Australian actress Melissa George has been fighting a legal battle for custody of her two kids with French entrepreneur Jean-David Blanc for the last six months.
Now, she’s opened up in an interview on Sunday Night about the violent assault that ended her relationship and left her bleeding and throwing up.
George says that Blanc came home late at night and woke her up with his movements around the house – watching TV, preparing food – despite George having just given birth and needing to rest.
They started to argue, and then things became physical.
“It started with him on top of me, with my arms locked above my head,” she said.“He pushed me into the door and then struck my face, and I hit the wall and fell on the floor. He stood over me and said, ‘Now you’re a real actress.’”
When George told Blanc that she was calling the police, she says he hit her in the mouth. Then:
“He grabbed the back of my head and smashed it on the metal thing where you hang your coats and that’s when I scratched him and I tried to fight for my life.”
Eventually Blanc left her alone. She got her documents, left the house and called an Uber. The driver found a police car, which escorted them to a station, where a bloodied and dazed George threw up into a rubbish bin until an ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital. The photo above was taken eight days after the assault.
“I had marks around my wrists when I was thrown into the door, I had bruising on my back, my bottom and my hip. When he struck my face I had swelling to the left side of my face.“When he hit my mouth I had a broken inner lip and then when he cracked my head onto the metal valet I had a huge lump above my eye that swelled and swelled and swelled and then slowly over the weeks the worst part was my neck. My neck wasn’t able to move, turn left, right, up or down.”
Both George and Blanc were convicted of assault in the French court, with Blanc ordered to pay 1000 euro to George, and George required to pay just one euro to Blanc. They are both appealing the convictions.
Now George is trying to get the Australian government to intervene on her behalf so she can bring her kids with her. Blanc won’t let them leave the country, which is crippling her ability to work abroad because she is still breastfeeding and refuses to be away from her children.
The full interview is pretty harrowing stuff. George says that Blanc was always controlling – he tried to get her to sign a contract before they had kids together that stated, among other things, that any boys they had would be circumcised, and that their children would be raised in France. She refused to sign it, even though he would take her passport away in order to pressure her.
She also says that while she recognised Blanc’s controlling nature, she stayed for the sake of her kids.
Heartbreakingly, at one point the interviewer asks if she knows that some people will say she’s making it all up – a pretty damning indictment of the way the Australian public continues to treat survivors of domestic abuse.
George remains in France.
Source: 7NEWS.
Image: Sunday Night.
