| No Images? Click here   By Nick Baumann and Samantha StoreyNina Kouprianova is divorcing white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. Lyz Lenz profiled her for us. We asked Lenz about the story.How did this story come about?A friend of mine who researches the alt-right knows Nina and thought I should write her story. I was resistant to the idea. Nina's story is complicated. I didn't want to do it injustice. I didn't want to skate over the complicity, but I didn't want to turn a blind eye to the abuse. Nina and I had a very long off-the-record conversation back in early October and while it was hard, I got the sense that whatever else, she would be honest with me. I pitched the story to a very large and fancy newspaper. They were interested but wanted me to have a co-writer on the story. I said no thanks and sent the idea over to the editor I've been working with at the Huffington Post. They trusted me to write and tell the story, so I booked a ticket to Whitefish and left the day after Halloween. What was the most surprising thing you found? The recordings of Richard Spencer yelling were deeply upsetting. I didn't expect them to be so harrowing. Especially the ones where you can hear the kids in the background. It was also upsetting to see how Nina had been left without a car. This is Montana, car country. She has two small kids and she has to walk them everywhere. I can barely walk my two older kids to the park. But her kids were very kind and compliant and such troopers. I imagine they don't know much else. But just hearing how hard it is for her to go places really resonated with me. The silliest thing I found was that Richard allegedly told Nina not to read the kids ABC board books that show children of other races. It was just so stupid; I laughed for a long time. I asked Spencer about it in our interview, but he declined to confirm it. So it didn't make it into the story. The most surprising thing was how Spencer wanted to talk. I called him while I was picking up dinner for Nina and the kids at a sushi place and he immediately answered the phone and genially suggested we meet at his mother's house where he was staying. I countered that we meet at a conference room in my hotel instead. The hotel staff was amazing. I told them what was going on, and they were very helpful. I did end up talking to some people in the town, all of them wanted to be off the record, but it was really evident how upset they were that they have to live in the shadow of all of this hate. What was the hardest part about reporting, writing or editing this piece? The hardest part was writing the story in a way that looked clear-eyed at both the abuse and the complicity of everyone involved. I talked to so many, many people for the story, but only a quarter of the interviews made it into the piece. And the allegations back and forth just continued to unravel as I reported it out. I could have written forever about all the disagreements and who doxed who, who leaked the girlfriend's nudes, the fact that Spencer left Nina at the hospital the day the youngest was born. Recordings of their fights. The story could have gone on forever. Knowing which details to use and which to leave out was hard. What's the reader response been like? It's been wild. There were calls from the alt-right to doxx me. I had paid someone to help scrub some personal data off the internet in the weeks before the story went up, so I was prepared, sort of. But worried. I have two kids as well. Richard Spencer went on a podcast and called me "an embarrassment" which I am putting on my Linked In profile. Please endorse me for being an embarrassment. But in that same podcast they indicated that they knew my first middle and my maiden name. So that was unnerving. Other people criticized me for leaving out her complicity. Which isn't an accurate reflection of the story since I talk about their partnership for several paragraphs. But as with any story, there is the story you wrote and the story someone else wants you to write. I wrote the story I wrote; it's part of a larger conversation about the alt-right, which I hope will continue. But there has been a lot of support as well. My DMs are filled with women telling me how they married men that they thought were just a little conservative and years later discovered these men had become radicalized into white nationalism. So many of them are still married. Still trying to get out. Confused. Hoping that the men they married come back. But they don't know what to do or how to get out. Many of them are emotionally or physically abused and are not economically independent. The response that surprises me is from the people in Whitefish, who have reached out to tell me that they like it. I live in Iowa, and I'm very sensitive to the feeling of a writer just parachuting into your town, writing about it and leaving. So it means a lot when I heard that I did an okay job with that. What do you want readers to take away? The story isn't about sympathy. The story is about a complicated woman in a bad situation. It's about the little lies we tell to ourselves to make relationships work. And we all do that. We all overlook the UFO conspiracy video, the drunken 2 a.m. political rant that we don't agree with, but whatever, we figure, not everyone agrees with their partner, right? And if it's not our partner it's our uncles, aunts or cousins. The story is about when do you draw the line? When do you leave? And also, we often say about abuse victims, "why don't they just leave?" This story is about how hard it is to leave. How hard it is to find freedom. More must reads:
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