The first ex-wife of Rob Porter told DailyMail.com has said that he choked and punched her during their marriage, breaking down her confidence so badly with his verbal and emotional abuse that she took an extended leave of absence from grad school.
Colbie Holderness, 37, who is a senior analyst for the U.S. government, spoke on the record to DailyMail.com about her five-year marriage following the on-the-record allegations by Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby.
She confirmed that she had also been interviewed by the FBI about her marriage after Porter was tapped for his current White House position and required security clearance which he has not received.
Colbie Holderness, 37, who is a senior analyst for the U.S. government, spoke on the record to DailyMail.com about her five-year marriage following the on-the-record allegations by Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby.
Colbie tells DailyMail.com that while she and Porter were on a vacation in Florence, Italy, a couple of years after they married, Porter punched her in the face
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‘I was his first wife and it wasn’t until there was a second wife and then a long-time girlfriend reaching out to me, who was experiencing some weird things. I started to realize that he keeps getting away with it. It’s a pattern now, it hasn’t gone away and it’s getting worse. More people are experiencing it.’
Colbie, then Paulson, met Porter at Mormon church in spring 2000 while she was attending Wellesley double major American studies and polticial science and Porter attended Harvard stuying government in Massachusetts.
Her first impressions were that he was ‘charming and charismatic’.
‘Rob is very intelligent – that’s what drew me to him,’ she said. ‘We had a mutual interest in government and public policy. We seemed to well paired. We got to know each other a little bit at church but he then he quickly asked me out and we became a couple. We became very serious very quickly but it was rocky.
‘He was never physical with me while we were dating and now I see there were red flags left and right. He was verbally abusive and emotionally abusive all during that time, which I understand now, and we were fighting a lot.
‘He would just belittle me constantly about my weight, my sexiness, how good I looked to him or didn’t look to him.
‘He would always be checking out other women very obviously and would often compare me to other women.
Says Colbie: ‘We were arguing and he punched me in the face. He left visible marks when he punched me and I have pictures of that. I didn’t go the police because I was scared, I was in Italy alone and I didn’t know what to do.’
Holderness said that she never went to the police in the U.S. because she did not think that she would be believed
‘Our relationship went on for three years until I graduated from college and then we got married two weeks later.’
The couple got married in June 2003 at New College Chapel in Oxford, England where Porter was attending as a Rhodes scholar.
Holderness said: ‘I remember crying all through my wedding day, not sure if I wanted to go through with it. But we were already over in England, everybody had flown over there and it was a very high-pressure situation for a 23-year-old and so I went through with it.
‘But he was never physically abusive until our honeymoon and that floored me.’
The incident happened after the couple had arrived on their honeymoon in the Canary Islands.
‘It was a really odd thing that he did. He was angry because we weren’t having sex when he wanted to have sex and he kicked me. It seems such a juvenile thing at the time, but I remember thinking about words my mother had told me when it happened.
She had passed away before I graduated from college.
‘She told me that she had once warned my father that if he ever hit her, she would leave him. My father never did anything like that because he’s a very good man – but I remember those words passing through my head right after Rob kicked me. I was thinking, “What do I do? I just got married.”
‘It was a kick which, although it hurt, was ridiculous at the same time. That was the first time he hurt me and then the doors opened. I didn’t do anything and it continued.’
Jennifer Willoughby, the second wife of President Trump’s staff secretary Rob Porter has spoken on the record to DailyMail.com about her abusive marriage
The physical abuse escalated from there.
Holderness, who has remarried, said: ‘In a sense I couldn’t believe it was happening to me – I was a well-educated woman, he was well-educated man, we came from good families. It just didn’t seem real, I think I was in denial.
‘At times the way he would be physically violent with me was very odd. He would throw me down on the bed, then put his full body weight on top of me, then grind a knee or elbow into my body, expressing rage.
‘It was scary but it wasn’t like it was life-threatening. For years, I would go to Mormon bishops and I would try to find the words to explain what was going on but I was at a loss beyond the explanation that he got physical with me.’
The violence escalated to where Porter was choking his wife.
‘It was not hard enough for me to pass out but it was scary, humiliating and dehumanizing,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t until I went to a secular counsellor at my work place one summer and told him what was going on that he was the first person, and not a male religious leader, who told me that what was happening was not okay.’
While on a vacation in Florence, Italy, a couple of years after they married, Holderness said that Porter punched her in the face.
Colbie, here with her current husband, confirmed that she had also been interviewed by the FBI about her marriage after Porter was tapped for his current White House position and required security clearance which he has not received
‘We were arguing and he punched me in the face. He left visible marks when he punched me and I have pictures of that. I didn’t go the police because I was scared, I was in Italy alone and I didn’t know what to do.’
Holderness said that she never went to the police in the U.S. because she did not think that she would be believed.
‘I did move out several times because of the abuse. We spent big chunks of our marriage apart. I would keep going back until enough was enough. I could feel myself slipping away as a person.’
She said that others had seen the warning signs but not realized the depth of abuse that she was going through.
‘Speaking to friends and family later, it was clear to people that Rob had a temper. He would be very cruel and mean but he was never physically abusive towards anybody else and no one saw it happen to me. He knew he had me in a vulnerable position and he could behave that way in private. But he was smart enough and careful enough to never behave that way in public but people did see his anger issues at various times.’
‘During the first year of the marriage we were in England and then I took in a job back in Idaho in my home state and was so relieved to get away. He would visit me there but I just remembered thinking that the job would give me the space and distance to think. We both went back to graduate school at Harvard and were living upstairs from his parents, who were masters at Dunster House.
‘We were living up in the old servants quarters during the first year of graduate school and the abuse continued. I don’t know what they knew or thought because they could obviously hear yelling and slamming doors but nobdy said anything. So I moved out the next summer and got my own place for the entire second year of graduate school.
Cheers! The couple was seen smiling and laughing over drinks as they enjoyed each other’s company at Rosa Mexicano in Washington D.C., hours before they went home together
‘Then he talked me into coming back after that year so I moved back in with him.
‘He would insult my intelligence because he knew that was important to me and it is important to him. He would call me a ‘fucking idiot’, you are so stupid, you are so dumb, you cannot do anything.
‘I was so distraught and my confidence was so broken that part way through the second year of my graduate program I had to take a leave of absence, go to all my professors and tell them that my marriage was a nightmare and I needed more time to compete my degree and essentially dropped out of school.
‘I did finish it after the divorce and after I had recovered a bit, I was just broken and its taken me years to recover my confidence and sense of self.’
Pretty shortly after that I cut off all contact with him and really haven’t talked to him since – with a few exceptions. He would track me down occasionally until I finally had to mail a letter to his parents and say, “please leave me alone I’ve asked nicely – it’s going to be a problem if he doesn’t.”
‘Rob might be a bit a monster but he’s very smart. I think he knew that was a liability for him if he continued with that behaviour. He’s not that obsessive.’
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