Article content continued

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

She didn’t want to go to Afghanistan during their 2012 trip to Central Asia, but her husband insisted, she said, and left her with the feeling that she had no choice but to accompany him across its border.

They were held in 22 different places, she said, after they were kidnapped in October 2012.

They were usually held in a single room with a dirt floor and bathroom, Coleman said, and were separated a number of times, once for seven months. She conceived and gave birth to three children during their hostage ordeal.

In 2015, she said, Boyle “casually announced” that if he were a secular person, he would have killed Coleman.

“I was very, very upset,” she testified. “He’d say, ‘Why are you so upset? You’re a terrible person. You’re a terrible wife. If I didn’t believe it was morally wrong, I would have killed you.”

He told her, she said, how she was supposed to dress, to speak to him and to behave. “I was to speak demurely to him,” she said, “call him ‘sir,’ speak politely to him, and not argue with him.”

During the last two years of captivity, she said, Boyle spanked her as a form of “physical chastisement,” and often hit her in face for arguing with him.

He told her, Coleman testified, that “I had to be OK with it because he was my husband and it was his right.”

He warned her that if she ever told the police, Coleman said, he would kill her, and he sometimes made “jokes” about it. Once, for instance, he spilled cooking oil on her and said that some men in Afghanistan kill their wives that way, Coleman told court.