IT'S been more than three years since I last spoke to Sally. But I remember the day, 10 Dec 2005, perfectly.

Sally was hysterical and in tears when she rang me.

'Why did you have to write bad things about Patrick again?' she screamed. 'He's not the monster you make him out to be.'

It took me two hours to calm her down.

Sally was a former victim of abuse. Patrick was her live-in lover who, for more than five years, brutally battered her.

The beatings that the monster (oh yes, he deserves nothing less in my book) unleashed on Sally included punching and blinding her eye, cutting her genitals, and slashing her cheek with a knife in front of their then 5-year-old daughter.

Patrick got his just desserts in July 2001 when he was sentenced to 7 1/2 years' jail and nine strokes of the cane.

In December 2005, I interviewed Sally for a report on abused women.

To this day, I still don't know why she flew into a rage after reading the article.

My best guess? Sally belongs to that category of battered women who just can't seem to leave their abusive partners, possibly because of their blind love for them.

Thrice, Sally ran away from Patrick but three times, she went crawling back. She applied for a PPO for herself and their two children but changed her mind later.

If you meet her, you'll be struck by the horror she went through - the missing teeth, the scars that criss-cross her cheeks and lips, one blind eye and the other partially blind, the red lines that dot her hands.

She was robbed not only of her beauty. Her children, just 4 and 5 then, were taken away from her as she was deemed unfit to care for them after the abuse came to light.

The ordeal turned her into a recluse who cooped herself up at home, jumping at every knock on her door that she kept locked at all times.

In two previous interviews in 2001 and 2002 , she told my colleagues that she still loved Patrick and would take him back.

She told me a different story in 2005 - that she did not want him back in her life.

Yet, minutes later, she said Patrick would be freed three months later and she was worried he would not be able to enter the flat they used to share as she had changed the locks.

He could get a locksmith, I told her. But, she asked, what if he had no money for one?

'That's his problem, not yours,' I replied, still appalled at her concern for the monster.

Sally's head probably agreed with me. But it was clouded by her heart, which still pined for the man she once thought would give her a lifetime of happiness.

I have since lost touch with Sally, but I think about her whenever I read reports of battered women.

Is she reconciled with her children? Is she back with Patrick? Is she happier?

Wherever she is now, I hope she's no longer paralysed by the intense fear that I have come to remember her by.

This article was first published in The New Paper.