Turns out hard drugs don't really keep you sharp enough for a class A felony.
Clearly, it was time to put several states -- maybe a few small countries and an ocean -- between herself and this guy. "I spent about six months jumping around the country trying to find someplace I felt safe," she says. Safety is not exactly what she found: "I was ultimately committed to a hospital in Seattle for a couple of months. I started making my way back East to be closer to my childhood home, and was raped two days later at a bus depot."
All of this left Alice with a heaping helping of PTSD, plus a side of relapse into the eating disorder she'd previously overcome. Grad school and the teaching job that had been paying her bills dropped to somewhere near "Suri Cruise's latest haircut" on the list of things on her mind. She isn't an anomaly.
Chad Baker/Jason Reed/Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty
Yes, grad school. Turns out way more homeless people have a degree than the cartoonish bum stereotype would have you believe.
Domestic violence is the number-one reason women end up homeless. One survey found that over 90 percent of all homeless women in shelters have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives, with many of them attributing their homelessness directly to those events. It's a favorite tactic of abusers to keep their victims isolated and financially dependent, which means they have nowhere to go when they decide to run. The most you can do is get a restraining order, which all too often only means that the stalker spends a weekend in jail and comes out even angrier. Legal pro tip: A firm letter generally does not dissuade violent psychopaths.