I recall reading that he beat up his first girlfriend and was arrested for it. But I don’t remember reading he beat his wife.
But I agree that her liberal family probably set her up to be ‘tolerant’.
She wasn’t married all that long and she had a baby, and further she worked 80 hours a week while her loser husband stayed home with the baby.
A young woman with a baby will often bend to her husband’s will even if he is a loser. Later after she wises up she will with leave the loser unless her life is threatened, and then she looks for an escape. But it’s not easy as it sounds.
We need to hear her story and the stories of her friends and family. It will come out.
The female DNA in the found explosives was not hers. But with accessory to murder hanging over head she’d better start singing.
Her Aunt Elizabeth Russell, of MA, hasn't’t seen Katherine in four years because her “whole path” caused friction and an estrangement in the family. Her family didn't approve of Tamerlan and most refused to attend their wedding. Her high school friends say she cut ties with them soon after graduation. A few friends say they didn't like Tamerlan because he was demanding and cussed her. One neighbor says she was wearing hijab before they were married so it may be she was going that direction anyway especially since she was interested in the Peace Corps. Some neighbors say Tamerlan would visit at her home in RI with her but others say they haven't seen him there in a year so maybe there was a rift on the Russell front. A few weeks after she graduated from high school, she was arrested for shoplifting at an Old Navy but the charges were later dismissed. There's been hints she was pregnant when they got married. Certainly, her family may have set her up to be "tolerant" but it also seems she was into teen rebellion and no one was going to tell her what to do.
"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