Omar Mateen’s ex-wife opens about about the abusive relationship with the Pulse nightclub shooter.
The Washington Post spoke with the ex-wife of suspected Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, who says he was “not a stable person” who beat her during their marriage.
Mateen, who died after a shootout with police, killed at least 50 people and injured more than 50 other people when he brought an assault rifle to Pulse nightclub and started opening fire early Sunday morning.
“He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that,” the ex-wife, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the paper.
She says they met online and married in March of 2009, when she moved to Florida to live with him in a two-bedroom condo owned by Mateen’s family. They were only married for a few months before her she told her parents about the abusive relationship with Mateen. She would later get divorced in 2011.
Her parents flew down to Fort Pierce and pulled her out of the house, leaving all her belongings behind. The ex-wife she said never had contact with Mateen again despite attempts by him to reach her.
“They literally saved my life,” she said of her parents.
Mateen was reportedly under investigation since 2013 by the FBI and once again in 2014 over his alleged ties to terrorists, but during the time they lived together, the ex-wife says, he was not religious and showed no signs of joining a terrorist group. “He seemed like a normal human being,” she said.
