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Ex-husband beat me while I was holding my two-year-old child--my four-year-old child was watching this screaming... [Shah] said to me in front of my children that all I wanted to do was "suck d___." I asked him not to use this language in front of my children... I said that his drinking had caused him to lose his job, wife and children. [Shah denies that he drinks to excess, or that drinking has ever cost him a job; former colleagues confirm his account.] He came down the stairs...and punched me in the face, he hit me with the car seat which he had picked up, threw me to the ground and I fell in order to protect and cover the child in my arms. He continued to hit me. I looked up and saw both the nanny and my four-year-old crying and screaming.
A damning statement, obviously. But a police source says there was no visible sign of injury to Ellen Shah. And her petition for protection was dismissed when she failed to show up in court. The nanny lives in California now and refuses to say what she saw that day. Through her daughter, the nanny says it was no picnic working for either Bipin or Ellen, and she's glad to be rid of them both.
Ellen would file protection orders again in 1994 and 1996, and file multiple claims that Bipin violated those orders with harassing phone calls and faxes. In one letter to the police she said that Bipin, while returning the children to her house, began "screaming many obscenities" and said, "You're a prostitute and a slut...you're going to get nothing from me." Ellen ended that letter, "My children and I are afraid of him." But while he signed agreements not to harass her, there was never an admission of guilt on his part or any criminal finding against him.
Do you know why? Bipin asks. Because he never laid a hand on her during or after the marriage. "It is all lies."
There was a pattern to her madness, according to him. Each time he refused her push for reconciliation, she filed abuse claims. If she was ever bruised, he says, it was from one of the several plastic surgeries she underwent to feed her vanity and draw ogles at the tony Main Line gym where she worked out almost daily, a spandex emporium for the young and the restless. He can give you the dates too, for the nose job, the eye job, the breast job, the chemical peels.
"Ellen does nothing in moderation. Everything is done to excess with her," Shah says.
The true story, as he tells it, is that he caught her in an affair in 1988 and suspected her of others. And the marriage--though it had begun with their own affair, and with Bipin's first wife actually walking in on them one day--could not survive the cheating.
In his war room, Shah offers piles of letters from Ellen both before and after the breakup, telling him what a wonderful father and husband he was. "I realized that I broke your trust in me after I had an affair with David," she wrote in August 1993. In a 1989 letter she refers to his "special brand of tenderness" and calls him her "brown eyes," "bunny" and "sweetheart." It was considerably more affectionate than the faxes she later sent telling him to go back to India and ride camels, or the many faxes demanding that he lay out more cash.