Report: 'Controlling' Tamerlan Tsarnaev Called Wife 'Slut,' 'Prostitute'

He may have belonged to a radical sect, and he had some trouble with the fairer sex.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspected Boston Marathon bomber who was killed in a Thursday shootout, was married to an American woman named Katherine Russell and fathered their daughter, now three years old.

Russell’s former friends and roommates have described Tsarnaev as a “controlling,” “manipulative” person–verbally abusive with an explosive temper.

According to an NPR report detailing interviews with Russell’s close friends and roommates, Tsarnaev was “combative and angry” and would call Russell “a slut and a prostitute.” 

The friends also said they remembered “fights that they would get into where he would fly into rages and sometimes throw furniture or throw things.”

He demanded she convert to Islam and forced her to cover herself, according to Russell’s friends. 

NPR’s Laura Sullivan, who conducted the interviews, says Russell cut herself off from friends and family after her marriage to Tsarnaev:

[S]he had gotten pregnant her senior year, and the roommates say that after she got pregnant, she left school and dropped out, and she never finished college. They say that she really pulled away from her friends, that she cut off contact with them, and she also cut off contact with her family members which her friends had been in contact with.

And at that point, they became – and they have been – very worried about her. One of the roommates said that she ran into her at a Whole Foods a year or so ago, and she was covered in traditional – she was covered wearing a hijab but also that she seemed very distant and almost fearful, and she was wearing a hijab.

Tsarnaev was arrested in 2009 for allegedly assaulting a different woman, his then-girlfriend. The police report states that Tsarnaev told officers he slapped the woman, but the case was later dismissed.