The woman with the battered face. Several years back that battered face was splashed all over the media. The woman's name was Hedda Nussbaum. She came to public attention as a dramatic witness for the prosecution in the death of her adopted daughter, Lisa.

Hedda Nussbaum was a vulnerable person already in her early years. She says that when she was a child, "I just went where I was taken." She just obeyed orders. Not surprisingly, she fell in love with a man who loved to give orders. His name was Joel Steinberg. He was an attorney. "I just loved to hear him talk," Hedda said of Joel. "Basically, I worshipped him. He was the most wonderful man I had ever met. I believed he had supernatural, godlike power." Friends of Hedda Nussbaum described her as a person in search of a god. She thought she had found a god in Joel Steinberg.

Hedda moved in with Joel! Two years later the beatings began. Joel Steinberg was an abusive person. The system that was created in the pairing of Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg was a very sick system. Hedda needed a god. Joel was a controlling and manipulative man. They chose each other. It was to be a fatal choice!

Joel Steinberg had Hedda Nussbaum totally under his control. He told her where she could go, whom she could talk to, what she should do at work and so on. He forbade her to see her parents. And, he beat her. She reported finally that he hit her violently time and time again. Her spleen was ruptured by one of his blows and she had to have it removed. Her knee was damaged, she was burned, her sexual organs were beaten with a broomstick, some of her teeth were knocked out, her hair was pulled out. A New York City doctor described Hedda's case as, "absolutely the worst case of wife battering I've ever seen. She was a slave," he said, "totally submissive to this man, with no ability or will to save her own daughter."

Hedda Nussbaum was a nobody. She was a thoroughly "bent over" woman. "I'm a piece of ----," Joel made her write over and over. She wrote it and she believed it.

The tragedy that brought Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg to the courtroom and to public knowledge was the death of their daughter, Lisa. Mr. Steinberg was going out one evening. Lisa wondered if he was going to take her with him. Hedda told her to go to the bathroom and ask him. She did. Joel Steinberg proceeded to knock her unconscious. Hedda didn't know what to do with this lifeless body. "Don't worry," Joel said, "just let her sleep. I will get her up when I get back."

Hedda waited. She was confused. She was so dependent on Joel's every command, so convinced of his healing power, that she did nothing for Lisa. She was simply paralyzed. Consequently, Lisa died three days later. Hedda could have saved her. But to act on her own would have been an act of disloyalty to Steinberg. She was not a free person. She was not free to act. She was, indeed, a "bent over" woman with not an ounce of self-esteem left in her.

And Hedda is not alone in this world. In the United States alone 1.8 million women are battered every year. Some form of violence occurs in 25 percent of all marriages. On and on the statistics roll. There are "bent over" women everywhere. Who shall stand them straight again?