© Tanya Selvaratnam and Eric Schneiderman Getty Images
Harvard-educated activist writer Tanya Selvaratnam told the New Yorker magazine that her yearlong affair with Schneiderman "was a fairytale that became a nightmare" - and quickly escalated into violence in the bedroom, even as he begged for threesomes.
"Sometimes, he'd tell me to call him Master, and he'd slap me until I did," Selvaratnam said.
"He started calling me his 'brown slave' and demanding that I repeat that I was 'his property.'"
Selvaratnam said, "The slaps started after we'd gotten to know each other.
"It was at first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder. It wasn't consensual. This wasn't sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior."
She said that as the violence grew, so did his sexual demands.
"He was obsessed with having a threesome and said it was my job to find a woman," Selvaratnam said. "He said he'd have nothing to look forward to if I didn't and would hit me until I agreed."
She said she had no intention of adding a second woman to their bed.
The abuse increased until Schneiderman was not only slapping her but spitting on her and choking her, she said.
"He was cutting off my ability to breathe," she said.
Soon, "we could rarely have sex without him beating me."
The attorney general was often fueled by booze, Selvaratnam said.
And he would push her to drink, too, she said.
"Drink your bourbon, Turnip,'' she said he ordered her, using his nickname for her.
A friend finally helped her leave him, Selvaratnam said.
Schneiderman told the mag in a statement, "In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross."
Reader Comments
The question is, why didn't she say NO and terminate the relationship when the abuse started. Was he such a high profile figure and considered a "good catch".
It takes two to tango as the saying goes.
Now it has been disclosed, she is ashamed and of course she has to blame the so called initiator.
That is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and watching that dreadful movie of the same title will get you if one get's so enamored with the fantasy,
There are many more egregious cases, that young woman just walked into the wrong bar.
I agree, I don't think he should hold public office. Such a person with such proclivities is wide open for coercion, blackmail and corruption considering he is Attorney General.
It's like some underground, where like attracts like, and if there is a sniff of disclosure, it's a blackout as though it never happened, because these people act and behave as a normal person. they protect their own nobody ever suspects they have a dark side.
Try to prove it, they have connections and a network that will do anything to preserve anonymity and disclosure.