After years spent building Abruzzo Swim, Samantha Abruzzo says she sought help during a frightening domestic situation only to find herself targeted and mistreated. Now, the designer and mother is fighting to take her life back.
Samantha Abruzzo built her name in fashion. Now she is fighting to protect it.
The founder and designer of Abruzzo Swim spent years building an independent fashion label that reached Miami Swim Week and attracted attention from major fashion and lifestyle media.
Then her private life fell apart.
Abruzzo says the nightmare began during the breakdown of her marriage, after a frightening incident involving her former husband while she was caring for their young daughter.
“I called the police for help,” she says.
She expected to be protected. Instead, Abruzzo says she walked away feeling like she had been treated as the offender.
That is the part of her story she believes has never been properly heard.
“Their job is supposed to be to protect women and children,” Abruzzo says. “Not this.”
What followed was a painful period involving divorce, family court, lawyers and repeated encounters with local New Jersey police. Abruzzo says she was unfairly portrayed as the aggressor when she believes she and her daughter were the ones who needed protection.
One encounter in particular remains deeply upsetting to her.
Abruzzo says an officer involved in her case physically mistreated her during an arrest and left her feeling frightened, humiliated and powerless. She has also questioned how information and footage connected to her encounters with police were handled and presented.
For Abruzzo, those experiences changed the way she looked at the people she had once expected to protect her.
She also says apparent personal and social connections surrounding some of those involved made her question whether she was ever getting a fair shake.
Abruzzo doesn't hide her anger about it.
Then the situation followed her online.
She says damaging claims, images and other material began spreading across social media. Abruzzo describes what followed as a targeted online smear campaign that humiliated her and damaged her reputation, with people connected to her former relationships, she believes, helping push a version of events she says was false and stripped of crucial context.
For a mother already dealing with divorce and a legal nightmare, seeing it spread publicly was devastating.
It also threatened something she had spent years building.
Long before any of this happened, Abruzzo created Abruzzo Swim from the ground up. The brand appeared at Miami Swim Week, including the Style Saves runway show, and its designs have been worn by model and television personality Camille Kostek.
“I worked very hard to build my fashion line,” Abruzzo says.
That work represents the Samantha Abruzzo she knows: a designer, entrepreneur and mother. Not the person she believes others have tried to portray online.
And now she has had enough.
“I’m not living in fear,” she says.
Abruzzo continues to address unresolved legal issues with her attorneys. But she is no longer willing to stay silent while damaging material circulates without her side of the story.
She believes she was failed when she asked for help. She says she was mistreated when she expected protection. She believes people then tried to weaponize one of the most painful periods of her life against her online.
And she wants it to stop.
Her focus now is on her daughter, her future and the fashion brand she worked so hard to create. The same daughter who was beside her at the beginning of this painful chapter has become one of the biggest reasons she refuses to let it define the rest of her life.
When Abruzzo felt powerless, motherhood gave her something worth fighting for. When she felt others were trying to destroy the name she had built, she found a reason to stand up and protect it.
She isn't disappearing. She isn't surrendering her voice.
Samantha Abruzzo is fighting for her daughter, for the business she built and, finally, for herself.
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