Two of Ashley Benefield’s ballerina friends have revealed they saw the “angry side” of her husband Douglas in a new podcast which the creators believe may support their claims that he later shot her to death to protect her from domestic violence at his hands.
Ashley Benefield, who founded a ballet company with her husband Douglas Benefield in 2017, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July after she shot him to death in 2020 despite claiming that he was protecting her from domestic violence.
Former American National Ballet (ANB) members Hanna Manka and Sarah Walborn have publicly discussed their perspectives on Douglas Benefield for the first time in a new Law & Crime podcast exploring Ashley Benefield’s conviction in the so-called “Black Swan murder case.” USA.
According to a quote provided to the Guardian by Law & Crime, Manka recalled feeling things were amiss when she visited the performance hall she was supposed to use in ANB’s first season and saw no advertising for the company’s planned premiere. performance.
“There’s absolutely nothing on the show,” Manka said in an excerpt from the podcast Black Swan Murder, the first two episodes of which were released to Wondery+’s library subscribers on Monday. “That’s a little weird.”
Walborn added that it became clear there was no plan for the random choreography their superiors gave them to work on. “It was very clear in the studio that this was a series of silent games and that there was no end goal to the material we were working on in the studio.”
Douglas Benefield tried to assuage his dancers’ concerns by creating and presenting a video to the dancers with “inspiring quotes from people,” Walborn said. “He sat us all down in the room… to watch and… he had tears in his eyes… he said: ‘Look, this is what we’re working for,'” Walborn added.
But Walborn said the ploy, which he described as manipulation, failed to mobilize the group because “there were so many other concerns at play,” such as Ashley Benefield’s conspicuous absence and the dancers not being paid. Realizing that the ballerinas were running out of patience, Walborn recalled how one day Douglas Benefield “showed up with a lot of money and one by one.” [handed] “every dancer gets their share of cash” in the hope that this will “make everything right.”
The podcast noted how the dancers were stunned that a company boasting a $2.5 million budget could not deduct their standard paychecks. Walborn described how one of the dancers stood up at the time and told her colleagues to “keep your records and receipts of what’s going on to protect yourself” because it was strange.
This caused Douglas Benefield to raise his voice and say: “You don’t need to keep receipts; Don’t worry about this. According to Walborn, I got this done.”
“Doug came out with a very angry side to her; it was the first time I’d ever seen him angry,” Walborn continued. “And it seemed strange to me at the time that he was so passionate about this conversation. And it painted a picture of my future encounters with him along the way.
The American National Ballet closed a year after its founding in Charleston, South Carolina. Douglas and Ashley Benefield’s marriage collapsed, they got into a custody battle over their daughter, and on September 27, 2020, she shot him to death at their Lakewood Ranch, Florida, home.
Lawyers for 33-year-old Ashley Benefield argued that she was defending herself against domestic violence by 58-year-old Douglas Benefield and that the use of deadly force was justified. She testified that she feared for her life when she shot her estranged husband, who prevented her from leaving the house that day, hit her, and attacked her while holding a gun.
Relating to: Former ballerina found guilty of shooting her husband to death in Florida
But prosecutors argued that the evidence in Douglas Benefield’s killing did not match Ashley Benefield’s testimony about the fatal confrontation. They claimed that Ashley Benefield killed her out of frustration over the custody battle and that she wanted to keep her daughter to herself because she had no intention of reconciling with Douglas Benefield.
The jury hearing Benefield’s case declined to convict him of murder but found him guilty of the reduced charge of manslaughter, an involuntary murder that is still illegal. He faces between 11 and 30 years in prison at the sentencing hearing tentatively scheduled for October 22.
Black Swan Murder is the fourth of five games Law & Crime has planned for Wondery+. Its three predecessors – The Rise and Fall of Ruby Franke, The Sins of the Child and Karen – proved popular.