LOCKPORT — When Ashley Marie Berger stabbed Richard Christian to death in a dispute over a condom and $100, it was the culmination of a lifetime of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
“It was fear, it was a feeling of hopelessness. She was scared and not feeling safe,” Dr. Dawn Hughes said in describing Berger’s psychological state of mind in the early morning hours of April 27, 2014.
One of the preeminent clinical and forensic psychologists practicing in the U.S. today, Hughes was called to the stand Thursday in Niagara County Court to testify on her evaluation of Berger’s claims that her victimization by a sometime boyfriend and sometime pimp had triggered her deadly encounter with Christian.
Hughes testified that she spent five hours at a downstate New York prison in January, interviewing and conducting psychological testing on Berger.
An expert witness in the cases of Nxivm sex cult founder Keith Raniere, singers R. Kelly and Sean “P-Diddy” Combs, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and in the civil trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Hughes said she had also examined thousands of pages of Berger’s medical and mental health records in her effort to determine the Falls woman’s psychological state of mind before she committed the murder.
Berger previously told Niagara County Court Judge John Ottaviano that Christian, 22, came to see her at a South End motel in the 400 block of Main Street for a prostitution date. But after paying her $100 in cash and beginning to have sex with her, Berger said Christian took off the condom he was using.
She had also previously testified that her boyfriend and pimp, a man identified during court proceedings as E.C., had always instructed her to follow his “rules” and never engage in unprotected sex for both her safety and to allow him to track her sexual activity. Berger said that E.C. would check the number of discarded condoms in the waste baskets inside the hotel rooms that she used for her prostitution activities to make sure they matched the number of clients she claimed to see.
(NOTE: An order from Ottaviano prohibits “the press and other media outlets … from publishing or broadcasting the full name, image or other identifying information” of a human trafficking witness in the case and Berger’s alleged abuser.)
Christian, Berger said, tried to continue to have sex with her, without the condom, so she attempted to call a friend for help.
“He slapped the phone out of my hand and punched me in the head,” Berger testified. “I got up and grabbed a knife from underneath the mattress. I was scared something bad would happen to me and I had all these visions (of instances of violent abuse) in the past.”
After pointing the knife at Christian, Berger said he “lunged” at her.
“I stabbed him,” she said. “I can’t say what I felt. I can see myself do it, but I feel like I wasn’t actually there.”
Hughes testified that she believes Berger’s state of mind led her to stab Christian. She said Berger’s “dissociative behavior” (a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity) is consistent with the state of mind of someone who has experienced “severe” trauma.
“She says, ‘I don’t remember,’ “but then she shares a dissociative memory of it,” Hughes said.
The expert testified that she believes Berger has actually “minimized the extent and severity of the abuse she suffered.”
“She was crying during much of the evaluation, had trouble sequencing her thoughts,” Hughes said. “The testing showed Ms. Berger was experiencing an extreme amount of trauma. We know she experienced physical abuse across her life, but she was exposed to (extreme physical and sexual abuse) by E.C. The sex trafficking and domestic abuse by E.C. contributed to her behavior (in the stabbing).”
In November 2014, Berger pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter in the slaying of Christian. She was sentenced to a 15-year prison term.
Now 42 years old, Berger has served 10 years of her original sentence and is back in Niagara County Court, hoping to convince Ottaviano to shorten the remaining five years of her prison term, or just release her outright from custody, under the provisions of New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA). The legislation, signed into law in 2019, expands the circumstances under which judges can consider abuse suffered by survivors of domestic violence or sex trafficking in determining appropriate sentences if they commit criminal offenses.
Under the DVSJA, a person “must show that they were a victim of abuse at the time of their criminal offense.” The abuse may be “physical, sexual, or psychological (in nature), committed by a family member or person in the (victim’s) household, and must be a significant contributing factor in the criminal conduct.”
Niagara County prosecutors are aggressively opposing Berger’s request for a sentencing reduction. Berger’s hearing will resume on Oct. 21.