She endured years of domestic violence and sexual abuse. She was dragged through hundreds of court matters and custody battles. Her son was murdered at the hands of her ex-partner.
But there was another revelation former Australian of the Year and domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty had to deal with; one that would test her in unexpected ways.
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The Rosie Batty Factor
Domestic and family violence campaigner Rosie Batty reflects on her year in the public spotlight.
In the midst of Ms Batty's ongoing court battles with her ex-partner Greg Anderson, she discovered that he had been charged with accessing online child abuse material at a library.
His child pornography charges have been a lesser-known part of Batty's tragic and well-publicised story.
But, such was the trauma it brought her, she will speak at a world-first conference in Melbourne on Wednesday about the partners and families of online child sex offenders.
"He was in front of a magistrate wanting greater access to Luke and it was actually his lawyer that told the magistrate there were other charges pending, which none of us knew about," she said.
"When he said it was accessing child pornographic images, I just gasped audibly. I never for one second thought there was any further shock or horror that I could learn about Greg. I thought I knew him, I'd known him for over 20 years."
Ms Batty struggled to get more information from the police, who continually cited privacy protections.
She fought harder to restrict his access to Luke but never foresaw how it would end: Anderson killed their son after cricket practice in 2014, before being shot dead by police.
In the aftermath, confusion and anger set in. She tried to put pieces of the jigsaw together.
"You think you know the person you're with in the most intimate way, and everything that's good or bad about them, and you just can't reconcile what you did not pick out," she said.
"I had this realisation that so many of the accusatory, disgusting things he said to me over Luke's lifetime, which were so appalling that they didn't even hurt me any more, I thought, 'Oh my god, he's projecting his thoughts on to me'."
PartnerSpeak, a support group for affected partners and the organisers of Wednesday's conference, said the partners of child sex offenders often suffer extreme trauma that is rarely recognised by society.
With 11,000 online child sex investigations undertaken by the Australian Federal Police in 2015, Ms Batty's experience is possibly replicated among thousands.
"It is totally life changing for these people but there are few support services, they don't factor in as anybody's primary responsibility," said UK academic and conference speaker Rachel Condry, who has written one of the few studies on the families of serious offenders.
"One of the most devastating effects is that society is far from sympathetic. People often draw those who are related to an offender into that web of vilification."
Most women she spoke to had no idea about their partners' offending and were beset with guilt, confusion, isolation and shame.
Natalie Walker, founder of PartnerSpeak, said the inability of frontline workers like police and welfare officers to understand what partners go through can compound the trauma.
"They often inadvertently feed into the shame, the feeling that you should have known," she said.
Ms Walker is leading a push for partners to be recognised as secondary victims, a finding backed by a world-first study by Melbourne's RMIT University into affected partners.
"There needs to be some support and understanding," Ms Batty said. "I just remember going to bed and just not knowing what was ahead of me. I didn't know who to tell, I didn't know whether to tell Luke, I didn't know what on earth was the right way to deal with it."
A spokesman for the federal Department of Social Services said a funding proposal from PartnerSpeak is under consideration.