She Escaped Her Abuser. But Not Before He Buried Her in Debt.
One day, Sarah Ortiz bought a sweater at Target. She knew money was tight. She had just moved across the country from California to Massachusetts with her two toddlers and husband to seek costly, specialized medical care for one of her boys. But, Ortiz thought, it was just $25. And she needed a new sweater.
Still, Ortiz was nervous. She always handled the shopping for her family, filling the fridge, clothing her children, and ensuring the needs of her home were met. Often, like “any other person,” that meant heading to Target, she told me. “Especially, moms, right?” But all this shopping had to fall within a budget her husband, Tyson, set. If Ortiz wanted to purchase something over $25, she had to ask his permission.
“It was basically like a parent giving a child a card and then telling them, ‘This is what you can do with it, and if you step outside of that, then I will take it,’” Ortiz recalled. “And that was always the threat. If you don’t do X, I will take this from you.”
When Tyson handed Ortiz a Target credit card with her name on it, Ortiz didn’t think much of it, especially given his control over her budget. But she did wonder how her name could be on a card she never signed on to. “He said: ‘Oh, I opened it. I’m paying the bills anyway. What do you care?’” Ortiz recalled. If she was going to be spending so much money at this store, she remembers him saying, then why aren’t we getting anything out of it?
That credit card was opened over six years ago. Today, despite not having signed up herself, Ortiz owes Target $6,096. She also needs to pay Capital One $5,304, she owes Citibank $1,553, and half of the $18,052 debt to Bank of America held between her and Tyson. She struggles to remember all the rest: the student loans, the mortgage, the tabs spread across different retail stores and banks.
Five years ago, Ortiz began the process of leaving her husband. Since then, she has been trying to prove to the judges in her divorce proceedings that she was left in the dark by her husband and unknowingly saddled with debilitating debt.
“Right now, he’s in debt around $100,000,” Ortiz told me, and he wants her to pay half of it—on top of the $45,926 (and 99 cents) of debt in her name. “Most of [it],” she continued, “I didn’t know existed.” It’s a hard battle. “It’s his word versus mine,” she said, “and my name is on the document.”
There was a time when credit card users needed to walk into a physical space, sit down at a desk, and sign their names to gain access to credit. Those intimacies are not required anymore. Having access to the internet makes it remarkably easy to open a credit account for yourself. All you need is personal data potentially accessible by a partner: an address, email, Social Security and telephone numbers, and sometimes employment status and gross income. “Basic information that, of course, my husband is gonna know,” Ortiz told me. She is an authorized primary user on many of the credit cards. But she says she isn’t the one who opened them. There’s one big problem, she tells me: “There’s no way I can prove it.”
According to surveys of survivors of intimate partner violence, up to 99 percent of victims of domestic violence experience some kind of financial injury related to the abusive relationship; this ranges from lost wages from missed work to costs associated with housing instability and the more extreme cases, like Ortiz’s, of mass debts accrued by a controlling partner. The coercion happens in private. Lines of credit are opened on a computer in a shared home. The debt balloons, but the payments aren’t made. Then the victim gets a call from collectors, telling them they are responsible for thousands of dollars in unpaid charges.
One of the most pernicious kinds of financial abuse is what Ortiz experienced: coerced debt or “nonconsensual credit-related transactions,” as Teal Inzunza, associate vice president of justice initiatives at the Urban Resource Institute in New York, told me.
Over several interviews, Ortiz detailed being haunted by debt previously unbeknownst to her, brought on throughout a marriage she has been trying to leave—claims confirmed by her lawyer and a family member, in addition to court documents, police records, emails, and messages sent through the co-parenting application OurFamilyWizard that were reviewed by Mother Jones.
Tyson did not respond to a detailed list of questions and, when reached, asked to not be on the record. When I attempted to reach him on the phone, he did not respond. He has said over email to Ortiz’s lawyer that “these cards were used for survival during challenging financial times.”
On average, people experiencing financial abuse incur $15,938 in coerced debt from a partner each year. Forty-three percent of survivors report being pressured to take out credit in their own name when they did not want to, and 52 percent reported that an abusive partner put debt in their name through a fraudulent or forced transaction.
Understanding this kind of manipulation can be complicated, Inzunza said. “Economic abuse can vary and often is done in ways that are not as easy to understand for people because our financial system is so complicated,” she said. “It’s confusing.”
That also makes it ridiculously hard to crack down on. When handled outside of divorce court, Inzunza told me, coercive debt is often treated like identity theft. In the eyes of the law, someone who had their card information swiped at a gas station and a victim of domestic financial abuse are often grouped into the same category. In the United States legal system, the burden of proof in financial identity theft cases falls upon the victim, not economic institutions like banks. This burden is compounded for survivors. To erase or relieve debt, victims must file a report either through their local police department or with the Federal Trade Commission, the governmental agency that handles identity theft and consumer debt nationally.
The structures that allow coercive debt to run rampant have remained largely untouched over several decades. The credit industrial complex has little to no accountability for how abusers co-opt their services to keep victims, especially women, locked out of economic safety and security. When coerced debt occurs between intimate partners, it can be relegated to an interpersonal, rather than legal, matter, leaving it up to individual survivors to navigate these financial and legal institutions.
“It’s complicated for me as a person who is actually practicing,” Naomi Mo Chee Young, a lawyer who years ago launched the Marital Debt Project, which focused on matrimonial and consumer debt matters, told me. “Consumers are burdened with making their own case, and it’s absurd.”
The first time many victims of domestic violence learn that their abuser took out a credit card in their name is when they get called by a debt collector to pay it back. “Once someone realizes somebody stole their identity,” Young, who works in New York City, notes, “their mind immediately goes to, ‘Oh, I know who did this.’” Proving who did it, though, is a much more arduous, red tape–filled process. Survivors and advocates told me that trying to recover from coercive debt or navigate the complicated laws surrounding financial abuse can feel insurmountable.
Early last summer, four years after initially filing for divorce, Ortiz and her husband sat down with their lawyers to discuss terms of custody agreements ahead of an upcoming trial date. That part, Ortiz told me, “actually was very simple. He basically signed off on everything.”
“But then,” she continued, “when it came to debt, he said, ‘No, I want you to pay everything in your name’—half of what’s in his name—and then pay off his credit cards that he’s currently using.” After Ortiz denied his request, she told a judge what happened—detailing the abuse, the credit cards, and the crushing debt. In response, the court-mandated debt counseling to figure out their finances.
Tyson and Ortiz, along with their lawyers, unsuccessfully struggled to find a counselor to talk to virtually and coordinate a time to do so. So they’re now back in court to figure out who is legally required to pay back the debts accrued throughout their marriage—and complete its dissolution.
“It, to be honest, scares me,” Ortiz told me of the court requiring her to meet with her husband to discuss the debt. “Because I’d be going by myself in a room with somebody with the history he has with me, talk about finances, and then walk back out to my car by myself…Like, this is not safe.”
Proving that debt isn’t yours, Inzunza told me, can take survivors “months and months and months, and sometimes years, honestly, sometimes decades to figure these things out.” Those who are trapped in it are “likely advised by their attorney not to pay debts that are not theirs,” she continued, “because as soon as you pay that, then you’re saying, ‘Okay, this is my debt.’”
Implicit in coerced debt, compared with other loans, is what appears to be a paradox: that paying the debt back, even a little, can worsen your claims for justice. Throwing twenty dollars, or a thousand, at student loans, car payments, or a mortgage lessens the overall amount you’ll need to pay later—diminishing the tide one payment at a time. But for those who didn’t know they were on the hook for this debt, paying it back can signal that they’re claiming ownership over it.
During those months, years, and even decades, the debt can continue to accrue, often at high interest. Late fees compound. And debt collectors keep calling. Survivors, advocates, and lawyers all told me that these constant reminders of the money create prolonged and indefinite associations with the abuse.
“I have never done more suicide assessments than when I’ve run credit reports with clients and found coerced debt or identity theft,” Inzunza, who has worked with victims of financial abuse for years as a social worker, told me. “It is devastating to people in a way that I think is really hard for people to understand.”
In December 2024, during the final month of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it was seeking information in advance of “preparing a proposed rule to address concerns related to information furnished to credit bureaus and other consumer reporting agencies concerning coerced debt.” The Center for Survivor Agency & Justice, along with the National Consumer Law Center, petitioned the CFPB to amend its rules to enable survivors with coerced debt to “avail themselves of identity theft protections under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” according to a document released by the CFPB.
But with President Donald Trump’s administration targeting the CFPB, it’s unclear when or even if these potential changes could be implemented. In February, representatives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were seen at the headquarters and were able to access some of the CFPB’s internal computer systems, calling into question the safety of scores of Americans’ sensitive financial information. Days later, Russell Vought, the new acting director of the CFPB and an author of Project 2025, told employees in an email not to come in to the office and to “not perform any work tasks.” In late March, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from the mass firing of workers or otherwise dismantling the CFPB. The future of the main US agency tasked with protecting consumers—including survivors fighting financial abuse—remains uncertain.
“The active dismantling of the CFPB against the will of Congress is just stunning to behold,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Mother Jones, “and is so wrong.” A funded CFPB, she added, “could be a powerful vehicle” for protecting the rights of survivors of coerced debt.
Smith, along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), introduced the Survivor Financial Safety and Inclusion Working Group Act in February 2024. The bill aims to support victims of financial abuse, including coerced debt. The pair, according to Smith, is planning to reintroduce the bill this year. Rather than laying out a specific legislative solution, the act would put together a working group of federal financial regulators, advocates, and other relevant players to parse through what national protections can be established for survivors.
After hearing more and more constituents bring up financial abuse and coerced debt as a problem, Smith and Velázquez started to explore national legislative options. “And as we started to talk more with advocates and other experts, we realized that we weren’t ready yet for a policy solution,” Smith said.
The group, Smith continued, could work on policy actions that could be pursued. “It’s not a partisan issue,” she told me. “It’s something that everybody should agree shouldn’t happen, and yet this is a glitch in the law that we have to fix, and that’s what our bill would do.”
Yet, Smith said, the two members of Congress have struggled to gain Republican support. “Our issue is not so much active resistance as what I would describe as passive resistance,” she said. “Some of our outreach to Republicans has been met with a new kind of pushback, which is basically, well, we don’t want to create another working group, because this is the kind of thing that DOGE is going after, and they’re not going to like it.”
“How stunning is that?” Smith said. “This unelected billionaire is having this chilling effect on what Congress needs to do to develop good policy solutions for people that are getting abused and ripped off by intimate partners.”
Some states have made moves to ease this process for survivors, pursuing laws designed to help victims of coercive debt—but they’re not cure-alls. In Texas, lawmakers passed a bill expanding the definition of identity theft to include this kind of debt. Nonetheless, a lawyer there told me that she can rarely use this law because it doesn’t intersect with family court, where divorces play out.
A New York City law broadened the definition of victims of domestic violence to include economic abuse, but at the same time, a state bill that would have done more to protect victims from coerced debt stalled last year. The legislation, which would amend the general business law and “establishes a right of action” for claims arising out of coerced debts, passed the state Senate but didn’t make it out of the Assembly by the time the legislative session finished. Inzunza, from the Urban Resource Institute in New York, spent months trying to get the legislation passed. But “the banks have started strongly opposing the bill behind the scenes,” she told me, adding that they would argue, “The banks are also victims of this bill.” The bill was reintroduced in both the Senate and Assembly in 2025.
The Maine legislature passed “An Act to Provide Relief to Survivors of Economic Abuse,” which requires the removal of any debt or portion of a debt that resulted from economic abuse on reports by a consumer reporting agency. A 2022 California law, a similar version of which also passed in Minnesota, prevents creditors from collecting if a survivor can demonstrate that the debt was coerced. And at the end of last year, Connecticut lawmakers established that if a survivor can prove that the debt was coerced, the abuser is legally required to pay it back.
“I think it’s important that we understand what a big step this is in Connecticut,” said Mary-Jane Foster, president of Interval House, the state’s largest agency focused on ending domestic violence and providing services to survivors. “It is one more tool in the toolbox to protect victims.”
Because banks and creditors are primarily privately run in the US, they’re given substantial legal leeway on how they process claims of fraud or financial abuse. “To report fraud to a financial institution, to a bank, typically, what that bank is going to want to see is a police report,” said Young, who co-founded the Economic Justice for Survivors Collective and has worked with people trying to get rid of coerced debt. According to a 2019 survey from the Department of Justice, only 41 percent of all violent victimizations were reported to police—and proving financial abuse can be more difficult than a physical offense that leaves visible evidence. “The burden of proof should never have been on the victim in the first place,” Young said of coerced debt. “It’s like if you went to the police and they told you to solve your own murder before they would take you seriously.”
If survivors are unable to obtain a police report or don’t feel comfortable going to law enforcement, banks are able to dismiss their claims. And once the debt is accrued, these same banking institutions can transfer or sell the case to collections—effectively washing their hands.
For Ortiz, the trauma of financial abuse didn’t exist in a vacuum—it was paired with physical and emotional abuse, too.
The physical violence began before they started living together—always, Ortiz explained, under the guise of a joke. He didn’t like a comment she made in front of family members, so he threw a tomato at her leg so hard that it exploded. Ortiz was ironing a shirt in a way he didn’t approve of, so he hit her with a wire hanger. It only escalated from there.
Three days before their wedding in 2010, Ortiz and her soon-to-be husband got into an argument outside. She says he had been drinking, was high on marijuana, and was trying to drive away in Ortiz’s car.
“No, you’re not gonna take my car,” she recalled saying. “If you’re gonna act like an idiot, take your car, but it’s not mine.” She remembers having her hand on the hood of the car, telling him not to leave. “And then he pulled forward and hit me with the car and knocked me back into a planter.”
“So,” Ortiz continued, “on our wedding day, I had bruises and scratches all down my body from being thrown into a brick planter.”
About five years ago, around when Covid was first pushing people indoors, Ortiz said the physical abuse increased. She detailed the abuse in an affidavit for a restraining order. Ortiz had been keeping track of days when things became physical and what Tyson said to her: “You get out of the bed or I am going to come in there and piss on you like the sack of shit you are,” “You’re an abomination, what a mistake, what a fucking mistake,” and “piece of trash” were a few.
In one instance, Ortiz writes about a time she went into the bedroom following a fight to de-escalate and collect herself. Tyson came in and wanted the room, telling her to leave. “When I did not leave he grabbed me out of the bed and dragged me out of the room. When we got to the door he tossed me out and closed the door behind me,” she wrote in a document labeled “Tinctures,” just in case Tyson went through her computer. In an email exchange from September 2020, Tyson and Ortiz discussed, in part, this situation.
The kids “heard you drag and push me out of my own room,” she wrote.
“I did get physical in pushing you out of our room several months ago, and this was wrong,” Tyson responded. “But again there’s much more to the story than the manipulative picture you paint. I went to the room to lie down and escape your berating,” he replied. “You followed me into the room to continue berating me. I asked you repeatedly to stop, to leave me alone, and you just kept standing over me haranguing me until I finally decided to force you out of the room.”
She was granted the restraining order.
In that same email, Tyson wrote: “I have thrown things in the past, but the last time I threw something intending to hit you was in Sacramento in 2013 when I threw a 1-lb bag of wood chips at you from the garage. The other times I’ve thrown something it’s been when I lose control because you won’t stop haranguing me, and in my frustration, I’m desperate to get you to stop.”
“I’ve learned a lot since then and come to see that you deliberately provoke these reactions,” he continued, “so you won’t be able to get me to react like this again.”
Everyone in her family knows about the physical abuse and the ongoing divorce proceedings. The debt? Not so much. Ortiz told me that it was notably easier “to say I got shoved, hit, pushed, hit by a car—all of those are less embarrassing than the financial piece.” Why?
“Because that’s what it feels like. It feels like, ‘How could you not know that?’” she said. “And it’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been in that situation.”
Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told me that “a lot of women say the hardest part to clean up, when they left the relationship, was the financial damage—because it’s not a quick fix to repair your credit.”
Without access to your own bank accounts, it’s difficult to plan where to go and how to pay for it. And in each of these moments—when applying for an apartment, figuring out car insurance, paying one of the debt collectors—a gatekeeper runs a credit score, which can act as a persistent reminder of the abuse. “You’re out of the relationship, you’re feeling independent,” Ray-Jones said, “gotta go buy a car—whoops, there it is again. And it comes back really fast.”
Not too long ago, most women couldn’t have access to credit or a credit card of their own without a man signing off on it. On October 11, 1974, the New York Times front page read, “Congress Passes Bill Banning Bias Against Women on Credit.” It was about the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a new law that prohibited credit card companies from discriminating based on sex or marital status. The legislation came over two decades after the first “charge card” was introduced. (About two years later, the law was expanded to protect race, color, religion, national origin, age, and receipt of public assistance benefits.)
The legislation was a direct response to complainants who included married women, unable to access credit cards in their own names regardless of their personal income, or single women who had been denied bank loans or were “granted smaller amounts than a single man with an identical financial background,” according to the Times. Put simply, access to lines of credit, without reference to a male partner, meant that women obtained more financial power to start businesses, build generational wealth, and leave abusive partners on whom they were financially dependent.
“Betting on her to be able to work every day for the next four years isn’t the same as betting on a man,” one creditor said in the early 1970s. “It is impossible to put a man and a woman on the same level completely as far as extending credit is concerned.”
In the years that followed, banks and other financial institutions, which were once the primary antagonists of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act’s text, began to see the law as a financial win. In one TV ad, a “well-dressed working woman [is] pulling out her credit card to pay for a romantic dinner with her husband.” In another, a woman is exiting a sporting goods store with a lacrosse stick—and a briefcase.
“American Express recognized in the late 1970s that its traditional market, the middle-aged traveling businessman, was already well-supplied with credit cards, but women presented a growth opportunity,” K. Shelly Porges, who served as director of consumer card marketing for the company, told the Washington Post in 1986.
Decades later, the credit honeymoon seems to have worn off for American banking institutions, and they remain a roadblock for survivors attempting to recover from coerced debt. Banks and creditors today benefit from how easy it is to obtain debt and skirt responsibility if abusers choose to co-opt that ease.
According to a survey of callers to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 73 percent remained in abusive relationships longer because they were concerned about how they could support themselves or their children. Erika Sussman founded Center for Survivor Agency & Justice in 2007 and currently serves as the organization’s executive director. About two decades ago, Sussman remembers being at a conference aimed at bringing together domestic violence and consumer protection advocates.
“At that early point in time, there was a literal rift in the room, like you could visually see it and also hear about it,” she told me. On one side, there were domestic violence advocates, “who were very familiar with survivors’ safety needs and the ways in which economics played a prominent role,” Sussman said. And then on the other side of the room were consumer advocates, “who were very aware of the remedies that existed but not so aware of the ways that survivors’ safety risk analysis needed to play a critical role in navigating that advocacy.”
The Center for Survivor Agency & Justice and it Consumer Rights for Domestic and Sexual Violence Survivors Initiative were formed to fill that gap. Today, Sussman and her team spend their days meeting with congressional leaders, financial institutions, and survivors to educate these intersecting groups about consumer finance law and how to mitigate coercive debt.
Still, Sussman said, because “our current credit system is confounding for most consumers” and “is for the most part unregulated,” actually getting courts or banks or collections companies to side with the survivor is hard.
“The path of undoing those harms,” she said, “is really just unbelievably challenging for folks.”
In January, Ortiz and Tyson went back to court—this time for a trial. Ortiz sat on the stand for hours as her lawyer and his lawyer drilled her about their marriage, about who said what and when, and what would be best for their three children, of whom Ortiz has primary custody. Her lawyer said she may not hear a judge’s decision for several months or over a year. In the meantime, this debt is still on her credit report.
After five years of fighting for some acknowledgment of who should be responsible for the debt, Ortiz is tired—so tired that she’s ready to pay every cent of money taken out under her name. Especially if it would mean no more court dates, no more messaging through lawyers, no more seeing his name pop up on her phone.
When I asked her whether the act of testifying was at all empowering, she replied that it felt like she wasn’t even in the room—let alone on the stand.
“I’ve told my story so many times that I feel like at some points, it doesn’t even feel like mine anymore,” she said. “I’m telling somebody else’s story just because I feel like that helps me. If I detach from it, then it’s not as big.”
But as Tyson spoke, Ortiz was there again. She began scribbling notes each time she felt he was rewriting their past. “It was infuriating,” she said. She wanted a record of it.
“Even in court, when I’m sitting there with proof in front of me…that little voice starts to come up again that’s like: ‘Wait, am I remembering it wrong? Am I altering it?’” Ortiz told me.
“It’s like fear with fury, with confusion, with wanting so badly to prove that you aren’t in the wrong. And part of that, I think, comes from when you were in the wrong, when you were with that person, there was a consequence. And that’s the fear. It’s: ‘Oh no, I don’t want another consequence. I did nothing. Somebody, please believe I didn’t do anything so that I don’t get hurt again.’”