"On a personal level, it was a little hard for me to watch," Charlotte Fedders said of her viewing of "Shattered Dreams," the CBS docudrama about her years as the battered wife of a successful attorney and prominent government official.
"Professionally speaking," Fedders said, "I think, in general, it's very well done. I think it adequately shows - very accurately shows - the physical violence the way it was in my relationship, which was, as some people said, violent but not really that bad. In other words, I was never set on fire, as someone once said.""Shattered Dreams," with Lindsay Wagner playing Fedders, airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 5.
Fedders said the film shows that the violence does not have to be as life-threatening as the violence shown in "The Burning Bed" and "The Tracey Thurman Story" for it to be dehumanizing to the victim and other family members.
That's one message Fedders said she has been delivering in lectures in recent years since her 1988 divorce in Maryland from John Fedders. Charlotte Fedders, who grew up in Baltimore and went to school there until she met and married John Fedders while serving as a student nurse in Washington, today lives in Montgomery County, Md. The five sons - ages 9, 11, 15, 17 and 21 - from her marriage to John all live with her. She has returned to nursing to support the family.
"After doing many, many, many odd jobs," Ms. Fedders said, "I'm working fulltime as a nurse doing a 40-hour week in three days. That's true, I do 16-hour shifts two out of the three days I work, so that I can be home as much as possible.
"I do lecture periodically all over the country (on domestic violence)," she said, adding that she had recently been contacted by a speakers' bureau and may be getting more lecture invitations as a result of the movie.
"Conservatively, I do six to eight lectures a year . . . I'm sure there are critics of Charlotte Fedders out there, but they're not coming forward. There are so many people who are very appreciative of what I feel is the small contribution I have made toward domestic violence and getting rid of it. But basically we lead a very busy life . . . We basically lead a loud, messy life."
John Fedders practices law in the Washington area. No criminal charges were filed in connection with the alleged domestic violence.