Dearly Beloved

Porn star Christy Mack's ex, a UFC fighter, walked in at 3am and found her with another man. Over the next hours he broke 18 bones in her face, knocked out her teeth, sexually assaulted her and sawed off her hair with a knife. She's only alive because he went to the kitchen. In 2014 she was one of the biggest names in the adult industry, the girl covered in tattoos with millions of followers. Her boyfriend was Jon Koppenhaver, a former UFC fighter who had legally changed his name to War Machine. Their relationship was violent long before that night, and a few months earlier she had finally ended it and moved on. On August 8, 2014 he let himself into her Las Vegas home at around 3am and found her there with a friend. He attacked the friend first, who managed to run out of the house. Then he turned on her. She says the beating went on for hours. He broke her nose, knocked out her teeth, fractured her ribs and ruptured her liver. At one point he grabbed a knife, held it to her and started hacking off her hair. When he walked off to the kitchen, she ran. She went out the back door barefoot, climbed over the fence into the neighbor's yard and begged them to call the police. A few days later she posted photos of her face from the hospital bed on Twitter. Half the internet was horrified. The other half wrote that a porn star had it coming. War Machine went on the run for a week before police found him hiding in a motel in California. In 2017 a jury convicted him on 29 counts, including kidnapping and sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison, and he won't even be eligible for parole until he has served 36 years. She has had multiple surgeries and still lives with the damage to her face. She stepped away from the industry, and today she tells the story herself on podcasts. She survived because he decided to go get a knife instead of finishing what he started. Should a man who did this ever walk free again, or is 36 years before parole still too easy?