Emmy Award-winning writer Chelsea Devantez has revealed for the first time that her first love violently abused her, shot her, and terrorized her.
The head writer of The Problem With Jon Stewart and host of the 3 million download podcast Glamorous Trash was forced to run for her life and change her name in an attempt to escape him… only for him to chase her in the scene a decade later. .
Devantez, who has also written for Sarah Bareilles’ girl band Girls5Eva, makes a living making people laugh, so she kept her past a secret for years, admitting she didn’t want to “have an ugly story.”
But in her new book, I Shouldn’t Tell You This (But I’m Gonna Do It Anyway), she reveals that she was finally ready to speak openly about the episode she calls The Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing, only to be forced to do it. withdraw the manuscript because the details were “too dangerous to share.”
“Right before the book went to print… I was told I had to erase the entire history of domestic violence that I experienced when I was very, very young,” she says on her podcast.
Devantez, host of the 3 million download podcast Glamorous Trash, has made a living from comedy and kept her past a secret for years, admitting she didn’t want to “have an ugly story.”
She is the head writer for The Problem With Jon Stewart and has worked on episodes specifically dealing with domestic violence.
“So they canceled the book and I canceled it, and it was devastating.”
However, Devantez’s mother, herself a survivor of domestic violence, encouraged her daughter to fight and find a way to tell her story.
“My husband came up with the idea of crossing out enough words so that I could keep the story and they couldn’t technically tell me to delete it,” she says.
The result is that large sections of the first and last chapters of I Shouldn’t Tell You This are covered in black bars, hiding the worst of the abuse.
He leaves many questions unanswered, but what remains gives clues to the horrors he endured.
“Now my comedian memoirs are more like the damn Mueller report.”
She writes: ‘StatisticsListically, if you grow up in an abusive home, you are much more likely to enter an abusive relationship yourself. Ever the rule follower, I jumped right into my probability.
‘At a time and place that shall not be specified, I fell in love for the first time. With that… came a very disturbing time in my timeline, one that changed the course of my life for the worse.’
She says the abuse began, as is often the case, with manipulation and psychological trauma.
The man she calls “Earl” told her friends she was a whore. No one was allowed near her and she would threaten anyone who tried.
“(He) had terrified me so much at that moment, that even the sound of his voice made me physically sick.”
But each attack was followed by a grand, romantic gesture to make up for it.
Then he upped the ante. Between black bars, Devantez writes about ‘the shooting (REDACTED)’. Then: ‘The second shooting.
‘The third (REDACTED) through whom the shots came (REDACTED) fell to the ground.
“As I was cleaning the glass, I told myself I had to endure it a little longer and then it would go away.”
When she finally went to the police, one of their first questions was whether she had had sexual relations with Earl. She started to sob.
‘I told them (REDACTED). That’s how she thought of it back then, just “sex she didn’t want to have.”
The couple appeared in court and an unspecified ruling was made: “Although the abuse was bad enough in the judge’s eyes to warrant this ruling, I was just beginning to accept that it had been abusive at all.”
Undeterred, Earl continued to torment Devantez, on one occasion climbing a tree outside his bedroom at night and pointing a laser pointer through the window.
“I lay in bed, terrified to move, wondering if he was trying to get my attention or practicing his aim,” she writes.
Announcing The Problem’s domestic abuse episode with Jon Stewart, Devantez wrote that “I, a teenager, would have loved it, and that’s why I did this.”
I shouldn’t tell you. This is heavily redacted, though it still reveals flashes of horrific abuse.
Earl continued to torment Devantez, on one occasion climbing a tree outside his room at night and pointing a laser pointer through the window.
She realized that she would never be free as long as Earl knew where she lived. So, even though she had very little money and no job, she found a way to escape.
Her mother and godmother took her to another state. Then, just as she was beginning to adjust to her new life, he managed to track her down.
This time he changed his name, moved once more, and held his breath, hoping his ordeal was finally over.
“Over the years, I have tried many different things to put the worst of my tragedies behind me, but nothing has brought me relief,” he writes.
She describes an “anger filled with sadness and ravenous pain” that has haunted her ever since.
Earl “may not have killed me,” she writes, “but he killed the woman I was going to become, and I will never get her back or know what it would have been like.”
And he adds: ‘At one point, my life almost ended. The vast and terrifying domestic violence brought destruction that went far beyond the actual attack. “It altered every cell in my body.”
He adds: “I used to hate that anyone could know this part of me… I believed that surviving something so disgusting and horrible meant that I was disgusting and horrible too.”
“I didn’t want to court misery forever, so I trudged along pretending to have a normal past, hoping that maybe then I could somehow have a normal future.”
The simulation continued for 10 years. Then a sheriff walked into a comedy show while she was performing on stage and burst her carefully constructed bubble.
“The police officer handed me a folder,” he writes. ‘I started reading its content. The first page was a (REDACTED) letter he had written, along with some documents.
Devantez was performing on stage when a sheriff entered the theater to summon her.
Chelsea Devantez with her husband, comedian Yassir Lester
Jon Stewart calls his memoir “raw, intimate, hilarious and truly inspiring”
‘I looked through the papers and found the instructions the sheriff had followed. The police had tracked me through my social security number, which led them to my job at the theater.
‘At the top of the instructions page, they had written my name. My new name: Chelsea Devantez.
‘I felt overwhelmed. I felt helpless. I did not feel anything.’
After being pursued by her abusive ex, she was summoned to return across the country to attend that same small court in the desert and reverse the decision that had been made a decade earlier.
“My ex-boyfriend, an extremely tall, blonde, blue-eyed athlete, had stated in his letter to the court that he wanted to be a police officer.”
And so, he looked over his shoulder again, living every moment in fear.
“After the big, scary issue of domestic violence resurfaced,” she writes, “my world on stage started to look and sound different. The nightly applause seemed sinister and untrustworthy.
“The applause turned into gunshots. Fast. Hitting… Every night on stage he spent the first two minutes watching the audience as he delivered each hit with clarity.line.
“The triumph of this book,” he writes, “was supposed to be that I had lived that story and survived to tell it, and even added a few jokes! If I had taken the story out of the book, the only triumph would have been… that I lived
“So instead of erasing it completely, I kept as much of the cursed history as possible.”
She encourages readers to read it with a ‘Taylor Swiftian lens’, hinting that there is much more to find between the lines.
“In fact, you might find that the whole story still exists… if you read closely enough.”
I shouldn’t tell you this (But I’m Gonna Do It Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez is published by Hanover Square Press
