Sheena Greitens documented abuse allegations against former Missouri governor in 2018

The former Missouri First Lady laid out instances of physical abuse by her ex-husband Eric Greitens in emails to a therapist and a family lawyer.
It was 10 days since her husband, Eric Greitens, resigned as governor and Sheena Greitens was terrified.

In that period, she wrote to a family lawyer in a June 14, 2018, email, Eric Greitens had been violent twice to one of his sons, lost his temper repeatedly and refused to admit his actions were a source of the family’s problems.

He could go from calm to enraged “in a flash,” she wrote.

An example was his reaction to an email to their marriage counselor.

“I received an irate call from Eric, who suggested I had deliberately and maliciously sent accusations of child abuse to a) the St. Louis Circuit Attorney, b)special prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, and c)the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and that I was trying to stab him in the back, that I was ‘hateful and disgusting,’ nasty,’ ‘vicious,’ and a ‘lying bitch,’” she wrote. “This seemed to me to verge onto open paranoia.”

So she put the kids in the car, she said in an interview with The Independent, drove to the airport in St. Louis and called her husband to tell him she was going to visit her parents.

She says she fled because she didn’t know if he had access to a firearm and feared he would kill the family if he followed through on his threats to kill himself.

“That became a concern in June of 2018,” Sheena Greitens said. “That was why I left with the children. His anger was now being directed at me and the children and I could not guarantee their safety.”

That email, along with others from those weeks following Eric Greitens’ departure from office, were provided to The Independent this week by Sheena Greitens and her attorney.

She said there are two reasons she provided the emails and agreed to break her silence with an interview about her marriage.

One is his repeated accusations by her ex-husband that she is lying in their ongoing child custody case in Boone County.

The other is that the fear she felt in those days was rekindled by the “RINO Hunt” video, posted to her ex-husband’s Senate campaign social media pages Monday depicting a SWAT-style raid.