It has been 10 years since TikToker Amy (@amyncox) married her high school teacher, and she is sharing the story of how that situation came to be.
So, it all started when she was a 17-year-old senior in high school, and her teacher slid his phone number to her during her last class.
“I had been told that he and the wife were getting a divorce,” Amy said.
“They weren’t living together, and all that came out, and it was not true. He had lied. He was probably my teacher from 9th or 10th grade to my senior year, so we had built, I guess, a friendship or a relationship. Looking back now, it was definitely grooming because I mean, we would talk like we were best friends.”
That same night, she gave him a call. She was nervous because he was telling her that he had liked her for a couple of years and couldn’t get her out of his head.
With all the love bombing he did, she truly thought he meant it when he claimed that he and his wife were getting a divorce.
They had been in a relationship for a month and a half when she went to stay with him behind her parents’ backs. Word got around the school because they weren’t very secretive about it.
One day, he called her and informed her that the police were coming to the school the next day to question them about their relationship.
The following day, detectives arrived and interviewed them. They were put into separate rooms, and she denied everything. Later that night, she received a call from an unknown number. It was her teacher, asking what she had said to the detectives.
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It was now Thanksgiving break, and Amy knew she had to break the news to her father. On the morning of Thanksgiving, her dad called her and asked about it.
She told him the truth, and after Thanksgiving dinner, they sat down to talk about it some more. He stated that she was no longer allowed to talk to this teacher. But of course, she found a way around that.
“My dad had tried to talk some sense into me, like when I was going to be in the prime of my life, I was probably going to have to be changing his diapers. It was rough…and I was 18, and I was fully head over heels in love.”
As soon as all the court cases began coming out, her teacher got divorced. Before the divorce was finalized, he proposed to her.
Now, she realizes that he had only proposed to avoid going to jail. He needed her to marry him so that she wouldn’t be able to go up to the stand and testify.
They ended up getting married at the end of her senior year. They had to wait about 60 days for his divorce to be finalized. Their story was international news at that point.
They moved in together, and he started being mentally and verbally abusive. She was working really hard to pay the bills because he had obviously gotten fired from his job as a teacher. He also wouldn’t let her go out in public without a full face of makeup on because it helped make her look older.
He called her names and told her that she needed to call his ex-wife and apologize for ruining her family. He owned several guns, and they had multiple arguments where he would put a gun to her head or his own head.
When she was 21, they got into a fight in front of everyone at a neighborhood block party. Their friends reached out to her, as they now knew that her husband was abusive.
A couple of weeks after that night, he went through her phone and saw all the messages between her and her friends and her dad.
This triggered him because he had forbidden her from talking to her dad. So, of course, he pulled out a gun. In the end, Amy told her father all about the abuse.
He told her to get her affairs in order before leaving. She had to have her assistant manager from work come to her house with a box cutter in her back pocket and pack up all her clothes.
After that, Amy moved in with her mom. The love bombing began again, but this time, she wasn’t falling for it. They had to meet up to sign the divorce papers.
He started showing up at her workplace unannounced. Her boss sent her to a different location to get her away from him, but he followed her. It took a while for her to finally escape from him.
“I truly thought that my ex-husband loved me until I got with my husband now,” Amy said.
“And the amount of love that that man has for me, my ex never had love for me. He had love for himself, and he was only on the lookout for himself.”
Amy is now married to a good friend who helped her get through a lot of this. They got together about two and a half years after her divorce. They were married on March 5, 2025.
Amy’s story shows that there is a way out and help is available. She rebuilt her life from the ground up and surrounded herself with real support.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
