Woman Whose Masked Attacker Turned Out to Be Ex-Husband Speaks Out: 'Didn't Sleep for Months'

Airing Sunday night, Gaslit By My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story stars Jana Kramer and Austin Nichols as Morgan and her ex, Rodney, who, in August 2021 eventually admitted to 14 charges related to an attack on his ex-wife including kidnapping, assaulting, threatening her with a handgun, and leaving her bound with homemade zip tie handcuffs.

Rodney pled guilty at the time and was sentenced to 70 years in prison, with the first 25 yers to be served in confinement and the remainder to be served on probation. He's still currently behind bars at the Augusta State Medical Prison in Grovetown, GA.

"Shortly after the divorce, he got really stalker-ish really fast," Morgan told The Sun in a new interview published Sunday ahead of the Lifetime premiere. "Just this weird feeling, when I looked at him, I don't even know how to explain it. Shortly after we signed the [divorce] documents, we traded kids back every other week. He would make random weird comments of trying to get back together, asking me to go on dates, I would say no."

"He kept trying all these small things to get me back. He thought he was going to win be back, he kept buying me flowers, other stuff that he should have been doing when we were married," she claimed. "He would lie ... anytime I was near him he'd just stare at me really weird."

On New Year's Day, she woke up to a man inside her room. The intruder used a device to mask his voice and was wearing what Morgan described as a "Batman"-style mask to hide his face. He beat her with a gun, strangled her, zip-tied her hands behind her back and sexually assaulted her.

"When he was 30 minutes into beating me, tying me up, when he decided to strangle me, I didn't really feel anything else," she told The Sun. "I didn't feel being punched or the gun because the adrenaline was going. I felt the strangling and it was the worst feeling in the world. Me looking up at him and I can't see his eyes."

Then, the intruder left, after telling her, "You're going to be fine but we can't say that about your ex-husband. You're really going to miss him.'"

"That's when I went, 'Wow, it's him,'" Morgan recalled. "Why would somebody randomly say you're going to miss your husband?"

Minutes later, Rodney showed up to her home, saying someone told him there'd been a break-in at the house. Neither Morgan or responding officers believed him and began questioning his behavior immediately. "There’s no way in hell that somebody knocks on your window and said her name and you immediately come over here because you’re going to check on her and she happens to be bound with a pillowcase over her head by a man who’s disguising his voice" a detective can be seen asking Rodney on Morgan's front porch that same night.

According to the DA, there was "substantial" evidence against Rodney, who had a gun at his apartment, as well as zip-ties matching the ones used on Morgan. Surveillance footage also showed him leaving Lowe's after purchasing the ties, despite telling authorities he didn't even know what zip-ties were in interviews with police.

Footage also showed him returning to his apartment, before leaving again in different clothes in the moments after the assault. His phone and laptop also showed searches for "how long before you starve to death, how to change the sound of your voice, and how long it takes to choke someone unconscious."

At the time, Assistant District Attorney Rachel Ashe said, "This man is a master manipulator. In the days leading up to this attack he faked a cancer diagnosis in an attempt to gain sympathy from his ex-wife. When that didn’t work, he created a convoluted plan that the investigators in this case and our office truly believe involved a plot to kill her and then himself. When he couldn’t go through with that plan, he instead devised a new plan to rescue her."

Speaking with The Sun, Morgan said that after the attack, she "didn't sleep at all" for months.

"I would sit in the corner my son's room and just stare at that doorway. Doorways scare me now. If there's someone that stands in the middle of a doorway, it triggers me so bad," she said. "I've been working on it. I didn't sleep for a few months."

As for why she's speaking out and what she hopes people take away from the Lifetime movie, Morgan said she wants women to stop being so "catty" and competitive with one another.

"I want women to learn to speak in a circle together of people they trust and somebody can go, 'That's not normal, Morgan, for him to do that,'" she said, before adding, "That's what I really want from this. And, quite frankly, I want his parents to see it. His parents still don't believe that he did it."

She also told TODAY she hopes people can start to recognize how "small, tiny red flags" could build up over time, before sharing her reaction to watching the movie herself.

"I watched it and I felt like it was somebody else's story. And then every once in a while it would hit me like, 'Oh, this is about you,'" she told the outlet. "Certain parts would make me a little sad. And then some parts I'd be like, 'I can't believe I actually went through this. How did I make it?' And it just made me think women's strength is beyond powerful."

Watch Gaslit By My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story here.