When Ashley Benefield fatally shot her husband Doug Benefield in 2020, she claimed that she'd acted in self-defense — but she was convicted of manslaughter after prosecutors argued that she'd lied about Doug's abuse.
Ashley Benefield/FacebookDoug and Ashley Benefield met at a political dinner in 2016 and got married just 13 days later.
Ashley Benefield seemingly had it all. The young Florida woman was a model and ballerina, had a job in politics, and had just gotten married after a whirlwind romance straight out of a fairy tale. But behind the scenes, things weren’t what they appeared.
She claimed that her new husband, Doug Benefield, was abusive. He’d once shot a bullet into their ceiling during an argument, and Ashley believed that he was poisoning her tea. So, she moved in with her mother and refused to let Doug see their daughter. She pursued case after case against him in court, but a judge dismissed her allegations as untrue.
Then, on Sept. 27, 2020, Ashley Benefield fatally shot Doug at her mother’s house in Lakewood Ranch, Florida. She told the police that she’d acted in self-defense after Doug lunged at her, but she was charged with his murder a month later.
In the ensuing “Black Swan” trial, the prosecution argued that Ashley had fabricated Doug’s abuse so she could have sole custody of their child. She was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison. So, was this truly a case of a vindictive wife seeking revenge? Or did Ashley Benefield shoot her abusive husband as a last resort after her cries for help went unheard for years?
The Whirlwind Relationship Of Doug And Ashley Benefield
In August 2016, 24-year-old Ashley Byers attended a political dinner party in Palm Beach while working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. There, she met Doug Benefield, a widower who was 30 years her senior.
Doug’s wife had died nine months earlier, leaving him to raise a teenage daughter on his own. He was immediately enchanted by Ashley, a former ballerina and model — and he married her just 13 days later.
“He was very loving and attentive,” Ashley Benefield later testified at her “Black Swan” trial, as reported by 48 Hours in 2024. “We laughed a lot and he made me feel very special and loved.”
Tommie BenefieldWhen Doug and Ashley Benefield met, he was 54 and she was 24.
Things quickly turned sour, however. Just a few months after their wedding, the Benefields had a heated argument about Doug’s daughter. Doug pulled out a gun, put it to his head, and threatened to kill himself before firing a shot into the kitchen ceiling. His friend Trip Cormeny later recalled that Doug called him after the incident and told him, “I did the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
And the violence didn’t end there, according to Ashley. In the summer of 2017, she found out she was pregnant, and she decided to move out of their home in Charleston, South Carolina, to live with her mother in Florida. Doug was busy running a ballet company that Ashley had wanted to start and couldn’t take care of her when she found herself bedridden in the early months of her pregnancy.
Then, in September 2017, Ashley Benefield decided to leave Doug for good.
A Tumultuous Separation Leads To Accusations Of Abuse
One night when Doug wasn’t home, Ashley returned to their house, gathered her belongings, and left him a letter. It read: “[E]ver since finding out I was pregnant, you have continued to display psychotic, irrational, and unsafe behavior that has left me fearful for my life and safety as well as that of my unborn child… Do not harass or try to follow me or I will call the police and have a restraining order against you.”
Ashley also cited several examples of Doug’s abusive tendencies in the letter, such as yelling, cussing, throwing objects, and even harming their dog. According to a 2021 article in Vanity Fair, Doug messaged Ashley saying, “I just read the note. I don’t even know how to start responding. I am sorry I wasn’t a stronger better man through everything… I will never act the way you talk about again.”
Facebook/Renee BenefieldDoug Benefield with his late wife, Renee, and their daughter, Eva.
Still, Ashley Benefield held her ground, and she remained in Florida with her mother. But her health didn’t improve. She was experiencing chest and stomach pain, and she decided to send a lock of her hair to a lab. The results reportedly revealed that she had high levels of aluminum, cobalt, zinc, tin, and barium in her body. She came to the conclusion that Doug had been poisoning her with the tea he used to bring her each morning.
Ashley felt that her suspicions were confirmed when Doug mailed her tea bags as part of her gift that Christmas. She even took the tea to the police station to have it examined.
She refused to see Doug for the remainder of her pregnancy. She didn’t let him meet their daughter, Emerson, when she was born in March 2018, either, leaving his name off the birth certificate completely. When Emerson was three months old, Ashley had her placed in a hyperbaric chamber several times to “detox” her from the purported poison she’d been exposed to in utero.
Then, in July 2018, Ashley went to court to seek a restraining order against Doug. However, the judge dismissed all of her allegations of abuse, stating, “There is not a single scintilla of credible evidence that Ms. Benefield has ever been poisoned or suffered from any illness of any poison.” Doug and Ashley Benefield were ordered to share custody of their daughter.
Doug BenefieldInside the American National Ballet studio, the Charleston, South Carolina-based company that Ashley and Doug Benefield started together before their separation.
Over the next two years, the couple reconciled several times. They attended therapy together and even planned a move to Maryland, where Ashley had grown up.
But this reconciliation didn’t last. In August 2019, Doug grew suspicious and hired a private investigator, who discovered that Ashley was seeing someone else. Doug immediately filed for divorce. Ashley countered by accusing him of physically and sexually abusing Emerson, but Child Protective Services found no evidence to support her claims.
Despite all of this, Doug hoped that he and Ashley could work things out for the sake of Emerson. He decided to go ahead and rent a U-Haul for their move to Maryland. It was a decision that would prove fatal.
The Death Of Doug Benefield
On Sept. 27, 2020, Doug and Ashley Benefield were packing the U-Haul at Ashley’s mother’s house when they began arguing. Soon after, Ashley walked to a neighbor’s house holding a handgun. “I shot Doug in self-defense,” she said.
The neighbor called 911, and the police arrived to find that Doug had been shot twice. One bullet had hit his leg, while the second struck his arm and then traveled into his chest cavity. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital an hour later.
Ashley Benefield later testified at the “Black Swan” trial, “He started coming towards me and then he lunged at me. And I just start pulling the trigger.”
Florida State Attorney’s OfficeDoug Benefield was shot and killed inside Ashley’s mother’s home in Lakewood Ranch, Florida.
However, investigators found no evidence that Doug had physically attacked Ashley that night. She had no defensive wounds, and there were no signs of a struggle in the house. Ballistics and forensic analysis showed that the bullet trajectories were inconsistent with a close-range, face-to-face confrontation.
According to a Manatee County Sheriff’s Office affidavit, “Based on entry wounds on Douglas, it does not appear that he was facing Ashley when she began shooting. It also does not appear that Douglas had taken any kind of defensive or combative stance. Douglas was not found to have any weapons on his person or near him.”
So, on Nov. 4, 2020, Ashley was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The case soon gained national attention and earned her the nickname “Black Swan,” inspired by the 2010 ballet thriller of the same name. By the time her case went to court in 2024, the media had dubbed it the “Black Swan” trial.
The ‘Black Swan’ Trial Of Ashley Benefield
Although Ashley Benefield maintained that she’d acted in self-defense and argued that her charges should be thrown out based on Florida’s “stand your ground” law, the jury didn’t accept her version of events. Prosecutors argued that her abuse claims against Doug were fabricated to ensure that she got sole custody of Emerson.
Meanwhile, Ashley’s attorneys insisted that Doug was controlling and abusive, claiming that Ashley feared for her safety and that of their daughter. On the stand, Ashley testified that Doug struck her in the face just before the shooting, which she said was the first time he’d been physically violent toward her. The defense also submitted a text from Doug’s late wife, Renee, as evidence. The message accused him of violence early in their marriage, including kicking her on their honeymoon and holding a gun to his head.
Manatee County Sheriff’s OfficeFormer ballerina Ashley Benefield was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of her husband, Doug.
However, Ashley had had no visible injuries in the aftermath of the shooting aside from a minor scratch that appeared unrelated to the incident. This ultimately led the jury to doubt her story, and she was convicted of manslaughter — a lesser charge than second-degree murder — on July 30, 2024.
She was sentenced to 20 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation and is currently serving her sentence at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida.
The woman who had once been an aspiring ballerina and a rising figure in the Charleston arts scene was now a convicted killer. Ashley Benefield maintains that she was an abused wife who acted out of fear — but the jury’s verdict suggests that she is indeed the “Black Swan” that prosecutors warned she was.
After reading about Ashley Benefield and the “Black Swan” trial, go inside the story of Betty Broderick, the angry divorcée who murdered her ex-husband and his new wife. Then, learn about the mysterious murder of Robert Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.
