He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

If a person tries to erase who you are in order to keep control of your life, and then calls it devotion — that is not love.

That is ownership.

My reputation was nearly stolen and my mind was nearly turned against me, but my name still belongs to me.” That clip ran for months.

For the first time in my adult life I was not the tragic girlfriend of a famous man.

I was simply Genevieve Hayes.

In the years after, I learned to live as myself — not the manufactured sweetheart, not the fragile invalid he’d tried to invent, just me.

With Dr.