name "to the point where it didn't mean too much anymore."
Fedders' 1987 bestselling book, Shattered Dreams, became a TV movie starring Lindsay Wagner.
"It has just brought too many memories with all the similarities," Fedders says, citing her own black eyes and broken window. "It’s been hard."
Back then, Fedders said, no one talked about this kind of abuse in the upper-middle-class, country-club world she then inhabited. So she stayed for 17 years after her 1966 wedding through the belittling, the physical abuse — including during her first pregnancy — and the weeks of silent treatment she and their children often got.
Fedders says she thought things had changed.
"I thought we had put a lot of this stuff behind us, us as a country," says Fedders, 74. "And it's very disturbing to know that someone would be in the White House that close to the president without a full security clearance with this past that people knew about."
One prominent difference between Fedders and the Porter story: She says she "never said a thing" about the abuse when administration officials were vetting her ex-husband to be the chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"I was afraid I’d be in real trouble if he found out," Fedders says.
Why women tolerate abuse
Women in prominent, affluent families may tolerate physical and emotional abuse because of fears that disclosure could harm families' reputations and careers, pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris writes in her new book The Deepest Well, which examines the health effects of these experiences on children.
When more affluent people don't talk about domestic violence, the problem continues, and it perpetuates the idea that "adversity is a problem for only certain communities," wrote Harris, who heads the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco.
Domestic abuse survivor and advocate L.Y. Marlow grew up in Philadelphia housing projects but knew stigma about abuse is spread across socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups. A decade ago, she launched the advocacy group Saving Promise, named after her granddaughter, Promise, who Marlow wanted to prevent from becoming the fifth generation of women in her family to become domestic abuse victims.