Businesswoman, publisher and broadcaster Norah Casey nearly cancelled her now infamous appearance on The Late Late Show where she revealed she was domestically abused for nine years but now she's fighting back.
Norah has decided to help others by taking action this Domestic Violence Awareness Month, as she told me in an exclusive interview on The LifeStyle Show.
On The LifeStyle Show podcast I'm lucky to meet many amazing people with inspiring stories who share with us all how they do what they do so well.
Norah Casey shocked the country when she bravely revealed the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband Peter - an abuse that lasted nine years and landed her in hospital on more than one occasion.
She thankfully went on to marry Richard Hannaford and together they had their son Dara. Following Richard's death six years ago after a battle with cancer, Dara encouraged his mother to speak openly about the domestic abuse she suffered, in a bid to help lift the lid on the issue, to get people talking and to enable people to speak out against it, to stop it.
Norah is currently preparing to host this year's Women of the Year Awards 2017 and she has teamed up with Women's Aid to not only raise funds for the charity but also to work on a bigger project to educate young women and men about the dangers of toxic relationships and how to handle them.
All of this following her interview with Ryan Tubridy on The Late Late Show - an interview that nearly didn't happen.
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"If you ask the people on The Late Late Show, the producer, as it got closer to the time, I would wake up every morning and phone him and say: 'I'm not doing it. I just can't do it'.
"And every evening, I would say, I'll do it. I'd calm myself during the day. Even in the live week [of the show], the day before, he had a stand in.
"I really was terrified of whether I could do it. As it got closer I began to think: 'Oh my Goodness, people are going to judge me. All the things I think about myself: Why did I stay? What kind of a doormat am I?' People see me as somebody with the personality of Dragon's Den - being formidable, having the respect of everything I've done, would I just be knocking all of that down. And they'd say, she couldn't even stand up to that man for nine years. I had all sorts of different things in my head."
Listen to the full interview above and below where Norah talks about her relationship with Peter, how the abuse began, how she coped in those nine years, how she had to keep quiet about what was happening until enough was enough...
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