Domestic abuse at any level is a tough, ongoing battle for many. For one military spouse, it has been years of hurt and it took nearly losing her life before she was able to escape her abuser. That woman sparked interest on social media after being seen holding a sign outside of the Naval Base Guam gate this week.

If a picture is worth a thousand words – a photo being circulated on local social media chatgroups only needs one. That’s how one military spouse, feels after nearly a decade of abuse from the man she once thought she would spend the rest of her life with.

Laura Allen - known locally as Laura Black - was spotted holding a peculiar sign out front the Naval Base Guam on Monday down in Sumay. This after more than a year had passed since she found the courage to report the abuse she suffered early on in her marriage – a marriage that started in 2013 to a man in the U.S. Coast Guard who she initially met online.

"The abuse started shortly after we got married and it went on for many years, and I decided I had to get out of it," she said, pausing while overcome with emotion.

The memories are still traumatic for her to recount. "This is really hard," she stated.

Seconds later she regained enough strength to continue, adding, "This is the first time that I’ve broken my silence on Monday when I decided to do the protest."

"It started with verbal, mental abuse and I was intimidated by knives and guns. He owns well over twenty automatic weapons he would keep behind the door, beside the bed and in the car. He would describe how he could hide a body and just really intimidated me. There was a lot of control. He was able to isolate me from my family and friends. Then we moved to Guam in 2015 and that’s when the real physical abuse started," she detailed.

The pair were in Guam up to 2018 before moving to Colorado. This is where she began planning her escape. "I was actually now in more danger because he now had all his guns with him," Black said.

She recently learning through advocates that Coast Guard investigators said her partner retired and was no longer in the military. To her that meant the investigation into her alleged abuse would now fall on deaf ears.

"I really just felt very alone. They asked that I keep my mouth shut and not speak about the investigation because it could interfere with it," she said. She escaped her alleged abuser in January of last year, returning to Guam.

"When I got here, I just couldn’t process everything that I had been through on my own," she said.

Her mission comes a year after a CBS News investigation found that roughly 100,000 domestic abuse cases were reported to the military since 2015 – survivors in those cases claiming the military failed to help them. Black said, "What I wanted from this is to put more awareness to it and inspire some change within the military to make spouses feel more supported and just safe...I feel there needs to be a lot of changes within the system to provide safety and support to spouses."

Since her protest, Black says she has been getting a flood of messages from military spouses on Guam and elsewhere coming forward and sharing their abuse.

When KUAM News asked her what she'd tell herself early on in the abuse, she replied, "Just get out and confide with family and trusted friends and get an escape plan because when you do try to leave or report things to their command, it puts you in a more dangerous situation so you have to have a plan and you need to get out."

A spokesperson for Forces Micronesia/Sector Guam told KUAM News, “The lady in question is a private citizen married to a retired Coast Guard member who is not in Guam but was stationed here some years ago," adding, "She was exercising her First Amendment rights peacefully, which we fully support.”

We reached out to authorities in hopes to get comment from the Coast Guard Investigate Services, but they have yet to respond.