A Florida mother says the father of her young son, an orthopedic surgeon, charmed her early on, then cheated on her, became physically abusive, and used police and court filings against her when she tried to leave.
The woman, identified on TikTok as Jensen, described the relationship in a video titled “storytime: having a baby with a narcissist.” She does not name the father in the video, and the video does not include his account of the events.
Jensen said one of the first things he told her was that his former wife was crazy, abusive, and a narcissist, and that the woman’s family was trying to ruin his life.
“He spoke about it so calmly that I had no reason to question his version,” Jensen said.
At first, she said, he seemed to be everything she wanted.
“He was charming, he was attentive, he was affectionate, he was patient, he was loyal,” she said. “Always talking to me about our future, always wanted to see me, always wanted me to meet his friends and his family, always wanted to travel with me, and told me how badly he wanted a family with me and how he never felt this way about anybody else before.”
“Looking back, I see how much I overlooked because I had never been in a relationship with a narcissist before, so I had no idea what love bombing and mirroring even was,” she said.
Jensen said things began to change when she learned she was pregnant. Shortly after, she said, she discovered he had cheated on her.
“He begged me to take him back, promised it was a mistake, said it would never happen again, blamed it on his drinking, said how happy he was that I was pregnant and said he couldn’t lose me, and I gave him another chance,” she said.
“But anytime the cheating was ever brought up, it ended up resulting in me apologizing to him and feeling like I did something wrong, and this ended up being a pattern in our relationship,” she said.
“Whenever I would say something that he did that hurt me, he would just get angry, storm out, give me the silent treatment, and I would apologize to him even though he was the one that hurt me in the first place,” Jensen said.
She said the behavior escalated.
“He would scream at me, drive erratically with me in the car, throw things next to my head, and just break glass around me,” she said. “And there were good days, which made it hard to understand what was happening, but the instability became a pattern, and it felt like I was constantly trying to fix things.”
On the night of her scheduled induction, Jensen said, the couple went out to dinner. He got angry at her, stormed out, and left her alone at the restaurant, she said.
“I initially started driving myself to the hospital alone, but he called me and told me that I needed to come back because it wasn’t a good look that I drive myself to the hospital,” she said.
“During my labor, he kept getting angry with me because the nurses had to keep coming into the room, and it was interrupting his sleep, and he needed rest,” she said.
“He also repeatedly left the hospital, to the point where one of the nurses noticed this and asked me where he was and told me it seemed like he wasn’t there helping me,” Jensen said.
Their son was born around 2 a.m., she said, and the father left within about 20 minutes.
“I was coming off an epidural, and I was trying to help one of the nurses move me into another room, and they kept checking in on me and asking why I was alone,” she said.
“When I told my child’s father about this the next day, he bought them all Crumbl cookies so they would forget about it,” she said.
Jensen said the cheating, drinking, and arguments continued after their son was born. He did not take any time off from work, she said, so she handled the feedings and diaper changes through the night.
“I ended up having to change rooms that way it wouldn’t disrupt his sleep, while he frequently went out with his friends, went to work dinners, and traveled,” she said.
Whenever she tried to leave, she said, he made the same threats.
“I’m going to take your son from you. I’m going to ruin your life. I’m going to ruin your reputation. I’m going to have you arrested. I’m going to bankrupt you and your family. Nobody’s ever going to believe you. Everybody’s going to think you’re crazy,” Jensen said he told her.
She said he cheated on her the night before his first Father’s Day. When she confronted him, she said, “he told me that I had to leave, and if I didn’t, he was going to call the police on me, escort me out, and take their son from her.
She said she flew with their newborn from Florida to New York to be with her family, flew back, packed her car, and drove from Florida to New York.
“He later sued me for custody and said that I absconded to New York, even though he knew that I had temporarily gone there because I had no place else to go,” she said.
“There were times that our son had rolled off the bed, and I would take him to the hospital out of concern, and he would comfort me in those moments and then later use those incidents against me to question my parenting,” Jensen said.
“There were times where I’d be holding our son on the stairs, and he would push me,” she said.
She described one occasion when she tried to stop him from driving drunk. She said he “became enraged, kicked me twice, stomped on my foot and swung the door” and almost hit their son twice.
“He later used that against me in an injunction that he filed, stating that I falsely imprisoned him when I was just trying to stop him from drinking and driving,” Jensen said.
She also said he recorded her during confrontations.
“There were times that I would discover him cheating on me, and when I confronted him about it, he would just record my reactions to it and tell me how crazy and psycho I was and that he was going to start showing people these recordings, and that way nobody would believe me,” she said.
Jensen said he often brought up other women, “trying to make me think that there was something going on between them,” while telling those women that she was crazy and would try to contact them, “trying to make it seem like I was obsessed with them or him.”
“Whenever I question him, he would just blame me for his behavior,” she said. “He would say that I forced him to do these things, or work was stressful, that I didn’t appreciate him and he had no other choice.”
“I spent so much time questioning myself that I genuinely believe that I was the problem or that I was the narcissist,” she said.
During that period, she said, he told her how badly he wanted things to work out between them “while telling everybody else that I was crazy, that I was unstable and that he wasn’t even with me.”
“After the last time I caught him cheating on me, I knew I couldn’t keep doing this,” Jensen said.
She said he knew she was preparing to leave, and he took their son for what she believes was the first night alone. He then sent her erratic messages, she said, accusing her of cheating, of being an escort and of sleeping with men in Miami.
“I knew he had been drinking,” she said. Their son was younger than 1 at the time, she said.
“I ended up going over to his place just because I was concerned,” she said. “Things obviously escalated, and he started recording me with flash on, and I reached towards his phone to move the phone out of my face.”
She said she got their son and left, and she and the father both called the police.
“I was later arrested for that,” she said.
“The next business day, I went to the courthouse to file an injunction against him, and this is when I found out that he had filed an injunction against me on behalf of himself and our son,” Jensen said.
In that filing, she said, he called her a flight risk and alluded to the two incidents in which he said she falsely imprisoned him. She said she was only trying to stop him from drinking and driving.
“I was never charged,” she said.
While the injunctions were in place, the two communicated through the TalkingParents app, she said. On some days, she said, he wrote that she was selfish and “sporadic,” insinuated that she had hurt their son when the boy had an injury from day care that he knew about, said she “moved to St. Pete for a guy” and said she was making their son’s life and his own harder.
“Other days he would be overly nice,” she said. “He would say things like he’s thinking about moving to St. Pete, or would message me late at night.”
The two eventually dismissed their injunctions, she said.
Around that time, Jensen said, she learned he was submitting cases against her to state prosecutors in Florida. She said one was a charge of violating an injunction.
“To my understanding, it was about a TikTok, but the charges were dropped on that,” she said.
By the time the case went to trial, she said, she “had spent so much money on all these legal proceedings that I didn’t have money for an attorney for trial.” She represented herself, and the court split time with their son equally, she said.
“Afterward, our relationship became unpredictable,” Jensen said. “Some days we were amicable, some days he would get angry.”
She said he would suggest they go places together and would ask whether he could come to her apartment to watch their son while she went out. At other times, she said, “he would say that I need to apologize to him if I ever want a relationship with him again, when I never expressed wanting to get back together.”
The parents discussed moving their son to a day care equally distant from both of them, she said, and he was open to it, “but that would change whenever he would get upset with me.”
The day care is about an hour from her each way in traffic, she said, so when he increasingly asked to exchange their son in person, she agreed rather than make the drive.
“People might wonder why I gave him so much access to me, but it wasn’t about wanting a relationship with him or being close to him,” she said. She said she was trying to navigate shared parenting “while managing his reactions and protecting my son.”
“I also felt like I had to walk on eggshells, because I was just worried that I might upset him and that he would try to make my life harder,” Jensen said.
She said her previous TikTok upset him, and the two decided to return to communicating through parenting apps, an arrangement she said “is the healthiest agreement for both of us.”
“I’m learning that protecting our son doesn’t mean keeping the peace at any cost,” she said. “Sometimes it means setting boundaries and protecting my own peace too.”
