Sonoma experts: Rothschild verdict could discourage domestic violence reporting
Juanita Rothschild was covered with blood, severely beaten and strangled to death when sheriff’s deputies arrived at her Sonoma Valley home in August 2017 – a victim of domestic violence, a crime that has long plagued the Valley, the county and the country.
Thousands of domestic violence-related calls pour in every year to YWCA Sonoma County. Between 600 and 700 people contacted Legal Aid of Sonoma County regarding civil restraining orders last year.
The crime has long been a national scourge, with more than half – 55 percent – of the 10,018 women murdered in 18 states in the U.S. between 2003 and 2014 killed by a romantic partner, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July 2017.
While the #MeToo movement has had a national impact, domestic violence has not yet achieved the same kind of breakthrough, though the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence created its own hashtag, #SurvivorSpeaks, and this October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
From the beginning, Juanita Rothschild’s husband of 36 years, Steven Rothschild, admitted he had killed his wife. The prosecution charged him with first-degree murder, but he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter Aug. 4.
Juanita Rothschild’s killer is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 30.
During his trial, he testified that he “exploded” the night he killed his wife because “I was afraid of the barrage of criticism” his wife had expressed verbally. “She was going to repeat it for hours,” Rothschild said.
“’She made me do it,’ is one of the most common and flimsy responses in the book,” said Ronit Rubinoff, executive director of Legal Aid of Sonoma County, speaking of domestic violence in general. “The perpetrator says, ‘The victim made me angry. If only she wouldn’t yell so much.’”
Rubinoff said, “You have a person who does not have anger control. They project that on the victim. You or I would not kill someone regardless of whether they were screaming at us for years.”
During the trial, Rothschild testified that he wrote voluminous letters to his wife, including those in a binder entered into evidence, praising her virtues and admitting to his failings in their marriage.
In those letters, Rothschild described his own “temper tantrums” and what he called “free-form rage,” which he clarified under questioning meant he’d hit the steering wheel or the bed, but not his wife.
A murder conviction could have sent Rothschild, 73, to prison for the remainder of his life. It required the prosecution to show Rothschild committed a premeditated act of violence.
The six-woman, six-man jury found Rothschild guilty of the lesser crime after finding that the evidence and testimony from mental health professionals supported Rothschild’s contention he snapped after years of emotional abuse by his 67-year-old wife.
“An abuser will say, ‘You brought this on. You made me do it,’” said Madeleine Keegan O’Connell, chief executive of YWCA Sonoma County, speaking of domestic violence in general. The YWCA served 220 adults and children at its confidential safe house between July 1, 2017 and June 20, 2018.
The shelter is a refuge for people experiencing domestic violence.
One in four women and one in seven men have experienced severe physical abuse by a partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
“Victims of domestic abuse have been groomed to understand that they are the cause of the violence in their lives and that they are to blame. Quite the opposite is true,” O’Connell said.
Steven Gallenson, Rothschild’s attorney, said, “What we had at this trial is not that he abused her, but she (the late Juanita Rothschild) abused him. I don’t think he’s saying, ‘You made me do it.’”
Gallenson said, “It was his rolling of his eyes, his outbursts, his temper. Those were things she blamed him for. There was a heck of a lot of evidence that suggested she was emotionally abusive to him.”
Examples of the alleged emotional abuse include “The fact that she would not let him talk with his son unless she was on the phone. The fact that she gave him a script to talk to his son on the phone. The fact that he had to tell his son and brother-in-law all the things she had to experience in 36 years of marriage,” Gallenson said.
“This is a manslaughter case. This is not a murder case. He admitted he did it from the beginning. He is the one who called 911,” Gallenson said. “He had a rage reaction to years of being abused emotionally.”
A 2017 Violence Policy Center report, “When Men Murder Women,” analyzed 2015 homicide data collected by the FBI. It found 928 female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers, which works out to 2.54 female victims killed by an intimate partner on average per day in the United States.
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