In a Beijing court last weekend, an American named Kim Lee made Chinese legal history. She was granted a divorce on grounds of domestic violence, an issue widely overlooked in China, and the court issued a three-month restraining order against her husband that the state media described as unprecedented. Her ex-husband is China’s most famous English teacher, Li Yang, whom I wrote about five years ago, when the couple was touring the country, teaching to crowds of thousands.

The judgment was a victory not only for Kim Lee and her three daughters, but also for advocates of the rule of law on behalf of China’s often-silenced victims of domestic violence. “All of society was paying attention,” Guo Jianmei, a prominent lawyer told the reporter Didi Kirsten Tatlow, after the ruling. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

Kim Lee came to China as a member of a Miami teachers union on a research trip to study foreign-language teaching practices in 1999. She met Li Yang, and the two began teaching side-by-side onstage. They married, and she got accustomed to the frenzied crowds that greeted them in towns around the country, where people were swept up in the hope of transforming their lives by learning English. Over lunch in 2008, she told me, “I’m just a mom who came into a bizarre life by happenstance.”

Her odyssey of becoming what the Chinese press called “a folk hero for China’s battered wives” began in September of 2011, when she uploaded photos of her injuries to the Web and went public with her husband's abuse. When I got in touch, she told me she had just returned from “a rather unnerving day at the police station.”

“I felt more like the criminal and like I was being pushed into just reconciling,” Lee said. Despite police attempts to discourage her, she insisted on filing a report and making a formal statement. “This was the longest day of my life, and it culminated in a very painful conversation with my three daughters about why Mommy had to take this action,” she said.

She took Li to court, and ignited a national conversation about domestic abuse. On the street, she encountered men who cursed her; in perhaps the clearest sign of what she was confronting, her husband’s lawyer, Shi Ziyue, disputed that the abuse constituted “domestic violence” because, he said, “Domestic violence is when a man hits and injures his wife frequently over a long time but has no reason, but my client did that because he had conflicts with his wife.”

And yet, throughout the ordeal, Lee found that China’s new social-media networks, such as Weibo, equipped women across the country reach out to her. By last Friday, just before the ruling, Lee had received more than fourteen hundred messages of support from strangers. “It quickly became a matter of the other women and their stories,” Lee told Tatlow. “No one else was speaking out. I just felt I had to.”

The court granted Lee full custody and ordered Li to pay child support and a sum of $1.9 million, including fifty thousand yuan in compensation for the abuse, which lawyers reportedly considered a symbolic achievement but also a sign that “Chinese courts failed to uncover Mr. Li’s true assets.”

After the verdict, Kim Lee posted a message to Weibo: “Believe that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

Photograph: Imaginechina/AP