The wife of an American track star says she felt her life was in danger during an explosive confrontation with the sprinter in 2023.
Fred Kerley, who won bronze at the Paris Olympics last summer, is being accused of choking his wife in front of their young children. Angelica Kerley said that she thought that she would “die at his hands.”
In an emotional interview with the Daily Mail, Kerley, a former college heptathlete, detailed the shocking accusation while also claiming that the Olympian is a serial cheater and was leading a “double life.”
The alleged attack occurred in May 2024 after Angelica says she felt compelled to confront Kerley about a woman she was certain he was seeing in the previous summer, leading Kerley to storm out of the family’s Miami home.
Angelica then followed an old flame on Instagram, which allegedly set Kerley off.
Kerley, 29, returned one morning at 6 a.m. and “bust in our bedroom door” while Angelica was sleeping with their two sons, the youngest only a few months old.
“He doesn’t have a shirt on, he doesn’t have shoes on. He walks up to me and tries to snatch my phone, asking why I’m following that man,” Angelica said.
“He then comes around and is snatching at me. I take my left hand and swing it across his face, not hard but because he’s at me. It’s like, back up.
“He stands back, he looks at me and he says, ‘if you put your hands on me again, we’re gonna have issues.’ I’m standing up on the bed in my nightclothes … and he charges me.”
That’s when things escalated, with Kerley’s aggression allegedly hitting a boiling point.
“He drags me off the bed and I land face first on the wooden floor, bashing my nose,” she told the outlet.
“He still tries to grab my phone which I slide under me. So, I’m on my stomach on the floor. He takes his arm and he wraps it around my neck and he’s literally choking me.
“And he’s not choking me where I can gasp for air. I can’t gasp for air at this point. And I’m literally tapping him. Like I can’t even swing at him because of the way he has my body, the lower half is on the floor, the top half is bent back and lifted up.
“Literally my feet are kicking at this point. And I’m thinking, he’s going to kill me. Our kids are in the room and he’s going to kill me. I’m trying to hit him.
“And I’m losing any sense of how long he’s been choking me. Finally, he lets me go and I breathe in as hard as I can so I can scream out loud.”
Angelica said she yelled for Kerley’s uncle and aunt, who were staying at the house, to come in and protect her as the Olympian once more advanced on her.
“They try to pull him away from me again and I manage to stand, pick up a lamp and swing it at him to defend myself. I’m telling him he needs to leave,” she continued.
“My daughter, who was eight at the time, was woken by all this, comes in and grabs the baby who is crying. And my husband comes around the back of me, grabs me around the neck with his arm and tries to choke me again.
“Now my daughter is behind him, with her baby brother in her arms. She puts the baby down and she’s behind Fred, clawing at his eyes to get him off me. At this point I didn’t even know that. I just knew he was doing this in front of our kids.”
Angelica says that she hadn’t called the police until she realized that Kerley “didn’t feel any remorse” for what he did.
“But I realized that this had happened in front of my daughter and she had tried to save me. She’s old enough to remember this, burned in her brain,” she said.
“It happens a lot, women not reporting men who put their hands on them, or trying to take their lives.
“So it’s my responsibility as a woman to show my daughter that these things are not OK. It doesn’t matter that it’s her dad. I probably wouldn’t have called the cops if she’d not been there.”
Kerley was released from jail on bond earlier this month after being arrested in a separate incident.
tap here to see other videos from our team.
During a night out in Miami, he allegedly became aggressive with police officers who were investigating a separate crime, leading to the Olympian being subdued with a stun gun on the street.
The athlete was charged with battery on an officer and resisting arrest. Angelica’s domestic violence accusations, which had been slowly moving through the justice system, were then addressed, leading to domestic battery with strangulation and strong-arm robbery being added to his rap sheet.
A lawyer representing Fred Kerley labelled Angelica’s claims as “fabrications,” pointing out they were not sufficient for cops to arrest him at the time.
“The only ones being hurt by these imaginative claims are their three young children who will remember how their mother sacrificed their privacy and their father’s reputation for fleeting fame,” lawyer Richard Cooper said.
Kerley is a two-time Olympic medallist, taking the bronze in the 100-metre sprint in Paris this past summer and a silver in the event at the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021.
Check out our sports section for the latest news and analysis.