WARNING: The content in this article may be disturbing for some readers.

Time can’t heal everything. But after 10 years, Angie Martinez says she’s ready to share her story.

“I am a domestic violence survivor,” said Martinez. “I was kidnapped.”

Martinez says it started like any other relationship.

“He was always telling me how much of a great woman I was, I was so independent, that he loved that about me,” said Martinez.

They’d been dating a few months, when Martinez found herself in a legal dispute with her apartment building over a mold problem.

Her boyfriend offered to help.

“I believed in him, I believed in his word, I believed that he was going to be there for me,” Martinez said.

So January 6, 2012, she and her one-and-a-half year old daughter, Janiyah, moved in.

“From that moment on, I knew it was too late,” Martinez said.

Martinez’s boyfriend became more controlling and aggressive, limiting her phone calls and interactions with friends and family.

“He wanted me to say certain things in a certain way, he wanted me to talk a certain way, he only wanted me to answer when he wanted me to answer,” Martinez said. “And as time went by, he felt as if he couldn’t trust me living with him there. He felt the need to have to tie me up. It first started with him tying me up with my scarf.”

Martinez and her baby became prisoners in their new home.

The beatings became constant. The threats were constant, too.

“He would threaten to do things to my kids and threaten to do things to my family, so at this point it was like, I couldn’t keep fighting back because it was their life or mine,” Martinez said. “So I had to surrender. I had to let him hit me.”

For six months, he kept Martinez and her baby isolated from friends and family.

“And I felt like my time was running out,” Martinez said. “He was planning to kill me.”

Then in May, a knock at the door changed everything.

“I saw stars, I saw the world, the moon, the stars, I saw everything because I said, ‘This is my way out,’” Martinez said.

“I thank God every single day for putting me in your path,” said Martinez, hugging her friend. “And that it was you opening that door and that it wasn’t nobody else.”

It was Colleen Price, an NYPD sergeant, who opened that door. She was called to the scene after neighbors reported someone being beaten.

”The smell — you couldn’t even be around it,” Price remembered. “The woman was just sitting there with her eyes popping out, not saying anything. Her face was distorted, like she might have had broken bones or something.”

“I couldn’t walk, I looked like a monster from him beating me so much,” Martinez said.

“If we didn’t go in, I’m convinced he would have killed her,” Price said. “When I picked Janiyah up, she was so bony. When I put her on my waist, I had my gun and I thought my gun was going to hurt her.”

Angie Martinez in the hospital after being freed. (Photo courtesy of Angie Martinez)

The abuse began at the hands of someone she trusted, as is often the case.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline says, in the U.S., more than one in three women and more than one in four men will experience domestic violence.

According to a 2017 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 53% of domestic violence cases don’t get reported.

Experts say of the cases that get reported there’s a high dismissal rate for a variety of reasons, whether it’s because the accuser drops the charges because their lives are often intertwined with the abuser, or the prosecutor decides not to go forward with the case.

“A lot of times the victims just can’t do it,” Price said. “I knew that it had to be somebody of great strength to get through that.”

So she pushed to get Martinez justice.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office backed Martinez as she pressed charges. Her cases eventually went to trial, and her abuser was sentenced to 60 years to life in prison.

At the time, that was the longest sentence in state history for a domestic violence case that didn’t end in murder.

Price, now retired from the force, says Martinez’s story still inspires her daily.

“The strength, the indomitable spirt of a woman who won’t let her life and her child’s life be taken from her,” said Price.

Today it’s the simple moment Martinez is most grateful for, spending time with her daughter, now 12 years old, moments she once feared she’d never see.

“When I was in that room, the only thing I remember asking God was, ‘All I want is to see my kids again, that’s all I want, I want to be able to see another birthday with them,’” said Martinez.

Ten years of celebrations later, NY1 asked Martinez how she would describe herself today.

Through tears, she said, “As an amazing, phenomenal woman, and I’m so proud of myself.”

She credits that self-love to what she learned in that Brooklyn room.

“What it is to actually be stripped from everything, learning how to gain that back on my own,” Martinez said. “I actually learned how to survive in that room with him.”

And the people, like Price, who helped her find her way out.

“I wanted her to be the same, I wanted her to be healed,” Price said. “And I don’t think she’s the same, I think she’s better.”

And a decade later, Martinez hopes sharing her story can help make others better, too.

“And it’s going to give them hope that it’s not the end, and greater things are coming,” Martinez said. “This is just the beginning.”

Angie Martinez and her daughter Janiyah. (Photo courtesy of Angie Martinez)