Actress Maddie Corman’s husband was arrested for downloading and sharing child sex abuse images, and she decided to stay with him, for the sake of their three children.
It’s a decision that has raised many eyebrows, but Corman, 49, is sticking by her choice.
“I’m aware that decision does not sit well with some people. I don’t like having to defend my choice. I was proud to be married to who I’m married too, and I am still proud to be married to him, I am,” she told The Times.
Here is Maddie talking about her new play about her husband’s arrest, and how hard the decision to stay was to make.
Corman has turned her controversial experience into a one woman play called ‘Accidentally Brave’. She gets to relive the horror of that incident on stage, eight times a week.
Her life was turned upside down in 2015, when early one morning she received a frantic call from her 16-year-old daughter while at work.
“MOM! The police are here! Mom! They’re taking Dad’s computer. MOOMMMM!”
During the show, she tells the story warts and all. The calls that followed to her husband, her father, her brother. Her initial reaction that it must have been a horrible mistake.
She describes seeing her husband waiting outside her workplace:
“The man that I have been with for 20 years, the man who is the father of my three children and my very best friend . . . who plays songs at the piano and makes silly puns and reads The New Yorker,” she says. “He is hunched over and pale and I don’t recognise this person.”
“Is it true? How old? Did you ever touch anyone?” she asked him.
She describes throwing up, perhaps punching him (it’s all a blur) and the uncontrollable shaking.
The story hit the news. Her husband Jason (Jace) Alexander, 54, is famous himself. He is a TV director, and worked on Law & Order. So media coverage was inevitable.
It’s for this reason her show is titled what it is, she didn’t want her family’s life to be thrust into the limelight, but that wasn’t really a choice she could make. She would have preferred, she tells The Times, to keep it all private.
“If I had the choice, I probably would have,” she says.
She uses her play as a way to settle some facts that she believes were misconstrued in the headlines.
“Some of the headlines about his arrest gave the impression that he had made the videos himself. “He did not,” she says in the play. “He watched them. I’m not in any way saying that this is OK, but let’s be clear: he downloaded and watched.”
