By Catie Powers

Copyright mamamia

When Rose* saw Jason* across the room at an event, she recognised him immediately. And not for good reasons.”He had a terrible reputation for being a real pr***,” Rose told Mamamia. “I didn’t care though, I just thought he was absolutely attractive.”Jason thought the same about Rose, who was a few years his junior.With an instant physical connection, the pair started dating. Eventually, they began working together and later built a successful business together.Watch: Three women share their stories of financial abuse. Post continues after video.Video via MamamiaWhile the couple never married, they were happy. Until Rose started noticing some suspicious behaviour.”People in the industry would drop hints to me that things weren’t quite right,” she said. “There was weird stuff going on.”But when she confronted Jason about the rumours, he always deflected.”He had an excuse for absolutely everything he ever got confronted with. He was very smart and very quick on his feet,” she said. Still, the rumours didn’t go away. And Rose found herself growing more and more wary of the man she once loved.”One thing that always struck me as peculiar is he never had any friends. He’d get these people in his life, these friendships, but they’d last a year or two and then they’d go. I started noticing this pattern,” she said.Rose added that he was “always trying to control” her.”I think he was a deeply insecure person. And I’m not, I’m very self-confident. I think that he was quite insecure and couldn’t handle that,” she said.Eight years into the relationship, Rose knew it was time to go.”I knew I wanted out. But when you’ve got this business, what do you do? I couldn’t run it on my own,” Rose said. “I was already working 16-hour days.”So, she stayed. But her resentment only grew.”I used to get a visceral reaction when he walked in the room,” she recalled.Two years later, Rose would reach the end of her tether after two separate incidents. The first came during an interstate trip. Instead of going out with Rose to the event they’d planned to attend, Jason wanted to stay at the pub with his friends.”I thought, ‘Well, that’s really strange,'” she said. Mystified, Rose went to the event alone. When she returned to the pub that afternoon, Jason was with his friends, and acting strange.”They were all pretty drunk, him and his mates,” Rose recalled. “He did not want me anywhere near him. I went to give him a kiss hello and sit with him, and he was so nasty to me that even his buddies [noticed],” she said.Rose came to find out that Jason had been having an affair for the past six months, and had been with the other woman while Rose was at the event.”The girlfriend had been there the whole day. She’d gone, and now he had me around, and he clearly hated me as much as I hated him,” Rose recalled. After a few drinks, Rose went to grab some dinner. Jason “completely ignored” her the entire night.”I remember sitting there crying,” Rose said. “I was just sitting there thinking, ‘He literally doesn’t give a f*** about me’. I went straight home and I didn’t get a phone call or a text or anything like ‘Where have you gone? Have you got home safe?.'”Still, the pair stayed together. Then came the second incident two months later, when Jason returned from one of his frequent work trips.”He walked into the house, and I hated him being in the house. I wanted him gone,” Rose said. “Then he went and stayed the night with the girlfriend who only lived an hour away. He came back on the Sunday.”I just sat him down on the couch and I said, ‘We just can’t do this’. I absolutely don’t want to go on with this. We have to split up. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the business. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to do it, but this has just got to stop.'”Rose will never forget “the look of relief that came over his face.”It was official, they had broken up. And both parties knew it was the right call. But with shared finances, the split wasn’t that easy.They were living in the same house, and old habits die hard.”The sex was so good,” she recalled. “We were still (sleeping together) even after we split up. Even though I hated him. But when you’re just that addicted to that physical thing, I think all sense goes out the room.”Rose thought the worst was over, until she approached a mortgage broker to ask for a loan. “He said, ‘No one’s going to give you another loan. You guys haven’t done your tax returns for four years’. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’. It turns out we owed the tax department millions of dollars,” she said. From there, Rose claimed, more and more things came to light. “I found hidden bank accounts. It was just an absolute s*** show,” she said. “I never quite got to the bottom of whether he was just completely incompetent at running a business, or a thief. I think a bit of both.”Paralysed, Rose asked her lawyer what to do. He advised her to sell her shares in the company to Jason and walk away. So that’s what Rose did.”I literally walked out with nothing,” she said. So, Rose landed back at her mother’s place. “I was a shell of a person,” she said. “I was just so broken. The grief of losing my business, because I loved what I did so much. I was so good at my job and I couldn’t wait to go to work every day. “And one day, it’s just all gone. A decade’s worth of work, all gone, all shut down. It was so painful.”After finally feeling as if she was moving on from Jason, she spotted that he’d shared some cryptic posts on social media about what she’d been doing since they split up. It was information that she’d never shared with him. “How would he know that? It was just really weird things going on,” she said.Then, a trip to her lawyer’s office revealed the truth. “I was trying to work out what happened and where all the money had gone, and take him to jail hopefully,” Rose said.While reading a recent email from Jason, Rose and her lawyer came across something peculiar.”[Jason] had said something about a personal conversation I’d had with an industry colleague. And my lawyer and I looked at each other and said, ‘How would he know that?’.”The lawyer said, ‘He’s reading your emails.’ And I said, ‘He bloody is too’.”Suddenly, all the puzzle pieces clicked into place. “He had set up the office, he had set up my email account, so he knew all the passwords. He knew everything that I was doing, all my conversations with my lawyers. He was one step ahead of me the whole way,” she said. Rose went straight to the authorities to report Jason. “They took it really seriously,” she said.But it was no use; the detectives couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him. Rose then changed her email address and passwords, but nothing could erase the feeling of betrayal.”He knew everything for two years. The feeling that someone’s been watching you for years after a horrendous breakup it’s just vile. Absolutely vile. The deceitfulness and violation. It was horrendous,” she said.To this day, Rose “still can’t trust anyone.””I’ve started another successful business. I do everything myself. Everything,” she said. “I will never ever trust anyone ever again.”While she has “a great life” now, Rose maintains she will “always be single.””I will never, ever get into another relationship. And I haven’t since we split. I’ve had lots and lots of fabulous sex, and I’ve got great friends. But I’d never invite someone back into my life again after that. It just hardens you. Hardens your heart,” she said. By sharing her story, Rose hopes she can help educate young women about financial independence. “Don’t trust anyone else with your finances. Don’t have joint bank accounts. Make sure your taxes are paid,” Rose said.”Check your bank balance. If I can stop even one other woman from going through what I did, my story is worth telling.” *All names have been changed for privacy reasons.Feature Image: Getty (Stock image for illustrative purposes only).