'Extreme cruelty': Ohio woman describes 7-month marriage to Nick Alahverdian (2025)

Tom Mooney|The Providence Journal

He insisted she wear nice skirts. And always with pantyhose.

He “would have a conniption if he saw a tear,” she says.

“There was this image he was going for.”

Her Ohio marriage to Nicholas Alahverdian, the convicted sex offender and Rhode Island con man who would come to fake his death in 2020, lasted seven months.

“He still haunts me,” she says,six years after she filed for divorce on grounds of “extreme cruelty.”

“To this day there are certain things that can trigger me and make me feel unsafe.”

Hearing a Boston or Rhode Island accent can anger her “because it reminds me of him.”

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She is 32 now and still lives in Ohio, where she and the now-34-year-old Alahverdian lived. (She spoke to The Journal on the condition her name not be used for this story.)

They met in Dayton, Ohio, at a singles ward, a religious gathering in the Church of Latter-Day Saints where youngsingles worship together with hopes of meeting their future spouses.

She scoffs while remembering that Alahverdian’s fake obituary, widely circulated to Rhode Island media in February 2020, noted he was a “devout Roman Catholic” —“his typical B.S.,” as he professed to being a devout Mormon in Ohio.

It took a few singles ward services before she and Alahverdian introduced themselves to each other. Before long she felt drawn in by him.

DNA evidence: A woman in Ohio met Nick Alahverdian for lunch. Then he sexually assaulted her.

“I was very vulnerable at the time. Something had just happened in my life and I was hurting. I think he saw that and he’d put on a face and fooled me into thinking he understood me and was there for me. He is a very smooth talker.”

Her mother “had an inkling right off the bat that something was up with him,” she says. One day at her parents’ house, her mother said to Alahverdian straight out: “’You ever hurt my daughter, we will have some issues.’ And his response was his usual suck-up — ‘Oh I would never do that; I love her so much.’”

This was in 2015.

Seven years earlier, in 2008, Alahverdian had been convicted of groping a fellow student at Dayton’s Sinclair Community College whom he had met just an hour earlier over lunch.

Alahverdian wanted absolute control

A county prosecutor says that in September 2008, afew months after his conviction in the Sinclair case for “sexual imposition” and public indecency, Alahverdian raped a woman in Orem, Utah.

Between July 2010 and May 2011 Pawtucket police received at least four complaints from women claiming Alahverdian had assaulted them or made unwanted sexual advances.

One of the women was his first wife.

They had married in November 2010. Four months later, court records show, she separated from him and sought a restraining order to keep him away.

His former wife in Ohio says she knew nothing about Alahverdian’s past.

On Oct. 14, 2015, she and Alahverdian married in Riverside, Ohio, a suburb east of Dayton with 25,000 residents.

“The day after we married,” she says, “he started getting violent.”

“It was just like some of the stories I’ve read” in recent weeks — the stories of women in Pawtucket, the student at Sinclair, the young woman in Utah. “He tried to hurt me with a knife. Then he said he was going to kill himself, and he put the knife to his neck.”

Alahverdian, now in a Scottish prison awaiting extradition to Utah on the rape charge, wanted absolute control over her, she says.

Arrest: Nicholas Alahverdian re-arrested in Scotland after bail-review hearing

Previously: Six things to know about Nicholas Alahverdian, the RI man who apparently faked his death

He prohibited her from working, she says. “He literally wanted me to stay confined to the house. There was this image he was going for —the strong husband that provided for his family —and I had to dress a certain way, have my hair a certain way.”

He isolated her from her friends and family.

Allegations of fraud

In January 2016, three months after their wedding,Alahverdian started a nonprofit called the Community Progress Institute, which claimed its mission was to rebuild Dayton to its former glory.

Among the institute’s named trustees was his former foster father, whose identity Alahverdian allegedly stole to take out 22 credit cards in his name and amassmore than $200,000 in debts.

Alahverdian also persuaded his wife to loan him $52,000 from her premarital Fidelity account, “which he claimed he needed to keep Community Progress Institute afloat temporarily,” divorce records show.

He never paid her back. And the institute “was a fake,” she says. “He swindled money out of schools. He’d hold fundraisers, saying he was revitalizing Dayton. ... It worked for him.”

At one point Alahverdian paid to have a onetime Providence friend, Bruce McCrae, fly out to Dayton under the guise of being a consultant for the institute.

“I wasn’t any consultant,” McCrae, better known by his newspaper pen name Rudy Cheeks, told The Journal. “I was known as an entertainer or a newspaper columnist. He had me flown out there at his expense. He wanted to take me to places out there, bars, and nightclubs and restaurants. It was just bizarre when I lookback onit now.”

'I felt I was going crazy'

Alahverdian hid his money from his Ohio wife, she says.

The isolation and emotional abuse “got to the point where I felt I was going crazy.”

She spent her days cleaning their two-bedroom house and walking their three dogs. “I felt I wasn't going to get out, felt downtrodden and sometimes I resorted to alcohol to just numb myself.”

When she turned to her parents, “believe it or not, they didn’t believe me. Even though Mom had those early feelings, nobody really believed me or to what extent. They thought I was being dramatic.”

Seven months after they wed, on May 17, 2016, she filed for divorce.

The judge who would grant her divorce noted that Alahverdian “has been guilty of gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty toward the plaintiff.”

The judge’s previous orders that Alahverdian pay temporary spousal support of $550 a monthhad been ignored for a year. It now totaled $6,783.

Alahverdian had also ignored the judge’s order that hepay $1,000 of his wife’s legal fees.

Instead, Alahverdian packed up and got out of Daytonand headed back to Rhode Island — with all of his ex-wife's furniture,she says, in violation of yet another courtorder.

“By the time I could get the court order [for him] to vacate, he had taken it all,” she says. “I really had nothing. I had to start over.”

Email Tom Mooney at: tmooney@providencejournal.com

'Extreme cruelty': Ohio woman describes 7-month marriage to Nick Alahverdian (2025)
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