Fashion Designer Olamide "Iconola" Agunloye Says She Was Beaten All Through Her Three Pregnancies..

The fashion designer and mother of three in a heart gripping monologue with dang network detailed the horrific experience she endured in the hands of her husband and how she found the courage to leave.

I've never really been a vocal person, I think as a teenager I was considered very quiet,reserved secretive, so I also think it's easy for people with my character to endure these kind of things. Nobody knew what I was enduring. This man beat me through all my pregnancies" and I have 3 kids. You just really have to endure. It's from neighbors pulling him off me or me trying to fight back. It went from once a month to once a week to 2,3,4 times a week to everyday of the week and then stop for a month and begin again. 

I didn’t really know the weight of what I was enduring. I tried to understand it from the point of view that this is somebody that I know, this is not a mad man that walks into my house and slaps me, I mean I won’t take it. This is someone that we gist, we laugh, we pray together, we do things together. So this is for the small percentage of the time we spent together. 

People thought we had a perfect life and I like to think he was a good actor but I was very good at acting as well. The beatings and the fighting got worse. It got worse sometimes in the quantity as well as the quality and I think it became morbid at some point. I had my third child three years into the marriage ad I remembered there was a time, I backed the baby and I was wearing his t-shirt and joggers, his brother had come into the house. As soon as his brother left, he said I wanted to disgrace him that I looked horrible and he tore the shirt off of me. He had removed my son of my back with a knife_ he had a knife to the wrapper.

 He put the three small children in the other room and beat me black and blue and I remember he was hitting my head on the kitchen floor and it got to the point I couldn’t endure it anymore. The pain was just a little bit too much, so played dead and I thought maybe he would stop beating me. he didn’t stop hitting me. He hit me even harder. In my mind I thought isn’t it bad enough that you’ve killed me, you’re hitting my dead body. I’m supposed to be dead or I am dead. This is how you hate me so much.

 You’re hitting my dead body. i couldn’t endure it anymore, I had to hold his leg and took a bite at it. Io left the house that day and I left the house a lot of times after that. But I went back, I kept going back. I went back for different reasons; can I sustain myself, can I sustain these boys? ,is this what I want for myself? I remembered that when I got to my friend’s house that day, she didn’t recognize who I was until I spoke, that’s how badly bruised my face was and some way you think you’re hiding these things, but some people already know and you keep enduring and enduring it and it gets to a point where I really felt like a fraud.


She explained further:


My reaction to the words, the slaps, the punches was that I know that I needed to be strong, needed to be sharp, needed to work harder. I need to provide for my family. It wasn’t enough to do my business as a hobby, as I was subtly responsible for five people. Sometimes he would say I was too slow to respond to people or I was too reserved or I’m not as hospitable as I’m supposed to be. he had a complain about almost every single thing and I didn’t know he was the problem at first cause some part of me thought he had a valid point. 

For every point I felt that he had, I improved upon myself, but you can’t please someone who is not pleased with themselves, so the more I improved, the more unhappy he became and he took it out in me and from being woken up in the middle of the night with a knife on my neck to been locked outside the house, I had a curfew, there are just a few things I couldn’t understand. There are times he would take a nine hour car ride just to come and beat me up and I couldn’t understand it because driving makes people relaxed, how do you have the energy to beat someone up after, and during the nine hours, it was with a lot of phone calls saying, “I’m coming home to kill you”. 

For the period of a year I knew I was leaving that I had had enough, but there were two light bulb moments. when I told my sister he tried to drown me and I remember this fight clearly because it was close to midnight? I’m normally enthused about business, talking about new ways to make money and he was using the toilet and he said,” you’re talking too much, I’m going to come and to shut you up” and I thought “are we not just talking” and he said I was acting erratic and I kept hitting the floor and I thought there’s nothing erratic about this… This is dirty. he was using the toilet, and he came and cleaned himself on me, spat on me in a drooling way, like he had been holding spit in his mouth for like a min or two and was drooling it all over my face and before I knew, my hand was behind my back and he dragged me to the bathroom and he put my head in a bucket of water and i just kept thinking I can’t fight back but he’s not going to kill me and I was so relieved when he raised my head up only for him to put it back in again.

 I don’t how many times some body tries to kill you before you understand that they’re trying to kill you. I told my sister 6months after and she was crying and she said I hope you know this is attempted murder and bulbs were going off in my head, like it took someone else to tell me 6months after. I knew I could have died, but some part of my thinking didn’t click on that he’s trying to kill me..


6 months or thereabout after I left, being in that space where you’re considering a friendship, a possible rekindling of the marriage, not really a love relationship, there was an argument in my friend’s house, it was a “give me your phone” argument and I thought to myself I have left you for six months so technically I’m not your wife. and in the space of 10/15n minutes there was argument, there was struggle, there were people there too, I felt a crunch around my nose and i knew he had bit me on the nose and a voice in my head said “don’t move” as my first instinct was to yank my face from his mouth .




so I screamed instead and as soon as I screamed he left me alone and I fell on the floor and I remember him say “do you see her, she’s pretending” and I got up and there was blood all over my face. That was the moment I knew and I felt that my life was in danger again and if I went back to this man I will not come out alive. And I take responsibility for my part in those seven years of marriage, and full of gratitude that I am alive.



I take responsibility for putting my life into someone’s hands and expected them to keep me safe and the moment I knew I wouldn’t be safe I still stayed ,hoping against all hope that lion wouldn’t be a lion.**..