On July 17, 2019, Kaufman went out to dinner with a friend. As she often did when she got home, she locked herself in an upstairs room to avoid confrontation with her husband, Jonah Keri, a well-known Montreal baseball writer and sports journalist.
While she was talking on the phone with a friend, Keri texted her complaining she hadn’t stopped in to give him a hug. To avoid a blow-up she feared would trigger days of verbal and physical abuse, Kaufman agreed to go back downstairs.
“When I walked into the room he said, ‘We’re going to have a big problem.’ And he grabbed me by the neck and strangled me,” Kaufman said in an interview. “I realized in that moment that his six-foot-four, 220-pound body made it so there was no defending myself.”
