The wife of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer has accused him of physical and emotional abuse — including choking her and trying to punch her while she was pregnant, according to a report.
“One of [Spencer’s] favorite statements to me is, ‘The only language women understand is violence,’” Spencer’s wife, Nina Koupriianova, alleged in divorce filings filed in Montana, the Guardian reported.
Koupriianova accused him of calling her “genetically defective” and a “parasite,” and that he lashed out at her verbally in front of their young daughter.
“I’m famous and you are not! I’m important and you are not!” Spencer would yell at her at times, she alleged in the filings that were first reported by BuzzFeed News after several attempts by Spencer to keep them under seal.
Spencer — who popularized the term “alt-right” to describe a fringe movement of a mix of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigration beliefs — called the allegations “a wild mischaracterization of who I am.”
“I’m not going to be engaging with specifics,” he told the Guardian.
Spencer gained international recognition after yelling “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” and being greeted with Nazi salutes during a white nationalist event in November 2016.
In 2017, he was one of the most prominent participants in the violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Spencer and Koupriianova, who have two young children, married in 2010 and have been living separately since July 2017.
In the divorce filings, she claimed that Spencer’s abusive behavior, drinking and white supremacist activism put their children at risk.
“Most if not all of [Spencer’s] public speaking events end in violence,” she noted.
In 2014, when she was pregnant with their first child, Spencer held her down and grabbed her by the neck and the jaw, leaving bruises, she claimed.
Three years later, when she was nine months pregnant, he tried to punch her in the face, she said.
After Spencer was punched in Washington, DC, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, he left a loaded .38-caliber handgun on the table in their bedroom in Montana, Koupriianova claimed.
When she confronted him about the risk to their 2-year-old daughter, “he did not seem to adequately appreciate the danger,” she claimed.
But Koupriianova also has previously defended Spencer.
In December 2016, she wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper suggesting that Spencer had been the subject of a “witch hunt” and claiming that he “promotes positive identity for peoples of European descent around the world.”
