About This Episode
"3. Love and Violence: 'First He Love-Bombed Me'" is an episode of Sagen Genåbnet ("The Case Reopened"), a Danish true crime podcast, and it centres on a woman called Julie, who in 2003, at the age of 23, began a relationship with a man she had known for some time.
The relationship started with what would today often be described as love bombing. He showered her with affectionate messages and attention, and things quickly became serious. After a while, however, he began to show another side of himself.
Over the following two years, Julie was subjected to what she now describes as extensive psychological violence. The episode traces how that psychological abuse gradually shaded into physical violence, and how the escalation happened so slowly that the boundaries kept shifting without her being able to react to them as they moved.
The focus is less on a single dramatic turning point than on the mechanisms of this kind of relationship: how overwhelming affection at the outset can function as an entry point to control and, later, to violence — and how a victim experiences and tries to make sense of the development while it is still unfolding.
Sagen Genåbnet normally digs into unsolved killings and reopens old cases with the help of modern investigative techniques. This instalment departs from that format, turning instead to intimate partner violence and the psychological patterns behind it.
The episode is number 212 in the series and runs for 33 minutes.
