In 2009, I went on a cruise with my (now ex) fiancée, who used it as an opportunity to mix excessive amounts of alcohol with prescription medications, including (but who knows what else he took) anxiety medication he did not need, and Ambien. His band was playing on the cruise.
He woke me one night, tried to pin me down, slapped my mouth, and cussed at me in some delirious mental state. He clamped a hand over my mouth when I tried to call for help, and began to push my head into a pillow until I could not breathe. I thought I was going to die right there in that bed. I could not move. Eventually I was able to turn my head enough to reach his finger, which I bit as hard as I could.
This stunned him and let me get free and stand up, but there was nowhere to run in our small cabin, and so he stood and punched me in the face twice. He was still screaming unintelligible things at me. He wasn't making any sense. I have never in my life been so terrified. He told me to get out, so I ran as fast as I could past him and out the door into the hallway, but he was right on my heels.
He swayed in the doorway, glaring at me and I started knocking on the door next to us, where one of his band members was staying with his wife. They did not answer. My fiancée began to threaten me to stop. I had nowhere to go, so I started knocking on the door on the opposite side of the hallway. Two female security guards were staying in that room and they let me in. They had witnessed the soulless abyss behind his eyes as he glared right through them at me.
Security let me stay in a friend's room, and told him to stay away from me with no contact for the remainder of the cruise. This was not enforced at all. He was contacting me four hours later, and telling other people to deliver messages to me. He kept trying to get me to go back to his room and be alone with him. I kept telling the security guards who had been present the night of the attack, and they were very blasé about even listening to me. They wouldn't even go talk to him.
Eventually my "friends" told me they wanted their room to themselves, and that I needed to go back to his room. I asked security if there ANother Jan Dwas another room I could stay in, and they kept telling me that everything was full. I was instructed to go back to his cabin by his band management, who my fiancee had convinced I was making a scene and that returning to his cabin would show the "fans" that I was just a drama queen who made it all up for attention. (I had not told a soul outside of ship security - I NEVER thought I would be a battered woman, and I am still ashamed to this day that I put myself in that position.)
I had nowhere else to stay unless I slept on deck, where he could get to me anyway. I slept in the tiny cabin bathroom with the door locked, curled up on the floor. Every so often he would pound at the door and yell horrible things at me, then stagger back to the bed and pass out.
The final night of the cruise I did not sleep at all. I put the room's furniture between myself and the bed, away from the door, to keep him away from me. He was so out of his mind he could not figure out how to move the chairs out of his way to get to me, and he'd give up and fall over. At one point he left the room, and one of his friends called his band management and had him taken back to the room (they were worried he would get in a fight, because he had molested a man's wife on the upper deck). His manager brought him back to the room, and before he could get his key in the door, he wet his pants in the hallway. He kept trying to get up and pack his things, saying that we were at the airport on the other side of the country, and that he was going to go to his car. He gathered his belongings, and a wine bucket full of water, and stood in the shower as if it were an elevator. Then he fell over.
Eventually he wandered back out of the bathroom. He thought I was a stranger, and tried to hit on me, telling me that he didn't love his fiancee (me), but he was "trying to." I eventually took my things to the upper deck to wait to disembark. At some point he staggered into the waiting area and fell asleep upside-down in a chair, with his head on a coffee table. There was no report made about any of it.
Security did not report any of the assault or harassment to anyone onshore. I tried to get a restraining order once back in my home state, and the judge would not grant me one. The cruise line would not give me the first or last names of the security guards who were on the scene, or any way for me to contact them, so I could not even include their testimony in my case.
I have not contacted or responded to him since the trial, other than having sheriffs and domestic violence detectives call him and tell him to leave me alone. Last I heard from him was in March, when I finally had to change my phone number and move. I still have nightmares.
There is still no protection for a cruise liner domestic violence victims, even if the stalking and harassment continues onshore.
