The Bachelor franchise creator Mike Fleiss‘ estranged wife accused him of physically attacking her while pregnant, and demanded she get an abortion. Laura Fleiss (Kaeppeler) reportedly filed an emergency domestic violence restraining order, claiming that on July 4, “While we were at out house in Kauai, Mike demanded that I get an abortion,” according to her declaration obtained by The Blast.
According to the documents, Laura said she is “approximately 10 weeks pregnant.” The news comes after the television producer filed for divorce from his wife last week. The couple also shares 4-year-old Benjamin.
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“Our son Ben was in the house, seated in another room nearby,” Laura, 31, claimed in the documents. “Mike told me, ‘If you have an abortion, then we can just go back to the way we were.’”
“Prior to July 4th, Mike threatened me that if I did not have an abortion, he would end the marriage,” she said in the documents, PEOPLE wrote. “This was not the first time he had threatened a divorce during our marriage, but now, he was using this threat as leverage to force me to have an abortion. In addition, on July 4th, Mike made the following statements to me: ‘I am cutting you off financially Monday morning’; ‘You are paying for everything with your money’; ‘Next time I see you, I don’t want to see your stomach’; and ‘You have a choice, you can choose. Have an abortion or go back to Wisconsin, but you are not taking Ben.’”
“He continued to threaten me, demanding to see bank statements showing I paid for an abortion and the flight information to and from Oahu for the medical procedure,” she added.
The former Miss America winner claimed further that “while Mike has frequently been verbally abusive towards me during our marriage, in recent weeks, he has become enraged, due to the fact I am pregnant with our second child.”
“Mike told me many times that he did not want us to have a second child. He also repeatedly told me throughout our marriage, and prior to our marriage, that he knew he would ‘have to have’ one child with me because I was 26-years-old when we got married, did not yet have any children, and he knew I wanted to have a family,” she added in the documents. “Mike, however, being 55-years old, did not want to have more than one child together.”
His behavior became more and more erratic on July 5 and 6, when an incident occurred in which the Bachelor producer threatened to hurt her after she tried to get her phone back from him.
But “just before we got outside of the front door, he grabbed my body, forcibly pinned me up against the wall and held me there. After I broke free, he continued to use his arms and hands to aggressively push me away from him as he walked outside the door, still not returning my phone. Then he walked towards his pick-up truck parked outside in our driveway, shouting ‘I’m going to punch your face in,’” she claimed in the documents.
The report also included surveillance photos seemingly showing the abuse. Mike reportedly left the property with her phone, Laura screamed for help and got assistance from a friend who drove her to the police station to report the indecent.
In the documents she added: “I am afraid of Mike. I am afraid he will continue to act erratically towards me, verbally and physically, and in the presence of Ben. I have been hiding in a hotel for the past several days with Ben, and want to be able to return home without fear for myself, my son and my unborn child.”
In addition, Laura claims that “over the past several years of our marriage, Mike has made many emotionally derogatory and demeaning comments designed to demonstrate his financial coercive control over me such as repeatedly insinuating that he would destroy me with his wealth and power” and that she has “spent time in therapy discussing the effects upon me of Mike’s demanding and denigrating comments.”
After Mike filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences, Laura claimed in her declaration she found out about the filing through “the media.” The couple met in 2012 when he was a judge for the Miss America pageant which she won. They married on April 6, 2014, at Mike’s Malibu home. The ceremony was officiated by Bachelor franchise host Chris Harrison.
