A Florida ballerina is on trial for murder after prosecutors say she brutally executed her wealthy GOP donor husband because she wanted to be a single mom to their young daughter.
Ashley Benefield, 32, admits she killed 59-year-old Douglas Benefield in the middle of a contentious custody battle in September 2020 — but she contends that she feared for her life following years of abuse.
“She was in fear for her life when she was forced to shoot him,” Benefield’s attorney Neil Taylor told the jurors during opening statements Tuesday.
Prosecutors say Doug was shot while facing away from his wife — showing that Ashley killed him in cold blood.
“This case is about a woman who very early on in her pregnancy decided she wanted to be a single mother,” Assistant State Attorney Suzanne O’Donnell argued. “She would stop at nothing to obtain that goal.”
Both sides admit the marriage between Doug and Ashley was broken beyond repair on Sept. 27, 2020, when police responded to a 911 call at the home of Ashley’s mother in Lakewood Ranch, Fla.
First responders found Doug lying on a bedroom floor. He had been shot three times. Ashley told police that her husband had tried to attack her.
But the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office didn’t buy it. “Detectives found no evidence that she was acting in self-defense when she fired multiple shots at her husband,” they said in an affidavit obtained by The Post.
“Based on entry wounds on Douglas it does not appear that he was facing Ashley when she began shooting,” the affidavit reads. “It also does not appear that Douglas had taken any kind of defensive or combative stance. He was not found to have any weapons on his person or near him.”
It was a violent end to what initially appeared to be a storybook romance.
Ashley Benefield met Doug, a Navy veteran and wealthy technology consultant who had started several businesses, at a 2016 Republican Party fundraiser at the Palm Beach mansion of Ben Carson. Two weeks later, the couple married.
Ashley, a trained dancer who was then 24, wanted to start her own ballet company. Doug funded the venture from his savings.
Ashley later gave birth to the couple’s baby girl, now 6.
But things soon deteriorated. Doug started to run out of funds. The entire ballet company fell apart. The couple was soon embroiled in a contentious divorce and they traded allegations of infidelity and abuse.
Throughout their four-year marriage, Ashley filed multiple abuse allegations against her husband. She claimed that he hit their dog so hard that he knocked it out, that Doug once shot a gun at the ceiling to “shut her up” and that he even tried to poison her.
But prosecutors told jurors on Tuesday that those allegations were part of a calculated strategy to gain sole custody of the couple’s child.
A judge previously found no evidence of abuse by Doug.
The trial is expected to last more than two weeks.
