Saundra Crockett, for more than a decade, wore a mask in public to hide her face: it was her husband’s deepest and darkest secret.
Crockett, who is from Beverly Hills, California, said, “I wore a mask for 12 years.”
At the time, her husband beat her so severely that she got an infection that ate away at her face, she said.
However, she survived but wanted to hide her disfigurement.
“They could hear my voice so they knew who I was but they didn’t know who I was because of my face,” Crockett said. “It was ah … pretty awful.”
Crockett later met a woman named Deborah Alessi, who started a nonprofit called Face Forward, which in seven years has provided reconstructive facial surgery to hundreds of people around the world who have been physically abused. “They have to look in the mirror and be reminded this man or this woman or this mother did this to me,” she said.
Crockett was one of those people who were helped.
“This is a thousand times better than what I looked like when this first happened to me. I don’t think I could even describe how awful it was,” Crockett said.
The nonprofit says that patients have to sign a form saying they'll become advocates against domestic violence.
