Emmy-award winning writer reveals she was violently abused by her first love

Emmy-award winning writer Chelsea Devantez has revealed for the first time that she was violently abused, shot at, and terrorized by her first love.

The head writer for The Problem With Jon Stewart and host of the 3m download podcast Glamorous Trash was forced to run for her life and change her name in a bid to escape him… only for him to hunt her down on stage a decade later.

Devantez – who has also written for the Sarah Bareilles girl band show Girls5Eva – has made her living making people laugh, so kept her past a secret for years, admitting she didn’t want to ‘have an ugly story’.

But in her new book, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going To Anyway), she reveals she was finally ready to open up about the episode she calls The Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing – only to be forced to withdraw the manuscript because the details were ‘too dangerous to share’.

‘Right before the book went to print… I was told I had to delete the entire story of the domestic violence I experienced when I was very, very young,’ she says in her podcast.

She is head writer for The Problem With Jon Stewart – and has worked on episodes specifically dealing with domestic violence

‘So they cancelled the book, and I cancelled the book, and it was devastating.’

However, Devantez’s mom – herself a survivor of domestic violence – encouraged her daughter to fight and find a way to tell her story.

‘My husband came up with the idea to black out enough words so that I could keep the story in and that technically they couldn’t tell me to delete it,’ she says.

The result is that large sections of the first and final chapters of I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This are covered in black bars, concealing the worst of the abuse.

It leaves many unanswered questions, but what is left hints at the horrors she endured.

‘Now my comedy gal memoir looks more like the f***ing Mueller report.’

She writes: ‘Statistically, if you grow up in a home that has abuse in it, you are way more likely to get into an abusive relationship yourself. Ever the rule-follower, I leaped right into my probability.

‘At a time and place that will both remain unspecified, I fell in love for the first time. With that… came a very disturbing epoch in my timeline, one that changed the course of my life for the far worse.’

She says the abuse started – as is so often the case – with manipulation and psychological trauma. 

The man she calls ‘Earl’ would tell friends she was a slut. No one was allowed near her – and he would threaten anyone who tried.

‘[He] had terrorized me so much at that point, that even the sound of his voice made me physically sick.’

But each attack was followed by a grand, romantic gesture to make up for it. 

Then he upped the ante. Between black bars, Devantez writes about ‘the gun [REDACTED] shooting.’ Then: ‘The second shooting.

‘The third [REDACTED] the shots came through [REDACTED] got down on the floor.

‘As I cleaned up the glass, I told myself I just had to endure it a little bit longer, and then it would go away.’ 

When she eventually went to the cops, one of their first questions was whether she had had sex with Earl. She started sobbing.

‘I told them [REDACTED]. That’s how I thought of it back then, just “sex I didn’t want to have.”’

The pair appeared in a courthouse and an unspecified ruling was made: ‘Even though the abuse was bad enough in the judge’s eyes to warrant this ruling, I was only beginning to accept that it had been abusive at all.’

Undeterred, Earl continued to torment Devantez, on one occasion climbing up a tree outside her bedroom at night and shining a laser pointer through the window. 

‘I lay in bed, terrified to move, wondering if he was trying to get my attention, or practicing his aim,’ she writes.

Announcing the domestic abuse episode of The Problem with Jon Stewart, Devantez wrote that ‘teenage me would have loved [it], and that is who I made this for’

I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This is heavily redacted, while still revealing glimpses of horrific abuse

Earl continued to torment Devantez, on one occasion climbing up a tree outside her bedroom at night and shining a laser pointer through the window

She realized she was never going to be free as long as Earl knew where she lived. So, despite the fact that she had very little money and no job, she found a way to escape.

Her mom and her godmother drove her to another state. Then, just as she started to settle into her new life, he managed to track her down.

This time she changed her name, moved yet again, and held her breath, hoping her ordeal was finally over.

‘Over the years I’ve tried many different things to leave the worst of my tragedies behind, but nothing has ever eased their grip on me,’ she writes.

She describes a ‘sorrow-filled, ravenously pained anger’ that has followed her ever since.

Earl ‘may not have killed me,’ she writes, ‘but he killed the woman I was going to become, and I’ll never get her back or know what she would have been like.’

She adds: ‘At one point, my life almost ended. The Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing brought with it a destruction that went far beyond just the actual attack. It disrupted every cell of my body.’

She adds: ‘I used to hate that anyone could know this part of me… I had thought surviving something so disgusting and awful meant that I, too, was disgusting and awful.

‘I didn’t want to court misery forever, so I trudged along pretending to have a normal past, hoping that maybe then I could somehow have a normal future.’

The pretense continued for 10 years. Then a sheriff walked into a comedy show as she was performing on stage and burst her carefully constructed bubble.

‘The cop handed me a folder,’ she writes. ‘I began to read through its contents. The first page was a letter [REDACTED] had written, along with some paperwork.

Devantez was on stage performing when a sheriff came into the theater to subpoena her

Chelsea Devantez with her husband, fellow comedian Yassir Lester

Jon Stewart calls her memoir ‘raw, intimate, hilarious, actually inspiring’

‘I sifted through the papers and found the instructions the sheriff had followed. The police had tracked me through my social security number, which led them to my job at the theater.

‘On the top of the instructions page, they had listed my name. My new name: Chelsea Devantez.

‘I felt overwhelmed. I felt helpless. I felt nothing.’

Having been hunted down by her abusive ex, she was subpoenaed back across the country to attend that same little courthouse in the desert, and reverse the decision that had been made a decade before. 

‘My ex-boyfriend, an extremely tall, blond, blue-eyed athlete, had stated in his letter to the court that he wanted to become a cop.’ 

And just like that, she was back to looking over her shoulder, living every moment in fear.

‘After the Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing resurfaced,’ she writes, ‘my world onstage began to look and sound different. The applause every night felt ominous and untrustworthy. 

‘The clapping became gunshots. Slapping. Hitting… Every night on stage I spent the first two minutes scanning the audience as I crisply delivered each punchline.

‘The triumph of this book,’ she writes, ‘was supposed to be that I had lived through that story, and survived to tell it, and even added some jokes! If I had taken the story out of the book, the only triumph would have been… that I lived.   

‘So, instead of deleting it entirely, I kept as much of the cursed story in as possible.’

She encourages readers to read it with a ‘Taylor Swiftian lens’, hinting that there is much more to be found between the lines. 

‘In fact, you might find the entire story still exists… if you read closely enough.’

I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez is published by Hanover Square Press