New True Crime Memoir Breaking Jenny Reveals Hidden Abuse, Digital Control, and a Chilling Discovery After Death

When Jenny’s fiancé died suddenly, grief wasn’t the only thing waiting for her.

Beneath the floorboards of their home, she discovered hidden phones, encrypted devices, and journals documenting a life she never knew existed, and a plan she was never meant to survive.

That discovery is at the center of Breaking Jenny, a new true crime memoir launching April 15, which is already drawing attention for its disturbing look at how abuse, manipulation, and control can hide in plain sight, even inside seemingly stable, successful relationships.

What Jenny uncovered wasn’t just betrayal. It was evidence.

The story is built from an extensive archive, including more than 692,000 text messages, financial records, surveillance footage, recorded audio, and recovered journals, all pieced together after her fiancé Max’s death.

In one journal entry, he wrote, “All I have to do is keep her here… keep her believing she’s safe.”

What Jenny uncovered wasn’t limited to digital evidence. It extended into the physical reality of how she was living.

At one point in the relationship, she was confined to what she describes as a makeshift “nook” outside the main home, a windowless space with cinder block walls, no ventilation, and minimal access to basic necessities.

“I even had to go outside to access it… a five-gallon Home Depot bucket in the corner… I used it as my toilet,” she writes.

What once felt like temporary compromise later revealed itself as something more structured: control, isolation, and the normalization of conditions she didn’t yet recognize as abuse.

Co-written by author, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nic Fairbrother and Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker Shane Stanley, Breaking Jenny approaches the story not just as a memoir, but as a reconstruction, blending investigative storytelling with a survivor-led perspective.

Rather than asking why someone stays, the book examines how coercive control is built over time through emotional conditioning, financial dependency, isolation, and the gradual erosion of autonomy.

As Jenny retraces her relationship, she begins to see patterns that extend beyond her fiancé, into earlier relationships, family dynamics, and formative experiences that shaped her understanding of trust, loyalty, and love. What once felt normal begins to unravel under the weight of evidence.

The timing of the release, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, underscores a broader cultural conversation. Abuse is no longer confined to physical violence or obvious warning signs. Increasingly, it exists in psychological, financial, and digital forms, often hidden behind intimacy and perceived stability.

Breaking Jenny brings those realities into focus not as speculation, but as documentation.

It also challenges a difficult question: How often do warning signs look like something else entirely, until it’s too late to recognize them?

For Jenny, the discovery came after the fact. But in reconstructing the truth, she transforms her story into more than a personal account—she turns it into a record of how control operates, and how it can be broken.

Early readers are already responding to the story’s intensity. As Nikki Boyer, Executive Producer of Dying for Sex, described it: “Raw, messy, vulnerable, and achingly human… the story pulls you in and refuses to let go.”

Breaking Jenny is available now in paperback, e-book, and Kindle on Amazon and BreakingJenny.com.