I am a secretary at the University who has been sickened at the canonization of a woman who put her daughter into danger of being abused and/or orphaned. As I've explained it to people, "I look at two pieces of paper: the letter she wrote to Judge O'Connor and the Northwood parking permit Nelson had (which she would have had to have signed off on). I weigh those two pieces of paper against each other, and they don't make any sense in relation to one another. Your commentary says very bluntly and very publicly so much of what I have said privately about this. I am the daughter of a child beater who died when I was 12. I do not consider myself a victim. This is simply a piece of my personal history which has provided me with some serious handicaps over the years and has meant I have to work a little harder than most at healthy interpersonal relationships. When I hear of a woman voluntarily staying with (or, worse yet, returning to) a violent man - much less putting or keeping a child in danger, I am sickened. I have to wonder how much anger that little girl will carry toward her mother in the decades to come. Your point, which you make eloquently, about the fact that this was a shack-up is an important point. She wasn't legally bound into this relationship. Your projection of that issue into the bad decisions that young women make all of the time about getting into unhealthy intimate relationships with strangers (duh, a redundancy!!) was well put and needed to be said aloud. you're going to get a lot of flack for saying these things, and you have my permission to cite this e-mail as documentation that you have support from the greater campus community for your statements. Thank you very much for having the courage to say these things.
Name Withheld
University Secretary