In the Nineties, I dated a man whose hands frightened me. He didn’t raise them in anger to hit me, but he had battered me so thoroughly emotionally and psychologically that I always kept an eye on his hands, suspecting that the next blows might not be verbal but physical. It was not a long relationship — under a year — and the question that always gets asked of any woman in any kind of abusive relationship — why didn’t you leave — can be answered like this: I was too broken. Maybe he was right, I thought. Maybe I am  a screw-up, a loser who gets everything wrong; maybe no one else would have the patience for me, and maybe he can correct what’s wrong with me, make me better. I finally left him when I thought I might be pregnant and I decided I wouldn’t let him anywhere near our child. I was mentally planning on going to an attorney, legally preventing him from coming near us, when it turned out I wasn’t pregnant. But I had gotten an adrenaline shot of courage, and I have to admit, a healthy dose of hatred toward him.

A few years ago, I saw a news story that he was arrested for domestic abuse. So I was right about those hands. Men who beat women do it first with their words, their attitude, their belittling and their humiliation (this man was particularly good at humiliation.) Their fists are just a natural extension of the abuse they’ve already leveed against a woman. Friends of mine know what my name is now for this man: ‘the spawn of Satan.’

Women who are abused in any way find themselves weighed down by loneliness. You need someone to talk to but you’re scared. What if they judge you? What if they don’t understand? What if all this is actually your fault? One person in my life at that time who, logically, would have been someone to go to for comfort and counsel, had a habit of saying, whenever the subject of domestic abuse came up, “Well, she must like it or she wouldn’t stay.” That kind of response is almost more frightening than the man who has dragged you down. So you stay silent, and you stay.

What has happened now with Rob Porter and the response from both John Kelly and Donald Trump, shows glaringly how willing some are to enable domestic abusers. According to Donald Trump (hardly a good advocate for women in any sense) Rob Porter was good at his job, so Trump is sad to lose him and wishes him well. Not a word about the women he beat. He followed that with a tweet about false allegations, which essentially called Porter’s ex-wives liars. John Kelly didn’t act on what he surely knew many months ago, and when the story broke, he urged Porter to stay on at the White House, to not resign. Because, you know, a good man is hard to find, so who cares if he beats his wife when he gets home.

We will never have moral leadership from this White House. But can we please understand that these attitudes don’t just exist inside those walls? Woman stay silent because they’re frightened not just of the man who is abusing them, but of other people. They’re scared someone will say what a great guy he is, or that he has such integrity, or is so charming. They’re scared someone will say you must like it or you wouldn’t stay.

We leave when we get the courage to do so. We speak out after we’ve reached deep inside ourselves and pulled up more courage. The men who tear women down, who beat them with words and fists, are cowards. And so are the men who enable them and make excuses for them. John Kelly might have been a great military man, but he’s pathetic as a human being.