"Katherine was a student at Suffolk University, Boston, when she met Tsaraev, then a promising boxer and athlete.
It was during that time that she converted and her youthful priorities appear to have changed as she left in 2010 without graduating.
By then her relationship with Tsaraev was intense. Not even his arrest for violently assaulting her in 2009 could change that."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312588/Tamerlan-Tsarnaevs-wife-How-Katherine-Russell-Muslim-convert-widow-Boston-bomber.html
I am sure the piece you quoted is in error. He was never arrested for assaulting his wife. He was arrested for assaulting a former girlfriend.
Let’s get the facts straight.
<> Not even his arrest for violently assaulting her in 2009 could change that.<>
That Daily Mail sentence was incorrect and subsequently corrected. That was a different girlfriend that he assaulted in 2009 — not Russell.
However if this Daily Mail story is correct, then the hijab honey better cough it all up because the FBI have the content of her phone calls, including the one where she alerted her terrorist husband: