The Repair Shop’s Suzie Fletcher’s ‘eyebrow-raising’ shotgun wedding with abusive husband

Suzie Fletcher has made several candid comments about her marriage with her abusive late husband, including how he “manoeuvred her” into a shotgun wedding.

Just three months after meeting Rob when she moved to America in her 30s, The Repair Shop star walked into a government office as a single woman in a sports outfit and left as a married woman.

© Ricochet

She told The Times she had initially gone to sort out her visa during her lunch break.

“He very quickly manoeuvred me into going there,” she recalled after they enquired about wedding options.

“The piece of paper was in front of me, and Rob goes, ‘Sign there.'” There were eyebrows raised back home, but I was swept up in the emotion,” Suzie added.

Sporty bridal outfit

© Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock

The saddle maker went into much more detail about her unconventional outfit during an appearance on the Relatively podcast. She told host Catherine Carr: “So [my husband] said, ‘Do you ever think about getting married?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and he said, ‘Well, why don’t we go and see what it would take because you’re a foreigner.’

“So we went to the registry office in Boulder, Colorado, and they said, ‘Well, you can do this, that or the other, or you can get married now,’ and he said, ‘Yep. Let’s get married now.”

Dressing for the warm weather, Suzie was wearing a casual ensemble including a sports bra and shorts, and her groom looked equally low-key.

“My husband had come straight from work so he had dried mud up to his knees, a cut-off T-shirt and a baseball cap on the wrong way round,” she said.

“He was a typical redneck, what a delightful pair we were.”

Abusive marriage

The Oxford native intended to live in the States for just two years, but ended up living in Colorado for 22 years in what she described as “a western life, a ranching life.”

During her interview with The Times, Suzie detailed some of Rob’s controlling behaviours, including “banning” shorts and insisting she stay in the house when he was having a bad time.

She also detailed two particularly terrifying experiences with her late husband. The first saw Rob lift her off the floor with his forearm under her throat and choke her before letting go, and the second was a death threat after she returned home from work.

“I just said hello, and he uttered those words – ‘I’ve worked out how to have you killed. And I will get away with it.’ It just stopped me in my tracks.”

Suzie joined Lorraine Kelly on her TV show to promote her book, The Sun Over The Mountains: A Story of Hope, Healing and Restoration, in which she discusses her complicated relationship.

© Guy Levy, BBC

She said that a lot of Rob’s “bad treatment” towards her came from “his insecurities and his inability to cope with life”. Looking back, Suzie explained: “We were good together, weirdly, but we had this element which was not healthy and I’m really interested in looking into why this occurs and try to find a solution.”

After her husband passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2013, she moved back to the UK and joined her brother Steve on The Repair Shop – something she admitted helped her “heal.”

If you’ve been personally affected by this story, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline offers confidential, non-judgmental support at any time, day or night, on 0808 2000 247.