A woman has revealed how her relationship fell apart after she made her boyfriend attend a George Floyd protest at the height of the pandemic which saw him arrested and held overnight in a prison cell.
Writer Emily Witt detailed how the longterm relationship with her partner, whom she calls Andrew, slowly spiraled out of control, with her pinpointing the protest and his subsequent arrest as the beginning of the end of their time together.
The couple had lived in Bushwick for years but when the coronavirus pandemic struck it affected people in different ways.
For Witt and her boyfriend, things came crashing down as he fell into a deep depression, while she attempted to busy herself with everyday tasks running small errands such as biking to a fish shop or bakery in Brooklyn.
Writer Emily Witt has revealed how her relationship fell apart after she made her boyfriend attend a George Floyd protest at the height of the pandemic which saw him arrested and held overnight in a prison cell
As the couple made their way towards the protest they felt there was a heavy police presence for the relatively small number of protestors that had gathered
In the background to the pandemic, protests had sprung up following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
While Witt had covered protests in and around the New York area, she felt she needed to attend as a member of the public rather than using the perks of her press pass to remain more of an observer.
On one June evening, she convinced Andrew to meet her in the South Bronx where a protest was due to take place, promising him that the pair would leave before a citywide curfew.
‘I relive this moment. I think I will forever. You can ruin your own life in an instant by not paying attention,’ Witt writes in a lengthy article for The New Yorker.
As the couple made their way towards the protest they felt there was a heavy police presence for the relatively small number of protestors that had gathered.
For Witt, old habits die hard as she put on her press pass, perhaps in the hope it might afford her some protection.
Witt put on her press pass and was able to resist being arrested by police. Her boyfriend was not so lucky and spend the night in an NYPD holding cell in Queens
Demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd in the South Bronx on June 4, 2020
Widespread protests continued around the country and other parts of the world for months following the death of George Floyd
The police seemed to be closing in on the group and honing in on white participants before NYPD cops lashed out and began pepper-spraying, arresting and beating the protestors. Those arrested later received $21,500 each in a class action lawsuit.
Witt documented a scene of chaos as people all around her were arrested, including medics and a pregnant woman.
Witt believes she would have been next had she not yelled out that she was press to police while flashing her pass.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Andrew, was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until later in the evening she found out that he had been taken to Queens Central Booking, near Flushing Meadows.
The following morning Witt returned to pick up her boyfriend. She remarks how things between them felt noticeably different.
‘I understood then that he was angry with me. He had a broken finger, a scratched eye, and a bloody nose, and had been forced to sit in police custody with pepper spray burning his face for sixteen hours. It was my fault: I had made him go, and I was unscathed,’ Witt writes.
Andrew told of the hellish experience that he had endured having spent the night with dozens of other men in a holding cell having waited hours to be processed by the NYPD.
He became focused on how the police at the protest had used their bikes as shields.
His depression became replaced by a new energy as he worked to understand what had happened.
But it appears there was to be no return to normality for the couple as the pair began to argue more often over the most insignificant things, such as dirty dishes piling up or the unkempt state of their apartment.
The day following her boyfriend’s arrest, Witt returned to pick him up from an NYPD holding cell and noticed that things felt different between them. It was the beginning of the end
Demonstrators march to protest the death of George Floyd in the Bronx. The same protest Witt’s boyfriend was arrested at
Andrew’s arrest had bent their relationship out of shape as the couple suddenly began verbally sparring with one another.
It was Andrew who made the decision for the couple to break up as he asked whether he should move out of the apartment, or her.
Witt moved out and initially booked an Airbnb in Manhattan for the night.
The pair went back-and-forth over text as Andrew blamed her for the state of their relationship.
While she also accepted her share of the blame for pushing him to attend the Bronx protest, it appears him getting arrested may simply have been the final straw.
Andrew threatened to call the locksmith and told Witt that she could come and get her possessions from the street the following day.
Cruelly, he then tormented her by telling her that he’d had sex with someone else while she had been away at a writing residency months earlier.
While Witt had covered protests in and around the New York area, she felt she needed to attend as a member of the public rather than using the perks of her press pass
In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, demonstrators are seen protesting the death of George Floyd in the heart of the South Bronx on June 4, 2020
Consoled by her friends, Witt decided that she needed to get out of the relationship.
It really appeared to be over as Witt set about finding a new sublet in Manhattan.
What looked to simply be an annoyance or inconvenience for him was a life altering crisis for her.
Witt held back from texting Andrew but eventually found she had no choice after she needed to return to her old apartment to pick up some clothes.
Witt considered that Andrew had been having a mental episode following his arrest, but he had also explained himself that the relationship had ended because he had come to his senses.
But when Witt went back to collect her clothes, he had left her a letter suggesting the couple needed to try and fix what had been broken.
On Labour Day 2020, Witt tweeted a picture of the beach with the caption: ‘Summer of heartbreak and violence, glad it’s over.’
Andrew accused her of libel despite her not even mentioning him by name.
Over the next couple of months Witt describes her state of mind as being like a nightmare from which she was unable to wake up.
One night she returned back to the Brooklyn home and found the place to be completely wrecked with unwashed dishes stacked in the sink with trash piled up in another room.
On Labor Day 2020, Witt tweeted a picture of the beach with the caption: ‘Summer of heartbreak and violence, glad it’s over.’ The tweet appeared to have more than once meaning
Bizarrely, even after time apart, Andrew was not clear as to whether he wanted to break up or not.
Despite this, he would continue to taunt her by telling her that he had slept with a former co-worker and that the sex had been better with the other woman.
On one return trip, Witt went back to see Andrew and the pair slept together once more.
On what was to be their final night together, having had sex for the final time, Witt described the longing she once felt as having gone.
She noticed that Andrew had become energized again in a way that made her anxious with his nervous energy turning to fury at a moment’s notice.
Witt tells how she felt alone at the realization their relationship was finally over.
In the midst of the pandemic, she was unable to be with anybody else close to her.
By October 2020, Witt had packed up her Brooklyn apartment and began the journey west
Her parents were in New Hampshire and were reluctant to come into New York City – then the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. – while her brother lived thousands of miles away in California.
Many of her friends had also left town and she felt ashamed to even mention to them that she had gone back to Andrew.
Finally, it appears a fire was lit under Witt who over the course of three days packed up her possessions from her apartment, rented a storage unit and booked movers.
She threw herself into work assignments and began focusing on other stories rather than the chaos of her own.
Weeks after the breakup, she learned that Andrew had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, later finding out that he had been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.
It explained much of his behavior in the earlier part of the year that had been symptomatic of a manic episode.
Months later while traveling across the country and visiting a national park in Utah, Witt looked at her now exes social media.
In the calmness of Zion National Park Witt texted Andrew telling him that she was struggling and would like to talk. ‘I cannot be near you ever again. I feel a lot better’ he wrote back
Many of his rants had been deleted. His friends had told her that he had a new life, a new social circle and a new girlfriend.
In the calmness of Zion National Park Witt texted Andrew telling him that she was struggling and would like to talk.
‘I cannot be near you ever again. I feel a lot better’ he wrote back.
Witt says that it felt as though he had erased her from his life and that she had been left wandering alone in the desert while he was still living happily in the Bushwick apartment they once shared, perfectly happy.
It was only when she finally reached the west coast and sunny California that she felt relief. She never looked him up again.
‘If I didn’t look for him, he would no longer exist, so I stopped looking, and my life took on its own character once again,’ Witt concludes.
