Debbie Dingell tells her story — even when she doesn’t want to

Rep. Debbie Dingell doesn’t want to talk about this, but I’m here in her office because she says she needs to.

Dingell grew up in Michigan and had what she describes as a “comfortable childhood.” Her father owned a business. Her mother was a member of Michigan’s famous Fisher family, whose company became part of what is now General Motors. 

But her father also was addicted to prescription drugs and suffered from mental illness. 

“He was paranoid. You just never knew what his mood was going to be and so he would just — trigger.”

It all came to a head on what Dingell described as “the night that I just really was convinced we were all going to die.”

Dingell’s father had a gun, and her mother had bought one of her own to protect herself. A fight broke out between the two “and I got in the middle of them,” Dingell recalled. 

“I tried to keep them from killing each other. My mother ran out of the house. He took the door knobs off of every door, so that we kids couldn’t get out. I tried to call the police. He ripped the phone out of the wall — not that anybody would have come anyway, the way they do today. So we hid in a closet and we didn’t know if we were going to live or die.”

At the time, Dingell was in middle school. Her baby sister was set to start first grade in the morning. Dingell walked her to school that next day, both pretending nothing had ever happened. Her younger sister, Dingell said, was forever traumatized. “She was never OK. This all was happening from the time she was born.” 

She died of an overdose years later, something Dingell continues to connect to the impact of that night, and of years of experiences like it.

Which is why, though she doesn’t like to talk about it, she will when she thinks it’s important, when she thinks her story might have the opportunity to change things, to shine a light, to ensure that another family can get the resources they need to reclaim their future. It’s why she’s talking to me today, even if she doesn’t really want to. She’s talking to me because I wanted to hear more after we spoke in early June about a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi critical of the administration’s actions to roll back resources and protections for survivors of domestic violence — and because she thinks it will help. 

“There’s always been a stigma associated with domestic violence,” Dingell tells me. “People think it doesn’t happen in ‘good homes’ — I don’t know what’s a ‘good home,’ by the way — or happen in certain families or in certain places, but it happens anywhere. For many reasons, you just didn’t talk about it. You didn’t want your family stigmatized, you didn’t want yourself stigmatized. But at some point — for me, for a long time, I always tried to figure out, how do you keep this down inside when there are guns getting into people’s hands in times when that shouldn’t happen?”

Dingell has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2015, after she ran for and won the seat vacated by the retirement of her husband — Rep. John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history, who died in 2019. She’s a former executive as well as an experienced Democratic operative, a connector and convener of people. Dingell is also widely known for her frank, direct speech — see her public spats with President Donald Trump. Since joining Congress, she has become one of the clearest, most consistent voices speaking out about the need to support survivors of domestic violence. 

She’s been talking about her childhood experiences with domestic violence since 2016, when her longtime friend John Lewis, the civil rights legend and new colleague in the U.S. House, took her by the hand during the 26-hour sit-in Democrats had staged at the Capitol to push for a vote on new gun safety legislation. 

“John Lewis knew my story and said, ‘Tell it.’ It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t rehearsed. It was in the middle of the night. And I got up and told the story. I never know what I’m going to say. I never pre-planned. I just talked about it in the minute there,” Dingell told me on a Monday afternoon in July as we sat opposite each other in arm chairs  in the Cannon House Office Building, surrounded by paraphernalia from her home-state and photos with political power players through the years. 

It wasn’t until that House speech that she had ever even used the term “domestic abuse” to describe her own experiences, Dingell said. When she did, she was “shaking like a leaf,” she recalled. But she understood why speaking up was important. 

“My sister was like, ‘If we could prevent anybody from going through what we went through, then we have a moral responsibility.’” 

They were words that have helped empower her to talk about her experience multiple times on the House floor in her 10-year tenure. But still, Dingell said, she and her surviving siblings don’t really ever discuss what happened to them. Dingell’s mother is alive, as are her brother and one sister, and she feels discomfort talking about a story that she says isn’t wholly hers. 

“When you grow up in this kind of situation, you learn to cope. You want to go on with your life. You don’t want to be demonized, or have that happen to your sister or your brother,” Dingell said. “That’s why I feel this probably isn’t my story to tell, nor should I really be talking about it. You just want to make a difference in people’s lives — and you want to move on. You don’t want to remember.”

The making a difference part means speaking honestly and frankly about domestic violence with the microphone she has in Congress. 

“Domestic violence is real. Domestic violence happens in every kind of family.” 

She worries people will ask why her mother didn’t leave and wants to protect her. 

I did not ask, but Dingell went ahead and answered the question: “You know, in those days, people said, ‘Stay together.’ The Catholic Church told you to stay together. So kids stay in situations where they shouldn’t stay.” 

She hopes her story can provide a kind of reference point for anyone navigating a similar situation. 

“Parents have to understand that when a child is in that kind of unstable, dangerous situation, it is not the best for the child. That would be one message I would have. And the other message is that when someone is unstable, when they have mood swings, when it can all just change in an instant, being armed in that situation is a dangerous situation.”

It’s these two things that have driven so much of Dingell’s legislative work in the area.

Dingell established the Bipartisan Working Group to End Domestic Violence, bringing together a group of House members to identify ways to strengthen resources and protections for survivors. There was the letter to Bondi urging the Trump administration to reinstate funding opportunities through the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) that provide critical resources and support to domestic violence survivors. (This funding was ultimately revived, though with new restrictions.) Another letter, to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., expressed deep concern about staff and budget cuts to programs that support survivors of domestic and sexual violence and their families. 

She was a key voice in helping the House pass the 2019 updates to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which included two provisions she authored. One was the bipartisan Zero Tolerance for Domestic Abusers Act, which closed loopholes that made it possible for perpetrators of dating violence and those convicted of misdemeanor stalking to legally access guns. The other strengthened the health care system’s identification, assessment and response to domestic violence, sexual assault and dating violence survivors, helping them better access behavioral health and safety resources. 

Dingell is particularly concerned about the way the Trump administration has delayed and restricted funding for the kinds of community-centered groups that provide services to women and children. She pointed to what’s happened in Detroit, where nonprofit support organizations worked for years to raise funds to build a shelter with 85 beds for domestic violence survivors. Now the future of the federal funding the shelter was relying on is unclear, putting its ability to operate in question. It’s just one example of why she’s once again choosing to talk about her personal experience with domestic violence now. 

“I’m working with the groups. We’ve had bipartisan conversations. You’re going to write an article. Half of this is just awareness and we need to go for that. That’s what I’m doing right now.”

These community-based resources, she said, are essential to helping children in particular. 

“I thought I needed to call the police because I thought we were going to die. But I don’t think many children, especially younger children, understand that there are other resources there,” she said. “This is why you educate teachers and people who work in emergency rooms, in case a child’s had a bone that’s been broken. That’s what you have to do — you have to raise community awareness.”

Though Dingell doesn’t care to talk about her personal experience with domestic violence, she does care about action and change — especially in the form of practical resources for other survivors. 

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. For me, it’s just about trying to keep other people from having to go through what we did and for mothers and fathers — there are men that are victims too — to know that there are resources. I want to make sure that there still are places that people can go so that we don’t make it so that people have to stay in those kinds of situations.”

The other thing that Dingell wants to talk about is hope. “If we give up and we don’t have hope, then — then it’s all gone. So I’m gonna give up? No. … When we come together, when we know that there’s something that’s not right, we have to raise our voices, collectively, across the country, and say, ‘We have to get this fixed.’” 

Her model for practicing this kind of hope paired with deep conviction and action were the nuns who taught her at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. They are the women who continue to inspire her today, she said. 

“The nuns taught me to be who I am, that I can be anything I want. They taught me the values that I have, that I have a responsibility to my community. They taught me to be tough.”

So Dingell talks, even about things she doesn’t want to remember, even in situations like this — sitting with a reporter, a stranger — to make sure her voice is heard. 

“I want somebody to know there are people there to help them. I want someone to recognize that they’re in a bad situation and that they need support and their family needs support — and that there need to be programs for them to get that support,” Dingell said. “I can remember talking to my priest when I was a kid in grade school, but nobody would do anything about it then because my parents were very generous contributors to the church and people didn’t want to upset anybody. We have to be willing to tell the truth. We have to be willing to intervene. And we have to be willing to get people the help and resources they need.”

She is introducing bills. She’s giving speeches. She’s doing whatever she can to call attention to the way the entire domestic violence safety net is at risk as a result of actions of the Trump administration. All of these things, though, are also ways for her to not dwell on her past and what she has survived. 

“I’m focused on living and helping people and helping people learn how to live through what we lived through,” she said. “Every person has strengths within themselves. Nobody has to put up with someone beating them or mentally abusing them or abusing them in any way. But we have to give people community places that people can go to get the help they need to escape it. We have to do the training in the community to identify where the problem is occurring, so that you can help get people out.”

She looked me squarely in the eye as she asserted what she wanted me to most know that day: “I’m not a victim. As my sister said, if we can help anybody escape what we went through, we should and that’s why I talk about it. But why bring up memories that only will make me not sleep tonight?” 

She was emphatic about the crux of her message: “You can have a life. You can. And we have to help get you the resources so you can.”