Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Taylor Armstrong had been quite open about her husband Russell Armstrong’s abusive behavior since his suicide last year.
Now Us Weekly has an excerpt from her book, Hiding from Reality: My Story of Love, Loss, and Finding the Courage Within, that goes into graphic detail about Russell and Taylor’s destructive relationship.
Taylor previously said she was too afraid to write a book while her husband was still alive, but now that she feels safe enough to share her story, the book will come out next month, just six months after his death.
The article pulls excerpts from the book that say the abuse began early in their six year marriage, when Russell accused Taylor of having affairs and did a background check on her. Taylor even discovered a tape recorder hidden in her home office.
“For the next nearly six years, I always assumed I was being recorded in the car and at home,” she writes. “I was always careful to make sure the content of my conversations was very clear…I went into my e-mail settings and found that he had set it up so that all of my e-mails were forwarded to him the moment I received them. I knew he was going to do what he wanted to do no matter how I reacted.”
Taylor also went into detail about the physical violence she endured.
“He would grab my hair and bang my head against the side of the car between the two doors, or against the glass of the passenger-side window while he was driving, because it made his point to me but didn’t leave a visible mark,” she writes, explaining why she often seemed unscathed on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Taylor also writes that her late husband would terrorize her in front of their five-year-old daughter Kennedy, telling her “your mom’s a whore” and “your mom’s a bitch.”
Taylor also addresses showing up at Lisa Vanderpump’s SUR opening with a black eye. She writes that Russell accused her of sleeping with a Chippendale dancer after she attended Lisa’s daughter Pandora’s bachelorette party in Las Vegas.
“The pain was excruciating. I could tell that something was very wrong with my vision,” she writes. “This whole time, Russell was glaring at me. ‘You’re so dramatic,’ he said. ‘You’re fine.’ Tests revealed that 40 percent of my orbital floor, the bone that supports the eye, had been fractured. ‘You need to have orbital reconstructive surgery,’ my doctor said. ‘This is not a small thing.’ My doctor went on to tell me that I would need a titanium implant beneath my eye.”
As Taylor explained to the other housewives at the SUR opening, this was the injury that finally convinced her it was time for her and her daughter to remove themselves from the situation. The book will also take an in-depth look at Taylor’s road to recovery following the abuse, as well as dealing with her husband’s suicide.
Gina Pusateri
Contributing Writer
(Image courtesy of US Magazine)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
