{"id":598103,"date":"2026-09-12T12:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T12:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/598103\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T12:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T12:40:13","slug":"jenny-rudd-is-turning-trauma-into-a-lifeline-for-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/598103\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Rudd is turning trauma into a lifeline for others"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JennyJenny in her 20s. Photo \/ Woman’s Day<\/p>\n

Jenny recalls, \u201cShe was like, \u2018All these things you\u2019re describing, that\u2019s what emotional abuse looks like.\u2019 Even now, saying it, I feel uncomfortable because so many other people have it so much worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

That discomfort is part of the problem. She explains, \u201cPeople think, \u2018Oh, well, it\u2019s not that bad. He didn\u2019t hit me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Coercive control can be hard to recognise. It builds through everyday exchanges that often look ordinary from the outside.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always something seemingly innocuous,\u201d Jenny tells. \u201cEvery single thing in isolation looks neutral, but together, they form a pretty big pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n

The catalyst came after a year back in England with her three children \u2013 then aged between six and four \u2013 and watching how her own parents treated her. <\/p>\n

She remembers, \u201cAlmost immediately I was like, \u2018Oh, my gosh, this is what love looks like.\u2019 I realised I wasn\u2019t the nasty, selfish, self-absorbed, manipulative person I was constantly being told I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days after they returned to New Zealand, Jenny ended the marriage, but the fight wasn\u2019t over. Years later, Jenny received information suggesting her ex-husband was using methamphetamine and she made an emergency Family Court application to have supervised contact.<\/p>\n

\"JennyJenny built a desktop app that finds patterns of coercive control and emotional abuse in years of text messages. Photo \/ Deborah de Graaf<\/p>\n

\u201cI needed to get all these text messages together to prove my children weren\u2019t safe,\u201d she says. Her lawyer\u2019s instructions were, \u201cSend me everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

What followed was one of the hardest weeks of her life. She spent 30 to 40 hours screenshotting years of text messages, reliving every cruel word as she went. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou massively second-guess yourself. You think, \u2018Maybe it was my fault.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This troubling period stuck with her for years. Realising others faced the same fight, Jenny built a desktop app, Dispute Buddy, that finds patterns of coercive control and emotional abuse in years of text messages, then turns them into a report to give a lawyer.<\/p>\n

Her first investor was Dame Theresa Gattung<\/a>, the former Telecom New Zealand chief executive, co-founder of My Food Bag, and a Dame for her services to women, governance and philanthropy. The pair has also joined forces on the Gender Investment Gap NZ, a project spotlighting the funding shortfall facing female entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

Once Jenny built Dispute Buddy, she ran her own messages through it. The analysis described a \u201csustained, decades-long pattern of coercive control over Jenny and her children\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"Jenny'sJenny’s app, Dispute Buddy. Photo \/ Woman’s Day<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cIt was 13 years after I\u2019d left and it was still such a shock to read. But even though a neutral machine had clearly labelled it coercive control, my brain was still saying to me, \u2018Nah, it wasn\u2019t that bad.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Jenny finds it hard to call herself a victim of anything. It\u2019s a philosophy shaped in part by a life that\u2019s already asked a lot of her. At 24, Jenny survived a motorcycle crash in England that killed both her friend and another rider. She still has only limited use of her right arm as a result. And in 2021, a fall while running left her with a brain injury that took years to resolve.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really think about it,\u201d she says of her arm and her head injury. \u201cIt\u2019s not part of my identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

What drives Jenny is her impatience with the systems meant to catch coercive control, not for her own story, but everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you coercively control someone in public? No. It\u2019s always in private,\u201d she explains. \u201cSo you\u2019ve got two issues. How do you recall what was said years later? And how do you find the evidence?\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, Jenny hears from women and men, working through the same realisation she once had, usually long after they\u2019ve left their controlling partner. Talking to them is the part she didn\u2019t expect to find so meaningful, she admits.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many of them haven\u2019t spoken to anyone else \u2013 no one believes them,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re lonely, frustrated and trying to process everything that\u2019s happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her advice for any woman recognising her own relationship in Jenny\u2019s is straight to the point.<\/p>\n

She insists, \u201cIf you\u2019re ever questioning whether something feels like love, it\u2019s probably not.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more about Dispute Buddy, see disputebuddy.co<\/a>. Shine\u2019s Domestic Violence Helpline is 0508 744 633 and takes calls 24\/7. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jenny in her 20s. Photo \/ Woman’s Day Jenny recalls, \u201cShe was like, \u2018All these things you\u2019re describing,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26220,28157,8493,2082,71,8589,10053,296,185,39164,34590,1619,19133,3234,111,43,139,69,2682,37250,180989,2247,40547,62082,37451,3057,1529,1908,25809,15315,4518,1316,540],"class_list":["post-598103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-26220","tag-dropped","tag-exactly","tag-for","tag-from","tag-garden","tag-house","tag-into","tag-is","tag-jenny","tag-lifeline","tag-london","tag-looking","tag-months","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-others","tag-penny","tag-perched","tag-pregnant","tag-remembers","tag-rudd","tag-sitting","tag-steps","tag-three","tag-trauma","tag-turning","tag-wedding","tag-weeks","tag-when","tag-where"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}