Stephen Bannon, the head of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, faced domestic violence charges after a fight with a woman he was married to 20 years ago, in which she accused him of grabbing her by the neck “violently” and destroying a telephone when she tried to summon police.
Documents from the Santa Monica, California, police department relating to the case were first published by Politico on Thursday, 25 August 2016. The case was eventually dismissed.
“She complained of soreness to her neck,” wrote a police officer who responded to the incident. “I saw red marks on her left wrist and the right side of her neck. These were photographed.”
Police arrived at the home on New Year’s Day, 1996, after a call was made to 911 and the line went dead, the police report says.
The report draws on an account by Bannon’s then wife, whom he had married eight months earlier, three days before she gave birth to their twins.
The couple’s decision to marry was described in a separate declaration filed by the woman in their divorce case, obtained by the New York Post.
“Bannon made it clear that he would not marry me just because I was pregnant,” the Post quotes the document as saying. “I was scheduled for an amniocentesis and was told by the respondent that if the babies were normal we would get married … After the test showed that the babies were normal the respondent sent over a prenuptial agreement for me to review.”
The Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment. Both Bannon’s ex-wife and his lawyer in the domestic case declined comment to Politico.
The police officer who filed the report in the domestic violence case noted that when he arrived on the scene, the woman “appeared as if she was very upset and had been crying”. The document continues:
I saw that her eyes were red and watery. She first said, ‘Oh, thank you, you are here. How did you know to come?’ As I started to tell her about the 911 hang up call, she started to cry, and it took 3-4 minutes for her to calm down, so she could tell me what happened.
The domestic dispute developed after a night in which Bannon slept on the couch, according to police documents. “Early in the morning she got up to feed their twins, and Mr Bannon got upset at her for making some noise,” the document says.
She asked him for the credit card to buy groceries, and he said she should write a check, the police report says. “She asked him why he was playing those games with the money, and he said it was his money.”
She spit on him, the document says, and then “he reached up to her, from the driver’s seat of his car, and grabbed her left wrist. He pulled her down … Mr Bannon grabbed at her neck also pulling her into the car. She said that she started to fight back.”
In the divorce filing, the woman says that Bannon, who later remarried, then followed her back into the home and destroyed the phone.
“I took the phone to call the police and he grabbed the phone away from me throwing it across the room, and breaking it as he [was] screaming,” the Post quotes the document as saying.
The couple had gone to counseling earlier in their relationship after “three or four arguments that became physical”, according to the police report.
Bannon was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness. The case was dismissed. The woman claims in the divorce filing that it was dismissed because Bannon convinced her to leave town, because “if I wasn’t in town they couldn’t serve me and I wouldn’t have to go to court”.
“He also told me that if I went to court he and his attorney would make sure that I would be the one who was guilty. I was told that I could go anywhere in the world.”
This article was originally published on 26 August 2016 and updated on 13 November 2016 after Bannon was named chief strategist for Donald Trump’s White House.
