Boxing legend Christy Martin: ‘My husband told me for 20 years he would kill me’

Christy Martin’s original story, the well-trodden narrative of the coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who left home and stepped into the boxing ring for her professional debut in 1989, ends on the floor of her bedroom in Apopka, Florida, on 23 November 2010. She was 42 years old. At the time, she was the welterweight champion who put women’s boxing on the map, the first female to sign with the sport’s iconic promoter, Don King, the first, and to this day, only, female boxer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Those bits of history were the stuff used to frame her rise, to shape her career within the narrative arc of an underdog. Stories that sung the barriers she’d broken and records she’d set. But they omitted chunks of reality. Christy was gay, and trapped in a violent marriage to her manager, Jim Martin, who was 25 years her senior. She constantly needed to get high. And on that early November evening in 2010, Jim, her then-husband, who was also her abuser and cocaine supplier, her blackmailer and confidant, stabbed her three times and shot her in the chest. There would be no more separation between who she was in public and how she survived at home.

Days after her induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, and 12 years after the attack that nearly killed her, Christy spoke to the Guardian about the lives she’s lived, and her just-released memoir Fighting for Survival: My Journey through Boxing Fame, Abuse, Murder, and Resurrection.

By now, there are so many points in your boxing career where you were the first woman to do what you did. Are there particular milestones that feel more meaningful than others? It’s tough to say, “Oh, wow, this one thing was the best, most awesome thing.” But it