After nineteen years in a controlling and often abusive relationship, she escaped a violent assault by her partner, Gabriel Wortman - unaware he was about to carry out the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. In "The First Survivor", Banfield tells her story for the first of being groomed and surviving years of intimate partner violence, and of the horrific night she fled barefoot into the freezing woods as Wortman began a murderous rampage that left twenty-two people and an unborn child dead.
Told with raw honesty and courage, Banfield's memoir is more than a personal account of life with a man she tried to heal - it's a call to action. With intimate reflections and her own transformation, she exposes the failures in how society sees, supports, and judges survivors of domestic abuse.
This is a powerful story of trauma, survival, and one woman's journey reclaiming her voice and redefining her life.
This memoir is Lisa Banfield’s account of the events surrounding the April 18 and 19, 2020, attacks in Portapique, Nova Scotia. After nearly 20 years in a relationship marked by control and abuse, Banfield escaped a violent assault by her partner, who then carried out the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history, killing 22 people and an unborn child.
In the book, Banfield details her experiences leading up to that night, the hours she spent hiding in the woods and the aftermath that followed. She also addresses the public scrutiny she faced and the realities of intimate partner violence.
This was a shocking story out of Nova Scotia at the beginning of COVID and I was interested to read more about what and why it happened and those involved. It was a tough story to read.
I've never experienced domestic violence but even after witnessing it when I was growing up, I don't understand why people stay in these relationships (regardless of the crappy childhoods they may have had). After the first beating Banfield received from her partner, she left him ... but he quickly talked her into getting back together and she stayed with him for 19 years (they were supposed to celebrate their anniversary that night). If someone I was involved with ever laid a hand on me, I'd be gone and there would be no going back.
After the way he abused her and the killings of innocent people, I found it amazing that it wasn't until 5 years later that she FINALLY deleted the pictures of their life together from her phone and threw away his cremated ashes (why did she even take some of the ashes of this monster??!!).
While I don't blame her for his actions and no one deserves the abuse she put with, I had a hard time feeling a lot of sympathy for her when she talked about the benefits of being with him like a new career and business, a house and a cottage, being able to shop and buy whatever she wanted, the vacations, etc.
