Her hope, once the show airs, is that people from high schools, colleges and women’s groups will call to invite her to come and speak about what she’s been through as a battered woman.
“I’ve got to help people,” said Norma Jean, 41. “Even at colleges, there’s an alarming rate of violence. It’s important for girls to hear that they need to protect themselves. No one told me this stuff when I was growing up. I thought love was dysfunctional, and it’s not.”
Norma Jean grew up in Watertown, N.Y. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, and her mother received shock treatments for what was diagnosed as postpartum depression. Her mother remarried and had another child, but turned the responsibility of caring for him over to Norma Jean, then 8 years old. She was a talented little girl, channeling her energy into ballet, jazz and tap dancing, playing the flute, the clarinet and the piano, ice skating with the U.S. Figure Skating Assn., and getting involved in community theater.
At 17, Norma Jean was physically abused by her teenaged boyfriend, who was also sleeping with her mother. When Norma Jean’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend ended, she married her first husband, who was also physically abusive. She had a son with him, divorced him soon after, then married and got pregnant again. When her second husband began abusing her, she threw him out, and by the age of 27, was a single mother with two young boys.
She went back to college and won the Wall Street Journal Award for Outstanding Business Student, then got her degree in business management. She worked for a while in corporate America, before heading out to California in 2004 to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming famous, like the actress (Marilyn Monroe) for whom she is named.
