I changed my identity to escape an ex who abused, shot at and stalked me – 10 years later he hunted me down…

Emmy-winning author Chelsea Devantez has revealed for the first time that she was violently abused, shot at and terrorized by her first love.

The head writer of The Problem With Jon Stewart and host of the 3 million download podcast Glamorous Trash was forced to run for her life and change her name in an attempt to escape him… only for him to take her on stage ten years later to hunt.

Devantez – who has also written for Sarah Bareilles’ girl band show Girls5Eva – has made her living making people laugh, so she kept her past a secret for years, admitting she “didn’t want to have an ugly story.”

But in her new book, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going To Anyway), she reveals she was finally ready to open up about the episode she calls The Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing — only to be forced to do so. withdrew the manuscript because the details were ‘too dangerous to share’.

“Right before the book was printed… I was told that I had to remove the whole story of the domestic violence that I experienced when I was very, very young,” she says in her podcast.

She is head writer for The Problem With Jon Stewart – and has worked on episodes specifically about domestic violence

“So they canceled the book, and I canceled the book, and it was devastating.”

However, Devantez’s mother, herself a survivor of domestic violence, encouraged her daughter to fight and find a way to tell her story.

“My husband came up with the idea of ​​blacking out enough words so that I could keep the story in and they couldn’t technically tell me to take it out,” she says.

The result is that large portions of the first and last chapters of I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This are covered in black bars, hiding the worst forms of abuse.

It leaves many unanswered questions, but what remains hints at the horrors she endured.

“Now my comedy memoir looks more like the damn Mueller report.”

She writes, “StatIf you grow up in an abusive home, you are much more likely to end up in an abusive relationship yourself. Ever the rule follower, I jumped right into my probability.

‘At a time and place that will both remain unspecified, I fell in love for the first time. With that… came a very disturbing era in my timeline, an era that changed the course of my life for the worse.”

She says the abuse – as is so often the case – started with manipulation and psychological trauma.

The man she calls “Earl” told friends she was a slut. No one was allowed near her – and he would threaten anyone who tried.

‘[He] had so terrorized me at that moment that even the sound of his voice made me physically sick.”

But every attack was followed by a grand, romantic gesture to make up for it.

Then he upped the ante. Between black bars Devantez writes about ‘the gun’ [REDACTED] to shoot.’ Then: ‘The second shooting.

‘The third [REDACTED] the shots came through [REDACTED] lay down on the ground.

“As I cleared the glass away, I told myself to just hold on a little longer and it would pass.”

When she finally went to the police, one of their first questions was whether she had had sex with Earl. She started to sob.

‘I told them [REDACTED]. That’s how I thought about it at the time, just “sex I didn’t want to have.”’

The pair appeared in a courthouse and an unspecified verdict was delivered: “Although the abuse was serious enough in the judge’s eyes to warrant this verdict, I was only beginning to accept that it had been abuse at all.”

Undeterred, Earl continued to torment Devantez, on one occasion climbing a tree outside her bedroom at night and shining a laser pointer through the window.

“I lay in bed, terrified to move, wondering if he was trying to get my attention or practicing his aim,” she writes.

Announcing the domestic violence episode of The Problem with Jon Stewart, Devantez wrote that “my teen would have loved [it]and that’s who I made this for’

I shouldn’t tell you. This is heavily redacted, but still reveals glimpses of horrific abuse

Earl continued to torment Devantez, once climbing a tree outside her bedroom at night and shining a laser pointer through the window.

She realized she would never be released as long as Earl knew where she lived. So despite having very little money and no job, she found a way to escape.

Her mother and her godmother took her to another state. Then, just as she was settling into her new life, he managed to track her down.

This time she changed her name, moved again and held her breath, hoping that her ordeal was finally over.

“Over the years I have tried many different things to move on from the worst of my tragedies, but nothing has ever softened their hold on me,” she wrote.

She describes a “grief-filled, voraciously tortured rage” that has haunted her ever since.

Earl “may not have killed me,” she writes, “but he killed the woman I would become, and I will never get her back or know what she would have been like.”

She adds, “At one point my life almost ended. The Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing brought destruction far beyond the actual attack. It disrupted every cell in my body.”

She adds: ‘I always hated that anyone could know this part of me… I had thought that surviving something so disgusting and horrible meant that I was disgusting and horrible too.

“I didn’t want to be in misery forever, so I trudged along and pretended I had a normal past, hoping that maybe then I could somehow have a normal future.”

The pretext lasted 10 years. Then a sheriff walked into a comedy show while she was performing on stage and her carefully constructed bubble burst.

“The officer handed me a folder,” she wrote. “I started reading through its contents. The first page was a letter [REDACTED] had written, along with some paperwork.

Devantez was on stage when a sheriff entered the theater to summon her

Chelsea Devantez with her husband, fellow comedian Yassir Lester

Jon Stewart calls her memoir ‘raw, intimate, hilarious, actually inspiring’

“I looked through the papers and found the instructions the sheriff had followed. The police traced me through my social security number, which led them to my job at the theater.

‘They had my name listed at the top of the instructions page. My new name: Chelsea Devantez.

‘I felt overwhelmed. I felt helpless. I didn’t feel anything.’

After being hunted by her abusive ex, she was summoned across the country to visit that same small courthouse in the desert and reverse the decision made ten years earlier.

‘My ex-boyfriend, an extremely tall, blond athlete with blue eyes, had stated in his letter to the court that he wanted to become a cop.’

And just like that, she was looking over her shoulder again, living every moment in fear.

“After the Big Scary Domestic Violence Thing resurfaced,” she writes, “my world on stage started to look and sound different. The applause felt ominous and unreliable every night.

“The clapping became gunshots. To beat. To beat… Every night on stage I spent the first two minutes scanning the audience as I delivered each punch sharplyline.

“The triumph of this book,” she writes, “should have been that I lived through that story and lived to tell it, and even added some jokes to it! If I had gotten the story out of the book, the only victory would have been… that I was alive.

“So instead of removing it altogether, I kept as much of the cursed story as possible.”

She encourages readers to read it with a “Taylor Swiftian lens,” hinting that there is much more to be found between the lines.

“In fact, you might discover that the whole story still exists… if you read closely enough.”

I shouldn’t be telling you this (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez is published by Hanover Square Press