Michael Schiavo's side of the story

Jodi Schiavo, Michael Schiavo's new wife: I knew the score when I met him. It was very clear that Mike had a wife. And I was okay with that. And just because our relationship changed and I fell in love with him, it didn’t mean that I could go back and change the rules.

This is Jodi Schiavo’s first interview. She’s the woman Michael Schiavo calls his rock, the mother of his two children. The couple was married two months ago, but Jodi has been by Michael’s side for more than a decade.

Michael Schiavo: She was my biggest supporter. She stood behind me the whole time. Cause she knew that Terri was my heart. And she knew that I still loved her. (crying.) That’s a lot.

Matt Lauer, NBC News: The woman whose ten years of a relationship with you… was all about someone else. That’s hard.

Michael Schiavo: And I love her to death.

Jodi met Michael three years after Terri’s collapse. At that time, she says both she and Michael were lost souls.

Jodi Schiavo: I knew Terri came first. And I would never have asked him to change that. I mean there were difficult times.

Lauer: Where you said, “enough about Terri”?

Jodi Schiavo: Yeah, there were probably some times. But at that time I would never asked him to walk away. He was kind of starting to say, “Maybe this is reality. Maybe she’s not coming back now.”

After three years of hopes and prayers, Michael now had to face the fact that the Terri he knew was gone. Doctors said she was in a persistent vegetative state and would never recover, and so he started thinking about the significance of a conversation he said he had with Terri years before on a train ride to Florida.

Michael Schiavo: Her uncle was very disabled.  And he lived with his mother.  And Terri said to me, “If I ever become a burden to anybody, don’t ever let me live like that.”  And I said, “Okay.  And you do the same for me.”

Lauer: She’s how old at that point?

Schiavo: 22?

Lauer: 22. I mean, I’m trying to remember when I was 22, Michael.  And you know what?  At that point, you never think you’re gonna die.

Schiavo: But when you’re—

Lauer: Is that the same thing as really stopping and thinking and saying, “No, Michael listen to me, if it happens to me, I don’t want to live like that”? You never followed it up.  You never, “Okay.  Terri, you know, you said something a second ago and that was pretty dramatic. Let me make sure I understand what you’re talking’ about”?

Schiavo: No. Because I understood Terri. 

Lauer: Her parents say they don’t remember her ever saying anything like that.

Schiavo: They weren’t there, Matt.

Lauer: But, that she never had a conversation like that with them.

Schiavo: But, I’m saying— Terri couldn’t talk to her parents like that.  

But Terri’s parents insisted the daughter they knew would never want her life to end that way and they weren’t giving up without a fight.

They went to court to try and gain guardianship of Terri, but the court ruled in Michael’s favor.
And the fact that Michael remained in charge of Terri’s care, even though by this time, he was engaged and living with Jodi only further incensed the Schindlers.

Lauer: I think maybe the average person watching TV every once in a while and catching bits and pieces of the story might have thought, “Well, wait a second.  He’s her husband.  But he has this whole other life over here.  And if he’s moved on with his life, why can’t he give her—Terri’s parents care of Terri?”

Schiavo: You had to live what I lived, Matt, to understand.  But I wasn’t going to give Terri back to somebody that would do what they wanted to do with Terri.

Lauer: People have often asked. Michael why didn’t you divorce Terri, you were living with Jodi.

Schiavo: Why do I have to divorce Terri? Terri wasn’t like a football… an inanimate object you pass back and forth. She was my wife. You mean because your wife gets sick, do you give her back?

Jodi Schiavo: I would think so much less of Michael had he walked away from her. That is one of the qualities in him that I so admire. That up against everything, everything.... he stuck by her and did it anyway. 

In 1998, Michael petitioned the Florida court to remove Terri’s feeding tube, saying he was fulfilling Terri’s wish not to be kept alive that way. It was the beginning of an epic legal battle between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers who were fighting desperately to keep their daughter alive.

They had their own doctors present testimony that Terri could one day recover and took their battle to the media, releasing a video that seemed to show Terri responding to her family.

But after seven years of litigation, Michael won. The court ordered Terri’s feeding tube removed on March 18, 2005.

Terri’s hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida became a scene of protest— a rallying place for  right to life groups who said Terri would suffer a cruel death. Michael was called everything from “an abuser” to “a murderer,” and Jodi says even their two young children were threatened.

Jodi Schiavo:  It’s very hard to accept when you get letters addressed to “the bastard children of Michael Schiavo” and they talk about how children are stolen out of their home every day and they just disappear.  And to always look over your shoulder, saying  “I’ll be there.” And then at the end of the letter, they’re quoting scripture. 

And with Terri off the feeding tube and facing imminent death, the battle became political. Florida Governor Jeb Bush who used his executivepowers to reinsert the feeding tube when it was removed a year and a half earlier, now threatened to take Terri into state custody.

Then in an extraordinary move, the U.S. Congress got involved, passing a bill signed later by President Bush that would transfer jurisdiction of the case from the state to the federal courts— keeping the case, and possibly Terri alive.

Lauer: Congress meets in a special session.  The president interrupts a vacation; comes back to Washington to sign it into law.  You’re now facing off against the Schindlers, the governor, a lot of people in the state of Florida, members of Congress, the president, and the pope.

Schiavo: Uh-huh.

Lauer: The Vatican weighs in on this case.

Lauer: We’re a long way from that conversation you had with Terri when you were 21 years old.

Schiavo: Yeah, well it, Matt, I guess when it all boiled down, I couldn’t understand why these people were so passionate about my wife. This happens to people across the country every day. People are allowed to die every day. Feeding tubes are removed every day.

Lauer: Did you think at all at that point— and I think Jodi even came to you one day and said— “Give it up.”

Schiavo: I couldn’t.  I couldn’t.  You know, my parents, they raised me to be a fighter.  And I was doing something that Terri wanted.  And I couldn’t give it up on her.  I came this far.  And I wasn’t gonna let anybody stand in my way.

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