my face or in my mouth that many times. He would use whatever was close. If he had the gun, he'd use the gun. If he had a telephone, it'd be a telephone. If it'd be his hands, it'd be his hands. I can remember being in the relationship and being in public places and him abusing me in public. And, you know, people just walk by.

How did you manage to get out? to get out? You know, it was sort of at that breaking point, you know, I, you know, he would do things that were just unbearable. I was so dead inside anyway, that I felt like at this point, I didn't care if he killed me, that at least it would be over and that I had to at least try to get out. At one point, it got so intense and detailed that I was worried she would still be identifiable, that her ex might hear. I asked our sound technician to stop recording. And then as we talked things through with the recording stopped, I found myself telling Naomi what had happened to me.

It just came out, and we both started to cry. I'd finally reached the point where my silence was no longer something that gave me empathy to connect with women like Naomi. My silence was becoming a lie. And I think that the thing that keeps this so silent is that we're not talking about the truth of the matter, right? We're not talking about the truth that no one is immune. Yeah. And particularly no woman is immune.

Like this happened to you because you're a woman. Right? Yes, it did. It's the only reason. It's the only reason it happened to you. Yeah. Like there wasn't anything you said that was wrong or that made it happen no no he did it because he could he did it because he could he did it because he could because i was his partner and he had that power over me. Yes. So in that moment, when I looked in the mirror and couldn't recognize myself, I was my own metaphor.

We all look away. I mean, look at the numbers of women between the ages of 15 and 49 who have been in a relationship. One third, one third worldwide have been physically or sexually assaulted by a partner. We know women are disproportionately affected by intimate partner violence, but of course all genders can be victims. And so many of us are silent. We have our reasons. I just know that I am, frankly, lucky that it was one year.

Because I do know enough to know that very few women get just one year. And then I start to think about, like, it almost feels ridiculous that I never talked about this till now. The idea that I didn't think... Let's work on this, because intellectually you know, like, lots of good reasons why people don't talk about these things, but it's still bugging you, right?

Yeah. It feels akin to, I don't know why I didn't leave earlier. Now, that's not what you're saying, but you're saying instead, why didn't know why I didn't leave earlier. Now, that's not what you're saying. But you're saying instead, why didn't I talk about this sooner? Yeah, you're right. You're right. Do you want to do you want to try to do a little play around this? Like, this is a technique and it's been quite well researched. Although it is a bit fringy.

Let's be honest. Fringe away. But what you do is you kind of just monkey see, monkey do. You're going to follow me and we're going to tap on different parts of the body. So the first thing we're going to do is you're just going to rub clockwise on your chest here. So this is the heart chakra. Okay. So rub here and say to yourself,

even though it took me decades to be able to talk about this, I fully love and respect myself. Do I say this out loud or I just say it? Yeah, say it out loud. It has more power. Okay. So even though it has taken me decades to talk about this, I respect myself and I love myself. So tap right above the eyebrows here. I feel so guilty for taking so long to talk about this. I feel so guilty for taking so long.

I should have done this sooner. I should have done this sooner. I could have had less self-loathing. I could have had less self-loathing. And now we're going to do another round, but with the self-compassion statements. Okay? Mm-hmm. What's the empowering statement you might want to say? Well, I'm telling it now, and this is the right time for me. There might even be some wisdom in waiting. And there might even be some wisdom because I waited. I might be able to tell a better story now. Maybe I can tell the story that I need to tell now. It's actually the most courageous thing to do something like this.

It's actually pretty courageous to do this. I'm able now. I'm able. I'm strong now. I'm strong now. I'm breaking silence. I'm breaking silence. I'm breaking silence. And then take a big deep breath. This season on Welcome to Paradise.

I remember the first time that he turned on me. And he just burst. I go to the bathroom and and I close the door, and I look at my back, and my back was already bruised. And I thought, wow, I bruised so easily. We came and visited you, and you were there with Pat. And that night when we came home,

your mother told me, something is not working. I didn't notice it, but she did. How did you understand the suicidal thoughts back then? I felt very much like there was no place for me. I felt just this darkness. When I opened the door, you were standing there and your face was white. Your eyes were red.

I wonder if I can contact him. I mean, it'd be interesting to know what he remembers and if that is different from what I remember. These people are really difficult to get rid of. If you've managed to get rid of one, don't go back there ever. If you or someone you know is living with intimate partner violence, you're not alone. There are people who can help. For more information, visit cbc.ca slash WTP resources. story editor. Sound design and additional story editing by Mira Bertwin-Tonick. S.K. Robert is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Damon Fairless. And the director of CBC Podcasts

is Arif Noorani. Special thanks to Farzana Doctor. If you'd like to reach me directly, go to my website, annamariatromonti.com. You can follow Welcome to Paradise on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. And if you like the show, please help others find it by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. This has been the first episode of Welcome to Paradise. You can listen to more episodes right now on the CBC Listen app and everywhere you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.