Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a longtime Republican darling, Trump fan, and ex-Navy SEAL now running for U.S. Senate, not only emotionally and physically abused his ex-wife, but was violent toward their 3-year-old son, an affidavit filed Monday in their ongoing child custody dispute alleges.
“Prior to our divorce, during an argument in late April 2018, Eric knocked me down and confiscated my cell phone, wallet and keys so that I was unable to call for help or extricate myself and our children from our home,” Sheena E. Greitens wrote in the filing, which was shared with The Daily Beast by the Boone County, Missouri Circuit Court clerk. “When my mother later confronted him about this, he told her that he did so to prevent me from doing anything that might damage his political career.”
In early June 2018, Greitens said she “became afraid for my safety and that of our children at our home,” pointing to “behavior [that] included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”
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In another episode detailed in the filing, one of the Greitens’ two children returned home from a visit with Eric “with a swollen face, bleeding gums, and [a] loose tooth.”
“He said Dad had hit him,” the affidavit explains. “[H]owever, Eric said they were roughhousing and it had been an accident. Due to the trauma, the tooth died, eventually abscessed, and had to be surgically removed in May 2020.”
Sheena Greitens, a professor at the University of Texas, filed for divorce in 2020, two years after it emerged that her ex-husband had carried on an affair with his hairdresser. Eric Greitens was indicted on a felony invasion of privacy charge in 2018 for allegedly coercing her into a sexual encounter then snapping a photo of the semi-nude woman against her wishes. Greitens allegedly told the victim that her reputation would be tarnished as a “little whore” if she said anything about it.
Greitens, at the time, dismissed the charge as a “witch hunt,” taking a page from then-President Donald Trump’s playbook, using the same language the twice-impeached, one-term commander-in-chief repeated ad nauseam in describing Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Greitens’ affidavit said she was subjected to “threats” by Eric “in order to coerce me to do or to refrain from doing or saying certain things.”
“After Eric admitted to me in late January 2021 that he had taken the photo that resulted in the invasion of privacy charge, he threatened that I would be exposed to legal jeopardy if I ever disclosed that fact to anyone, even family members or a therapist,” the filing continues. “Because of the reach of his influence in Missouri, I believed him, which had the consequence of isolating me from many sources of outside support as his threats escalated and my concerns for my safety and that of my children grew.”
Greitens further states in the affidavit that her husband flew off the handle after she told him she had accepted a teaching job in the Lone Star State, and threatened to use his influence to get the offer revoked.
This, according to the affidavit, included saying he would accuse her of stealing money from the couple’s joint bank account and claim she lied to the federal government, both untrue. Greitens also referred to his wife as the “enemy,” the filing states.
Eric also threatened to frame Sheena for child abuse if she didn’t comply with other demands, such as deleting emails she had sent to the family’s therapist seeking help, according to the affidavit. Through it all, he called her a “hateful, disgusting, nasty, vicious…lying bitch,” the affidavit alleges.
She further claims he purchased a gun at one point, and “repeatedly” threatened to kill himself unless she publicly supported his political ambitions. Things got so bad that friends and associates of Eric’s were “worried enough to intervene to limit Eric’s access to firearms on at least three separate occasions” in 2018, the affidavit says.
During this period, Sheena Greitens says she began sleeping in her children’s room “simply to try to keep them safe.”
“Now that Eric is a candidate for federal office, public interest in my life, my relationship with Eric and the breakdown thereof, and the existence of issues of custody between Eric and me are being re-kindled and brought back into central public discussion,” she wrote in the filing, arguing that the case should be moved to Texas where “the reach of his power and influence is significantly less.”
The couple’s two kids remain unaware of their father’s sex scandal, and Sheena says in her filing that she would like it to stay that way until they are older. She also says Greitens has continued to “lie and mislead the public about our marriage and my own life,” but has turned down all media requests to protect the children and has therefore been unable to correct the record.
“We are in a battle to save our Republic,” Greitens’ official campaign website tells visitors. “That means building an army of MAGA fighters. The strongest America First fighters have all joined the mission to send MAGA Navy SEAL Eric Greitens to the U.S. Senate in 2022.”
The disgraced governor is linked to Donald Trump by more than a shared ideology—Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s fiancée, is Greitens’ national campaign chair. He eagerly trumpets endorsements by a rogue’s gallery of Trump sycophants and conspiracy-mongers including Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Sebastian Gorka.
In a statement provided to The Daily Beast, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt—a Republican and a staunch Trump supporter who is running against Greitens for Senate—said, “These allegations of abuse are disgusting and sickening. As Missouri’s attorney general, I know a predator when I see one, and I have fought for victims every step of the way. The behavior described in this affidavit is cause for Eric Greitens to be in prison, not on the ballot for U.S. Senate. He should end his campaign immediately.”
Helen Wade, Sheena Greitens’ attorney, did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Monday.
In an emailed statement, Gary Stamper, Eric Greitens’ lawyer, told The Daily Beast, “In their mediated agreement the parties promised to insulate their two children from public exposure and discourse... Common sense suggests that no parent would agree to share joint legal and physical custody with the fictional parent described in the filing leaked to the press before it was submitted to the court. The recent filing confirms the wisdom of Mark Twain, ‘A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ The only audience that matters now is the judge who approved the parties’ agreement and has the power to change it.”
