There is a phrase Rachel Bellesen can’t shake, even to this day. It echoes in her dreams, the moment the judge read her the charges: deliberate homicide. Punishable by death.

Punishable by death. Bellesen can’t remember much past that phrase. The last 24 hours had already been a blur: the assault, the shooting, the arrest and now this – her arraignment.

It was 9 October 2020. Bellesen had started the day thinking she was the victim. After all, she had already explained how her ex-partner attacked her. How he tried to rape her. How she shot and killed him in self-defense.

But throughout the night, Bellesen noticed she hadn’t been treated the way a crime victim should.

Still, she figured if she was being charged something, it had to be because she had been driving drunk or didn’t have the proper gun permit. It didn’t occur to her until now that the justice system saw her as a perpetrator – as a killer. Not after everything she had survived at the hands of Jacob Glace.

“I felt like I was dead inside,” Bellesen says, looking back. “I felt like a person standing very still in the center of a tornado that was just exploding all around – and not being able to move or breathe or think or feel anything.”

In the United States, nearly one in four women – and one in 10 men – experience intimate partner violence or stalking during their lifetimes. Bellesen thought she had left that all behind; moving to Montana was supposed to be a fresh start.

But her history with Glace was about to come flooding back – in a public trial that would test the lengths necessary to prove self-defense, even after a lifetime of domestic abuse.

Read the rest of Rachel Bellesen’s story on The Guardian’s website.