Benincasa and Kissel started dating in late 2011, though she says they were seeing other people throughout, as Kissel did not want to be monogamous. “We were in what would be characterized now as a situationship,” she says.
It was, she says, understood that they were both seeing other people. So when Kissel asked her, one rainy night that winter, if she had slept with somebody else, she answered honestly in the affirmative, naming someone who was also on the New York City comedy scene. She was shocked, she says, when Kissel, whom she alleges had been drinking heavily throughout the evening, became irate.
As Kissel got “angrier and angrier, and drunker and drunker,” Benincasa says, she tried to figure out what to do. She tried calming him down, ushering him to go to bed. But he was still furious, she says. “[I said], ‘Those are the rules you set. I don’t understand why you’re so mad,’” she says. “And he said, ‘Well, never do that again.’”
That’s when, Benincasa alleges, Kissel slapped her across the face. “It’s weird that I don’t remember it hurting, because I think it must have hurt,” she says.” “But I remember freezing, and inside my head, thinking, ‘That just happened. And it could get worse. You need to get out of here.’”