With The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills just now airing season 2, Taylor Armstrong sat down with daytime television's Dr. Phil 'One on One' this week to speak about her estranged husband Russell Armstrong's horrific suicide, their tumultuous marriage and what may have pushed him over the edge. In videos, posted on the left, Taylor reveals the stress their marriage was under, how she tried to make it work and why she hung on so long.
Was there a point in their relationship that Taylor felt she was actually "afraid" of Russell? "Absolutely," she says. "He had come home from work. I was pregnant at the time and we needed to go to a charity event that evening and so I was getting ready. I had made a pizza for his two boys who were staying with us and his mother was visiting as well and they were upstairs eating. He came downstairs, grabbed me by the neck, shoved me up against the wall and said, 'If you ever serve my kids a pizza without a vegetable again, I'll kill you." What went through her mind at that second, asks Dr. Phil? "Sadly enough" she breaks down, "I think I felt like, 'Oh, my God, I should have made a vegetable! That was so irresponsible of me.’”
Russell Armstrong’s attorney, Ronald Richards, responding to Taylor Armstrong’s Entertainment Tonight interview, said it was a “shameful exploitation of Russell Armstrong’s reputation.”
“The shameful exploitation of Russell Armstrong’s reputation by others raises numerous ethical legal questions about tabloid journalism.”
Regarding the photos of Taylor Armstrong with a black eye, Richards shot back at the assumption that his former client inflicted the injury.
“At no time prior to Mr. Armstrong’s death did Taylor Armstrong file a police or medical report indicating she was the victim of domestic violence,” Richards said in a statement to ABCNews.com. “Specifically, the photos she sold to ‘ET’ are undated, unauthenticated, and lack any indicia of veracity to support the contention by her that my client ever caused injuries like the ones depicted in those hawked photos.’”
