Leaving his violently beaten and traumatized girlfriend in bed, a wealthy Parkland financial adviser stood up, put on a dress shirt and joined a Zoom hearing in his divorce case.
Scott Matalon listened calmly as a Broward judge told him and his ex-wife that they were a “good-looking couple” and that he couldn’t be the “strict parent” right now.
“I’m not going to be, Judge,” Matalon said in the Zoom hearing. In the next room, his new girlfriend was plotting her escape while nursing numerous injuries, her vision still blurry from the alcohol Matalon had poured in her eyes. “Judge, I’m going to be easy peasy and pleasurable and make sure that our son is well-adjusted, well-adapted, and use and employ the techniques that anger management has instructed me to.”
Four years after that June day, Matalon, now 44, is in prison, expected to be released in a year. He is accused of attacking at least four women, three in a matter of months, taking advantage of a Florida court system that was ill-equipped to stop him.
Several domestic violence cases have made headlines in South Florida in the last year, most only after they ended in murder. In many of these cases, the perpetrators had known histories of violence, but were still able to access the victims.
- In May of last year, a man stabbed his 2-year-old daughter to death during an unsupervised visit in Pembroke Pines, according to police. The mother of the child had fought for supervised visits, citing the father’s unstable mental health and violent outbursts.
- In November of last year, a man stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death in Hallandale Beach, according to police. He had two prior domestic violence charges, but prosecutors dropped them both times after the victim did not cooperate.
- In February, a man hunted his former wife through a Tamarac neighborhood, shooting and killing her, her father and a neighbor into whose home she ran seeking help, according to deputies. Her repeated warnings to law enforcement went unheeded.
- In March, a man killed his girlfriend and her three children in a murder-suicide in Pembroke Park, days before she planned to leave him, her family said.
- In June, a Michelin-star chef whose career bounced back after a prior domestic violence conviction, left a West Palm Beach woman hospitalized with bleeding in her brain, according to police. He has pleaded not guilty.
And then there’s Scott Matalon.
A bald man of 6-foot-1 and about 300 pounds, he presented himself as affluent and chivalrous, buying women seafood towers on dates, taking them on drives in his Mercedes convertible, and caring for them when they were sick. In private, he could be emotional. Sometimes he cried in the arms of the women he dated. Other times he would rage, beating and strangling women, chasing them and carrying them back if they tried to escape, threatening to kill them or their loved ones if they left him or told the police. Then he would demand forgiveness from them, often in the form of sex, and they would give in, even if they didn’t want to.
Matalon didn’t kill any of the women he attacked. But his case serves as a particularly stark illustration of what victims endure, both at the hands of their abuser and in the court system.
Despite multiple witnesses, severe and visible injuries, an immediate police response, footage and photographs, and their own persistence, the women who escaped Matalon still confronted the many challenges inherent to Florida’s handling of domestic violence cases.
Victims are questioned and belittled in court while perpetrators charm attorneys and judges. Perpetrators are repeatedly released under the state’s bond system. Prosecutors drop or down-charge the crimes. And those with children face custody battles that drain them of their money and force them to continue having a relationship with their abuser.
To report this article, the Sun Sentinel reviewed divorce records, police reports, court transcripts, body-camera footage, emails and text messages, and spoke with victims, their friends, relatives and neighbors, domestic violence experts and attorneys.
The reporting reveals the simultaneous ease with which Matalon avoided consequences and the lengths his victims had to go in order to get justice.
Michele Matalon, his ex-wife, says the family court system let her down during divorce proceedings. The judge gave Scott Matalon equal timesharing of their kids, while child protection investigators determined twice that he was not a danger to them despite allegations of abuse and threats to Michele’s life. He is now filing numerous motions for timesharing from prison, forcing his ex-wife to spend thousands on attorney fees.
At the same time as the divorce case unfolded in family court, in criminal court, his cases began to pile up.
The first was Christina La Ferrera, now 40, the girlfriend Matalon had attacked just before his divorce hearing. The brutal assault had unfolded over the course of a weekend, beginning in a Miami hotel room and ending at La Ferrera’s home in Boca Raton. Even though she reported the attack to police the same day, it took months for Miami prosecutors to charge Matalon.
Two weeks after La Ferrera’s attack, Matalon attacked another girlfriend at his home in Parkland. The woman did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, so the South Florida Sun Sentinel is not naming her. Matalon was charged with kidnapping, but he was released into a co-ed rehab program.
There, he began a relationship with Brittany Emslie, now 30, the last victim, a recovering addict working as a behavioral tech. After she was violently attacked, Matalon and his attorneys convinced her not to press charges and to send prosecutors an affidavit stating she was not afraid of him. When, four months later, she asked prosecutors to reopen the case, they refused, misstating important details.
Neither Emslie nor La Ferrera knew that statements they made to police about having rough sex with Matalon would be used repeatedly to discredit them.
“I feel like justice was definitely not served for me,” Emslie told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Matalon’s defense attorneys, Jeremy Kroll and Dave Raben, declined to comment in response to a series of questions.
‘I’m nervous they’re going to fail me again’
Eventually, the system caught up with Matalon. Two years after the divorce hearing, he agreed to plead guilty in La Ferrera’s case and no contest in the Parkland woman’s case in exchange for 5½ years in prison.
The fact that Matalon received a criminal conviction at all is unusual. Many victims never report their abuser. And when they do, the criminal justice system often fails to follow through, experts say.
“If they are arrested, rarely does it move forward to an actual domestic violence charge or conviction,” said Bethany Backes, an associate professor who leads the Violence Against Women program at the University of Central Florida. “It’s usually diverted somehow or it’s down-charged. Very serious crimes are being downgraded to misdemeanors.”
While the three women were relieved to see some form of justice, they are also terrified of Matalon’s impending release. He is expected to get out in September 2026 on good behavior, according to Michele Matalon.
In a coffee shop in West Delray in late March, the three women reunited, the abuse years behind them and Matalon still in prison. Michele Matalon and Christina La Ferrera had become best friends over the years. They had never met Brittany Emslie in person before, but had frequently texted and spoken with her over the phone.
“I feel like I know you,” Emslie told Matalon, standing in line for coffee.
All three of the women have been left shaken by the abuse and the years of trauma they endured — the threats, the lawyers, private investigators and even an alleged hitman, according to statements in court, emails to prosecutors and police reports.
As the women try to move on with their lives, they worry about the future. Michele Matalon, now 43, is anxious about the outcome of her pending custody case and Scott’s request for timesharing of their two children from prison.
“I’m nervous about the system,” Michele Matalon said. “And I’m nervous that they’re going to fail me again.”
‘I tried to leave a million times’
Michele (then Zuckerman) was living in Long Island when she met Scott Matalon on a Jewish dating app in 2007.
They were in their 20s at the time, and had a lot in common: He had grown up in the town next to hers; they went to the same summer camp; both their parents were in the jewelry business. And Michele’s parents had always told her to date a “nice Jewish boy,” she said.
They began living in a bedroom in Matalon’s parents’ house. Michele saw signs of his abusive nature early on, she recalled in a deposition for the divorce case. If she made him angry — by going out with friends, or saying something he didn’t like — he would grab her by the neck and “barricade” her in the bedroom by standing in the door, throwing her on the bed if she tried to leave and telling her she “wasn’t allowed.”
After every hourslong fight, Scott would demand forgiveness and makeup sex, Michele said in her deposition. She would oblige so that she could sleep.
The abuse continued during their engagement, she said in her deposition, culminating in “the night that was never supposed to be spoken about.”
It was the night of their bachelor and bachelorette parties.
An intoxicated Scott had called Michele “in a panic because he did some inappropriate behavior at his bachelor party and he wanted to confess to me what he had done,” she recalled in her deposition. She left her own bachelorette party early and met him at his parents’ house. When he confessed to her, she told him she was hurt, which made him angry. When she tried to leave the room, he grabbed her and punched her in the face, she said. The attack ended when he stumbled and fell down a flight of stairs.
After that night, Scott promised to do better, acknowledging his anger and control issues, Michele said in her deposition. She wanted to believe him. The wedding went forward.
“I tried to leave a million times,” Michele told the Sun Sentinel. “And then once I was married, I just tried to survive.”
Abusive relationships and the “patterns of terrorism” that unfold within them are like “hostage situations,” said Backes, the UCF professor, often taking away victims’ sense of self-efficacy and independence, making it more difficult for them to leave.
“What we forget, is these are relationships that often have been in place, there has been love in this relationship, or what someone envisioned as love,” she said. “… The person has been held and treated in such a way that is reframing their personality, making them feel helpless. Sometimes it’s easier to cope in the relationship than out of it.”
Scott and Michele married in 2010. He became a prominent investment adviser while she stopped working entirely, growing financially dependent on him. The abuse continued throughout their marriage and the births of their son and daughter, Michele said in her deposition. She contemplated leaving, but remained for the sake of the children.
The family moved to Parkland in 2019. Michele didn’t know anyone in South Florida besides her parents.
It wasn’t until their 8-year-old son began confiding in Michele Matalon’s parents about the abuse that she made efforts to leave, according to her deposition. The family came up with an exit plan, purchasing Mace and burner phones to reach police if they were in danger.
Meanwhile, a child protective investigator opened a case on Scott Matalon. A pediatrician had reported child abuse to the Department of Children and Families in February 2021 after Michele brought in their son over a painful “noogie” his father had given him out of anger, according to her deposition and a medical report.
Later that month, the Matalons went to Disney World for their daughter’s sixth birthday, where a violent, hourslong episode took place in which Scott pushed their son to the ground and cursed out their daughter before turning on Michele, according to her deposition. When they got back, she informed Scott in a text that she intended to leave with the children for her parents’ house.
Scott texted her dozens of times, begging for her to stay. He sent pictures of himself smiling with their daughter and promised to quit drinking and get emergency help from doctors for his mental health.
“We can talk today and remember I am different today,” he wrote, according to copies of the texts filed in court. “Promise me only one thing you will listen and I won’t scream if I yell you leave but I promise you today is different and I know why! I cannot wait to explain because this has shown me something I did not know about myself.”
Three days later, on Feb. 16, 2021, Michele Matalon filed for divorce.
Scott immediately filed an emergency motion for 50-50 custody.
In court, before Judge Dale Cohen, Michele began detailing the abuse, hoping that he would see the need for supervised visits, not equal custody.
“This has been an abusive relationship for 12 years with the wife as well as with the children,” Michele’s attorney told the judge at a March 2021 hearing over whether to grant Scott’s request.
Scott Matalon and his attorney denied Michele’s allegations of abuse, saying he hadn’t seen his children in a month.
The judge denied the emergency custody motion, awaiting the results of the child protective services investigation.
“I have a lot of concerns about this case,” he said. “I do think the father has an anger problem.”
Michele and her children began telling the CPS investigator about the years of Scott’s verbal and physical abuse. Michele’s parents described Scott as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
The report documented how Scott bit her lip so hard that it bled in front of their kids. The children both described fearing their father and witnessing physical and verbal fights. In one incident on a cruise, Scott broke their son’s Nintendo in half and threw it into the ocean. Another time, after Michele defended their son during an argument, he dragged her into the bedroom. Their son stood outside the door yelling, “Don’t hurt Mommy, don’t hurt Mommy.”
Scott Matalon denied the allegations, telling the investigator that Michele was “manipulating” the children and that he was simply a strict parent, not an abusive one. He said his son had been confused when he banged on the door and that he and Michele had been practicing martial arts, not actually fighting.
“His voice is sterner with the way he speaks and the mother never sees anything wrong and never tries to discipline them,” the investigator wrote in her report, summarizing Scott’s statements. “… He has never laid a finger on his wife or children. He just misses his children and wish [sic] this was all a dream.” The investigator spoke to Scott’s sister and two family friends, who all expressed “shock” over the case and denied any abuse toward Michele or the children.
In depositions and hearings, Matalon said that they were a “physical” family who liked to grapple and play. The two had a great marriage but began arguing due to different parenting styles and stress because of the pandemic, he and his attorney said. Scott described himself as an involved father who played dolls with his daughter and video games with his son, providing pictures of the family together on vacations and birthday letters Michele and the children had written to him.
“When (my daughter’s) not here I wake up all alone,” Scott said in March. “The first couple days I slept in her bed. I miss them. I miss him, I miss (my son).”
A great deal was riding on what CPS concluded. But most of Michele’s and the childrens’ meetings with the investigator consisted of minutes-long conversations in a parking lot, she recalled. Growing anxious about the case and the investigator’s ability to devote time to it, she sent the investigator an email in early May.
“I was concerned before because you had expressed to me that you have a large amount of cases and a lack of time to review them all,” Matalon wrote, referring to a conversation they’d had earlier.
The investigator did not respond.
Weeks later, CPS closed its investigation. The investigator wrote in her report that “the father threatens and degrades the mother. Sometimes the father is physically abusive” and that their son witnessed “a lot of it.”
But she also wrote that the children had no visible bruises and that Michele had never called the police.
“The case is being closed as no indicators for physical injury and not substantiated for household violence threatens child,” the report concluded.
Florida’s child protective investigators often lack the time and resources necessary to delve into complicated abuse cases, according to officials in the legal system.
“They’re so overworked,” said Rhoda Sokoloff, a family attorney based in Fort Lauderdale who does pro bono work on domestic violence.
Many investigators are also cynical about allegations of abuse after handling cases where parents lie in order to use it as a tactic.
“When this happens in the context of a marital breakdown, CPS might be like, yeah, we’re gonna take that with maybe a little grain of salt,” said Laura Arcaro, a divorce and child custody attorney based in Fort Lauderdale. “Because is it just to gain an advantage in litigation or is this woman truly a victim of abuse?”
The hearing for temporary custody of the Matalon children was set for June 2021.
‘I thought you were Michele’
Just a month after Michele Matalon fled the home, Scott Matalon moved on to another woman.
Christina La Ferrera had been on the brink of deleting her profile on the dating app Hinge in March 2021 when she received a match notification that sparked her interest. His photos and bio depicted him as a family man and a professional, wearing a white dress shirt, posing next to a golden retriever.
Matalon was direct about his interest — something La Ferrera found refreshing compared to the ghosting and hook-up culture so prevalent on the app — and asked her out to dinner that night. Their relationship progressed quickly. He wanted to be together all of the time, so she started working at her tech job from the Parkland house he once shared with his family.
La Ferrera didn’t know anything about Matalon’s divorce. When she asked him about his kids, she said, he made it sound like he still saw them regularly. Occasionally, he would make comments that La Ferrera found alarming, but she chalked them up to the words of a man “emotionally devastated by his divorce,” she said in a statement filed by Michele Matalon’s attorney in the divorce case.
He had talked about wanting to kill his ex-wife, La Ferrera said in the statement, and told her “that his driver / friend Ozzy from NYC was going to kidnap” her and “inject some substance … between her toes so that there would be no marks or evidence when her body was found.”
In May 2021, La Ferrera briefly broke up with Matalon after receiving mysterious texts from a woman — who is not among the four victims mentioned in this article — showing pictures of bruises, telling her that he did not have custody of his kids, unlike what he had told La Ferrera.
But Matalon begged to get back together, texting her lengthy notes and sending her flowers, telling her the woman was lying because she was jealous. The man La Ferrera thought she knew was not the man the mystery woman was describing.
“He was insistent on getting back together,” she told the Sun Sentinel. “So I gave him another chance.”
By June, they had reconciled.
Then, on June 12, two days before the custody hearing, La Ferrera discovered the dark side of Scott Matalon. He and La Ferrera had made plans for a “staycation” at a hotel in Miami, beginning with a fancy dinner followed by a night out at a lounge Saturday with her friends. Matalon had paid about $1,000 for a table, but her friends didn’t show. He became upset, she told the Sun Sentinel, and decided to hire an escort. While the two were in the hotel room, La Ferrera retreated to the balcony. When, eventually, La Ferrera told Matalon the escort needed to leave, she said, he became enraged.
The next thing La Ferrera remembered, she was opening her eyes in the hotel bed. She thought she’d just had a bad dream. Then she realized Matalon’s hands were around her neck, according to a Miami Police report.
He was crying and hovering over her face. “Babe, I am so sorry! I thought you were Michelle!” [sic] La Ferrera recalled him saying, according to court documents and a sworn statement given to police. “… I wasn’t trying to kill you, I was trying to kill her. You know I would never hurt you babe.”
La Ferrera began to scream. Matalon told her to be quiet; someone would hear. When she didn’t stop, he grabbed her by the throat and threw her into the wall, then threw her phone at the wall so she couldn’t call for help, according to her statement in the divorce case. When she tried to leave the room for help, he pinned her to the bed, poured alcohol from the minibar into her eyes, then demanded she have sex with him “in order to make things right,” according to the police report.
The next morning, on June 13, Matalon made La Ferrera cover her bruises before they drove back to her home in Boca Raton. He threatened to kill her children and her family if she disrupted his custody hearing, she wrote. La Ferrera complied with all of his demands.
Scott stayed at her house that night, and the same cycle of violence, threats and sex continued into the next day. Then, at 3:20 p.m., he calmly got dressed, sat at her dining room table and logged into the custody hearing.
The humble, charming side of Scott Matalon returned as he testified before the judge. Michele watched from her new apartment in Parkland, putting a post-it over his face so she wouldn’t have to look at him. He told the judge he had volunteered to take anger management classes and started seeing a therapist about his parenting. He denied any abuse.
“I want to be proactive,” he said. “I want to hold (my daughter and son). And so I did anything I could to just show best efforts because I really think our children need both a father and a mother.”
When it was Michele Matalon’s turn, she told a different story.
“I was fearful to leave from the beginning,” she said. “… He told me that he would hurt my father, hurt my family. And then when we did get married and I would stick up for myself or in an argument, he would tell me that he would take the children from me.”
Matalon had only 10 minutes for her testimony and had to rush through the various incidents of abuse.
“I have so much more to tell you,” her attorney told Judge Cohen when she ran out of time.
“I’ve heard enough,” Cohen replied. “I get the gist … unfortunately I guess, Michele, you know, you’ve been in fear even before you got married which probably should have signaled you not to get married.”
He then issued a ruling that would leave Michele Matalon reeling. It came amid a shift in Florida’s family courts toward presuming 50-50 custody is best for the children.
Cohen began by lecturing Scott and Michele about family values and the importance of working things out. He praised Scott for taking anger management classes to “correct” his issue.
“If I was a therapist, I would tell everybody, every day when you see your wife, you think of the first day and that’s how you treat your wife,” Cohen said.
He described the pictures he had seen of the family, shared by Matalon’s attorney, by the pool, a 40th birthday post saying “you’re the greatest.” If they wanted, the judge said, they could “fix it and have a happy family.”
Cohen praised the child protective investigator, saying that she “found no evidence of abuse.” And he criticized both Scott and Michele Matalon for fighting in front of the kids.
“Regardless of what path you all decide to go down in the future, there’s so much room for improvement between the two of you,” he told them. “But you’re both smart, you both care about your children, and you both did like each other at some point in your life. So there’s no reason that you can’t just get along.”
He granted Scott Matalon’s request for 50-50 timesharing, pending a final hearing.
Michele Matalon felt blamed for her own abuse.
“Clearly I need therapy,” she told the Sun Sentinel. “But yeah, yeah I did (marry him). Why are you victim blaming?”
Cohen has since retired as a judge, and now works as a family mediator. He declined to comment when reached by a Sun Sentinel reporter by phone and text for this article.
Florida’s shift toward 50-50 custody
In 2023, a new Florida law made 50-50 custody a mandatory presumption, requiring attorneys to convince judges why an alternative would be preferable. The law has led to drawn-out custody battles and agreements that often force victims to continue relationships with their abusers.
The new law was preceded by a trend toward 50-50 custody in Florida’s family courts, where the Matalon case was heard.
“The pendulum swung from the ’80s, when I first started,” said Susan Brown, a family attorney based in Plantation. “Mom got custody, Dad got every weekend unless Mom was really bad, and then Dad would get custody.”
The custody case forced Michele Matalon to keep interacting with the man she had fled.
“Now that I’m safe and I’m divorced, I don’t have to go back,” she told the Sun Sentinel. “But now you want me to send my children back to him? … I’m not OK with that. I hear his name or see his face and it brings me into anxiety, and into panic, about what’s going to happen.”
Even if Matalon wanted to leave Florida with her children, the law forbids parents with custody arrangements from leaving the state unless they get the approval of their former partner.
Constraints like that often lead victims to stay in abusive relationships because the alternative seems even worse. Their mindset is, “‘I can’t leave, but I can’t stay, what do I do?’ ” said Arcaro, the Fort Lauderdale family attorney. “I’m just going to try to smooth things over.”
As the Matalons’ timesharing hearing wrapped up, Scott had one more request for the judge: permission to have dinner with his children that night.
Judge Cohen granted the request.
La Ferrera escapes
After closing Zoom, Scott Matalon yelled “I won!” and gave La Ferrera a hug. On his way out the door, he told her to “be ready for his return at 8:30 p.m.”
She had three hours.
Afraid for her life, La Ferrera picked up her children from summer camp and took them to her father’s home for their safety, then drove to the Boca Raton Police station. The doors were locked, so she used the call box to signal an emergency. When officers arrived, she started telling them everything that had happened to her over the last 24 hours. And she asked them to do a wellness check on Michele Matalon and her children.
Meanwhile, Scott Matalon had been calling and texting La Ferrera repeatedly, asking her if everything was okay and sending pictures of himself smiling with his kids in the pool.
“Sorry I love you and was wrong and am all good own [sic],” he wrote. “Diff man with kids.”
La Ferrera told police officers that Scott Matalon drove a white Mercedes convertible, and they waited for him to return to her home that night. About 8:30, a car matching the description drove toward the house, then did a U-turn and left, according to a probable cause affidavit. Police tried to call Matalon multiple times, but he didn’t pick up.
The next night, he calmly turned himself in at the police station. He had brought another girlfriend with him, body camera footage showed.
“Thanks for coming in,” one of the officers told Matalon as they put him in handcuffs.
“Of course, man,” Matalon said. He asked the woman to scratch his chin for him since he was in handcuffs, and the two of them laughed. The officers told him he would be in jail only for a short time.
“I love you,” Matalon told the woman as they kissed goodbye. “I’ll see you for dinner.”
“You got this, kid,” the woman replied.
The police officers walked him to the squad car, where he tried to joke with them.
“You spoke to my attorney already?” Matalon asked one of the officers.
“Yes sir,” the officer said. “You’re all good, man. We’ll just get through this …”
Because the weekend-long attack had taken place in two jurisdictions, Boca Raton Police told La Ferrera she would have to file a separate police report in Miami for what had occurred there. But Miami Police would not take a report over the phone, telling her she had to come to the station.
La Ferrera, who had suffered blunt force injuries to her head and whose vision was still impaired from the alcohol in her eyes, did not feel comfortable driving to Miami in the rain that night.
“I thought I had a skull fracture,” La Ferrera told the Sun Sentinel. Later, an eye exam revealed that she had “clinical signs” of an eye socket fracture.
With no other option, she ended up driving back to Miami on June 17, four days after the attack, and made a delayed report.
“The victim was not able to report the incident that happened at the hotel prior to today’s date due to personal issues,” the Miami incident report states.
Palm Beach County prosecutors charged Matalon with two counts of simple battery, a misdemeanor, based on the events that had taken place after he and La Ferrera returned to Boca Raton from Miami.
The morning after Matalon’s arrest, La Ferrera attended his first appearance hearing in court, where, she said, she asked the judge to deny him bond. She told the court she feared for her own safety, the safety of her children, Michele Matalon’s children and the public.
Matalon was released the same day.
Just two weeks later, he was back in handcuffs, charged with kidnapping and strangling the girlfriend he had brought with him to the Boca Raton police station.
A profile of a serial batterer
When Dr. Donald Dutton set out to research domestic batterers in the early 1990s, the prevailing focus in the psychology community was on the victims, not the perpetrators. Renowned psychologist Dr. Lenore Walker had coined the term “battered woman syndrome” after studying victims in abusive relationships. But the psychology of the men who committed the acts was far less studied.
Dutton, a psychologist who worked with dozens of batterers in intervention programs, was curious about their motivations.
“I’ve always been fascinated by questions I thought were unanswerable,” said Dutton, who reviewed the Matalon case for the Sun Sentinel. “How can you love someone and beat them up? That just makes no sense at all.”
He began to develop a profile of a certain subset of abusers known as “cyclical batterers” — those who abuse their intimate partners in a repeated cycle of violence and contrition.
Cyclical batterers tend to include serial batterers, Dutton said, because they are repeat offenders, though cyclical batterers may stay in one relationship while serial batterers commit violence in multiple relationships. Cyclical batterers are also the most difficult to treat, and poorly understood by the criminal justice system, Dutton said.
“The criminal justice system says, well, we’ll put them in treatment,” he said. “They think it’s going to make the problem go away. It doesn’t make the problem go away.”
The description of Matalon given by the victims — as charming at first glance but a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” — is a hallmark trait of cyclical batterers. In Dutton’s experience, they “appeared to have two personalities, one at home with their partners and another in public, and even in private they seemed to undergo changes, alternately acting abusive and contrite,” he wrote in his book “The Batterer: A Psychological Profile.” Dutton is now one of the leading experts on batterer psychology.
Many cyclical batterers have personality disorders that are very difficult to treat, such as borderline personality disorder, which often manifests as “an unstable sense of self, a sort of terror of being abandoned by their partner and really extreme emotional reactions to a sense of abandonment,” qualities that make them more dangerous, Dutton told the Sun Sentinel. “These are the people who are overrepresented among spousal homicide perpetrators. ‘She can’t leave me, I’ll kill her before she leaves me.’”
Also overrepresented among spousal homicide perpetrators are those who strangle. A person who has been strangled by their partner is 750% more likely to be killed by them, studies show. Scott Matalon would ultimately be charged with strangling two women and convicted on one of the charges.
Judges in domestic violence cases can require anger management classes and batterer intervention programs, but unless the abuser has a desire to change and the programs specifically address personality disorders, rehabilitation is unlikely.
“[The abuser] has to agree that there’s parts of him that need to change,” Dutton said. “… But if you can’t get to that conclusion then everything else is a waste of time.”
Rehabilitation is also less likely in cases where there are numerous victims, said Backes, the UCF professor.
“It’s a learned behavior,” she said. “When you learn you’re able to get away with it and you’re able to do that or you saw your dad do that, it becomes very normalized and you don’t think it’s wrong.”
Dutton’s research has made him more supportive of longer-term incarceration when it comes to domestic violence. He was concerned when he learned that Matalon will be released in a year.
“I come down as a real law-and-order guy in certain cases,” Dutton said. “With people who are persistently violent, research shows you need to protect the public. That needs to be your No. 1 priority. In this case, protecting women that this guy gets in relationships with.”
Compared to someone who abuses one person repeatedly over the course of a relationship, a serial batterer must repeatedly find new people to date.
They often look for vulnerabilities, Backes said.
“Someone who’s a serial batterer has a better understanding of the type of people to select,” she said. “They will identify certain things in a person that makes them a more suitable target for them to engage in a relationship.”
That includes people who are more isolated or were victims of abuse themselves.
Domestic Violence resources
A private investigator and ‘rough sex’
Though La Ferrera had escaped Scott Matalon, she still wasn’t completely free of him.
Days after Matalon’s arrest, a private investigator contacted La Ferrera’s ex-boyfriend, requesting to meet with him.
The ex-boyfriend, who asked not to be named, was angry with La Ferrera at the time for filing a petition for a restraining order against him while she was dating Matalon. He was also curious about what the PI had to say. They agreed to meet at a Starbucks.
The PI was a former corrections officer who worked for Matalon’s attorney, according to Florida law enforcement records. She showed up at the Starbucks in Gucci and high heels and began questioning the man about his sex life with La Ferrera. She wanted to know if they had rough sex, if she liked him slapping her around, tying her up, restraining her or choking her.
The interaction made the ex-boyfriend uncomfortable. He told the Sun Sentinel he felt the PI was trying to coerce him into admitting something that hadn’t happened.
Later, the PI emailed him with an affidavit to sign on behalf of one of Matalon’s attorneys.
It was a list of 17 statements. One read, “Christina was into everything when it came to sex. Her sexual proclivities included, BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadomasochism) swinger parties and unprotected sex with strangers.”
Another stated, “During our relationship our intimacy included, spanking, flogging, choking, biting, slapping, hair pulling, spitting, and name calling. Christina always wanted it harder. She loved rough sex. (video evidence 07/2020).”
When he did not respond to the email, the PI texted him several times.
“Morning. Hope all is well,” one text read. “We are working with the Miami Detective trying to make this go away. Do you have any video or photos of you and Christina have [sic] rough sex and or with toys. Please. And sorry to bother.”
The PI told him he could edit the affidavit as he saw fit.
“I was like, if I edit it I’m gonna take out everything,” the ex-boyfriend told the Sun Sentinel.
He didn’t sign, and texted La Ferrera about the conversation.
For La Ferrera, the revelation — particularly the private investigator’s statement that she was working with Miami Police — only added to her concerns about her case. She had received little information from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, which had not yet filed charges against Matalon for the incident in the hotel room.
The allegations in Miami had the potential for more serious charges than the misdemeanor battery charges brought against Matalon in Boca Raton.
It wouldn’t be until Oct. 27, 2021, four months after the attack, that Miami-Dade prosecutors filed criminal charges against Matalon: domestic battery with strangulation and false imprisonment, both felonies, as well as simple domestic battery and criminal mischief.
The private investigator declined to comment when reached by the Sun Sentinel. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office did not provide details on the delay, saying that the prosecutors assigned to the case at the time had left the office.
‘Christina’s going to absolutely kill me’
Eventually, La Ferrera and Michele Matalon found each other.
The night of the June custody hearing, Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrived at Michele Matalon’s new apartment for the wellness check La Ferrera had requested.
The next day, Michele’s father got a text from an unknown number with a picture of Scott’s mugshot. Together, they called the number several times. Finally, a woman picked up.
“Christina’s going to absolutely kill me,” she told Michele Matalon, according to a recording of the call. She identified herself as a close friend of La Ferrera. She had been looking for Michele’s number online but found her father’s instead.
“She had to sit and watch through your entire court mediation while he got his kids back as he’s beating her ass,” the friend added.
Soon after that, La Ferrera and Michele Matalon spoke on the phone.
“And kind of ever since then, we’ve been there for each other,” Matalon told the Sun Sentinel.
The investigation of La Ferrera’s allegations against Matalon prompted child protective investigators to open a new probe into Michele Matalon’s case.
The day after Matalon’s arrest, Michele’s attorney filed an emergency motion challenging timesharing in their divorce case, attaching a statement from La Ferrera and a police report describing the weekend-long attack and Scott Matalon’s threats to Michele Matalon’s life.
Judge Cohen denied Michele’s request. A month later, the CPS investigator again determined that the children were not in danger.
CPS investigators tend to view events through the lens of what happens directly in front of the kids, experts say. But allegations of violence in another case, like those made by La Ferrera, could be indicative of potential danger to the children.
“What happens if the kid gets a little bit older, and the kid pisses off the father?” said Sokoloff, the family attorney. “Who’s to say the father’s not gonna go off? He may not be able to control himself.”
The child protective investigator declined to comment when reached by the Sun Sentinel.
But even as the CPS investigation was ongoing, so was Scott Matalon’s violent behavior.
On July 5, 2021, he attacked the woman who had supported him during his Boca Raton arrest.
The Parkland attack
The attack took place the night of July 5, at Matalon’s Parkland home. He had thrown the woman down in the shallow area of the pool, then beat her inside the home while stopping her from escaping, according to a probable cause affidavit. She finally managed to flee across the street to a neighbor’s house.
There, she rang the doorbell, barefoot and breathing heavily, according to Ring doorbell camera footage.
Before anyone could answer, Matalon caught up to her, wearing nothing but swim trunks.
“I’m done,” he said, panting, according to the footage. “It’s over.”
“Stay away from me,” the woman demanded as he approached. “Stay away from me!”
The video shows Matalon picking her up, throwing her over his shoulder, and carrying her back to his home. He called her a whore and stuffed $100 bills in her mouth to silence her, the woman later wrote in a petition for a restraining order. When they got back inside the home, he threatened to kill her dog and cornered her in a closet.
He told her police would never come, but they did. The neighbors had watched the confrontation through their Ring camera and called 911.
“He came in like a caveman and grabbed her,” a woman told the dispatcher.
Deputies arrested Matalon the same day as the attack. Prosecutors with the Broward State Attorney’s Office charged him with kidnapping, false imprisonment, domestic battery by strangulation and simple domestic battery, all violations of his bond in Palm Beach County.
But Matalon’s attorneys convinced a judge to release him again, this time into a co-ed substance abuse program. There, he would have direct contact with vulnerable women.
One of them was Brittany Emslie, a recovering addict who worked at the program.
In six months, Emslie and Matalon were married. A month later, police were called to their new home.
‘I can’t imagine why a judge would let you out’
The decision to release Matalon perplexed some experts who reviewed the case for the Sun Sentinel.
In Broward, he had been released on house arrest with an ankle monitor and a requirement that approval was needed for any appointments. He was then jailed again in Palm Beach County because the violent attack and kidnapping were a direct violation of his bond there.
But his attorneys argued for his release, saying he would go directly to rehab to work on his substance abuse issues.
At first, Judge Melanie Surber denied their request, but asked for more information. Two weeks later, they presented her with a letter from a program he had attended called Recovery Unplugged, which said Matalon had demonstrated “successful progress,” even though records show he was there for less than a week.
“Clients are supervised by staff 24/7. We can accommodate a GPS monitor and we have worked with probation and the courts in the tri-county area for many years,” the program’s admissions manager wrote in the letter. “Any major rule violation will be reported to the court.”
Surber released him.
“Frankly, if you’re on pretrial release for a domestic violence case and you go on to break it, not by getting a DUI or something not related to that, but if you’re on pretrial release and you’re out committing other domestic violence acts, I can’t imagine why a judge would let you out,” said Adriana Alcalde, a former Broward prosecutor who now represents victims of sexual violence.
Judges may see domestic violence as private in nature, affecting only a victim or a family, according to Backes, the UCF professor. Meanwhile, Florida’s cash bond system allows abusers with money to avoid jail time.
“Some of our risk assessments that we do when someone is detained or at first appearance, when you’re thinking about pre-trial conditions like an ankle monitor or something like that, don’t really consider the dynamics of domestic violence,” Backes said.
Since COVID, Backes has noticed a national trend toward fewer domestic violence arrests and more down-charging, possibly as part of a “push not to overincarcerate folks.”
“Things that should be felonies are just being charged as misdemeanors,” she said.
Surber did not respond to requests for comment.
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‘It’s only a matter of time’
In the treatment program, Matalon and Emslie grew close. In the court system, La Ferrera’s warnings about Matalon’s violence went unheeded.
Matalon was one of the clients assigned to Emslie in the inpatient program. She was in a vulnerable place at the time, she told the Sun Sentinel. Her son’s father had died of an overdose less than a year prior, and she was working to overcome her own addiction issues.
In September 2022, Matalon transitioned from inpatient into a halfway house — another step approved by the Palm Beach County judge. Soon, Emslie said she was practically living in Matalon’s room at the house despite her position as an employee, a violation of the program’s rules.
Matalon had also been posting TikTok videos with other women from rehab. He joked about what his alibi would be if he committed a crime and about having sex with another woman in the program. He showed himself driving with multiple women in a convertible as one of them stood in the moving car, the song “Young, Wild & Free” playing in the background, despite the fact that he was on house arrest with an ankle monitor.
When La Ferrera saw the videos, she contacted the Palm Beach County prosecutors assigned to Matalon’s case, worried for the safety of the women and concerned he was violating his bond.
Prosecutors referred her to the police, who referred her to Matalon’s probation officer.
La Ferrera emailed the probation officer, saying Matalon had access to “vulnerable” women who “are likely seeking treatment and very likely to be or already are being abused.”
“I find it very hard to imagine making TikTok’s about committing crimes and planning alibi’s is compliant let alone joy rides with vulnerable woman [sic],” she wrote. “… It is only a matter of time that someone else will be a victim just like the woman that was attacked only three weeks after he attacked me while he was out on pre-trial release for my case. I would hate to see someone else get hurt let alone killed when all of this could have been handled differently.”
But Matalon remained in the program.
Soon after her email to the probation officer, La Ferrera tried again to sound alarms over Matalon.
Miami prosecutors had finally charged him with battery, battery with strangulation, false imprisonment and criminal mischief in her hotel room attack. At a bond hearing for the case, she pleaded with the judge not to release him.
“I beg you to please keep our community safe from this monster of a man,” La Ferrera told the judge at the hearing.
After she spoke, Matalon’s attorney, Dave Raben, read from the arrest affidavit about La Ferrera’s attack in Boca Raton, where police wrote that she told them Matalon liked rough sex and that at one point she slapped him “because she knows that’s what he likes.”
Matalon was released on house arrest. He now wore two ankle monitors.
‘You did save my life’
With his three criminal cases underway and still under house arrest, Scott Matalon was in the process of getting married.
In November 2021, he moved out of rehab and into a new home in Sunrise with Emslie. In December, the two wed.
Within weeks, he attacked his new bride.
He had been drinking the night of Jan. 15, Emslie recalled, and became angry. She went on a drive, hoping he would cool off. She returned to find him sitting outside, crying. When he saw her, he charged toward her car and dragged her out, she told police.
The next thing she could remember, she was in the backyard of their house, partially deaf, her vision blurry and her mouth full of blood.
A neighbor Emslie had never met, Melissa Adamson, was watching TV when she heard screams. She thought someone had been attacked by a dog and followed the sound to the couple’s backyard. There, she witnessed the attack and said she would call the police, according to body camera footage.
Emslie followed Adamson, begging her not to call the police. But another neighbor did.
Sunrise Police officers arrived and found Emslie curled up on Adamson’s couch. She had a broken tooth, her forehead swelling into a large knot. Her entire body was bruised.
“He has a history of this,” Adamson told the officers.
“And you’re telling me you don’t want to press charges. Do you mind telling me why? I mean if somebody beat my ass, I’d certainly want to press charges,” the reporting officer said.
“I’m just scared, sir,” Emslie replied, sobbing. She had nowhere to go, no family nearby and no money, having quit her rehab job for Matalon. She signed a paper declining to press charges.
“Honey, don’t go back to him,” Adamson told her, pulling her into a hug. “Just don’t go back to him. No matter what he says.”
Emslie handed her a piece of paper. “Can you please put your number on here?” she asked. “Because I don’t know where my phone is at this time. I really want to keep you as a friend because I want to let you know that you did save my life.”
‘I need to be with her, protect her’
Two doors down, police officers handcuffed Matalon on the ground and put him in the back of a patrol car. The officers said they smelled alcohol on him, according to the footage.
“He has two ankle monitors on,” one of the officers later told a sergeant.
“Two?” the sergeant asked in disbelief.
At first, Matalon was calm. He asked the officers to contact his mother and his attorney, which they did, and to readjust his handcuffs to make them more comfortable. He asked if they could bring him a seltzer, which they said they could not.
As he waited in the car, however, he became desperate, speaking about how another arrest would violate his bond in his three other open cases. He asked several times if Emslie was pressing charges, and, if not, why he had to be arrested. He begged, over and over, to speak to Emslie.
“Is there any chance that Brittany says, you know, it’s OK —”
“There’s no chance,” an officer interrupted. “It doesn’t matter what Brittany says.”
“Brittany’s input in this is — if you arrest me, it breaks my bond,” Matalon said. “Please, officer. Officer, I’m begging you. I’m begging you to speak to my wife … I’ll never do anything, sergeant, please. I’m in love with her. And I need to be with her, protect her. Sergeant, please. If I can’t, I’m never gonna see her for another decade.”
“No,” an officer said.
Later, on his way to jail, Matalon asked, “If she doesn’t testify against me, the state is going to drop the charges, correct?”
“That I couldn’t tell you,” the officer said. “That’s going to be up to the state attorney.”
Prosecutors drop case
The Broward State Attorney’s Office did decline to file charges as Matalon had predicted, citing Emslie’s “lack of cooperation,” despite witnesses, footage and photographs of her bruises.
Repeatedly, prosecutors wrote that she never gave police a sworn statement, even though she had.
Emslie “refused to provide a sworn statement and stated that she did not want to prosecute. As the [Body Worn Camera] footage progressed, the victim stated that she could not recall what happened and that she thought she blacked out,” prosecutors wrote.
Emslie told police she had felt discombobulated after the attack. But body camera footage shows that she did give a sworn statement with the details she remembered, such as trying to lock her doors as Matalon dragged her from the car, then ending up at the back of the house. She affirmed that Matalon hit her and that her injuries were from that night.
Asked about the sworn statement, Paula McMahon, a spokesperson for the State Attorney’s Office, told the Sun Sentinel that “the decline memo should have stated that the victim/survivor did not provide a sworn statement that would assist prosecutors in proving a case — the sworn statement provided on body worn camera was that she did not know what happened and would not press charges.”
Prosecutors also wrote in the memo that Emslie “indicated that her injuries were caused from rough sex.”
Body camera footage shows that Emslie had made a comment to police while they documented her injuries indicating that the bruises on her arms were from rough sex. She did not say any of her other injuries were from rough sex.
In the weeks after the attack, Emslie, who was scared that Matalon would get out again, continued to speak to him on the phone while he was in jail. He and his defense attorneys convinced her to send prosecutors an affidavit stating her tooth was not permanently broken and she was not afraid of him, even though she was.
“I wanted everybody to think everything was all good until I found a safe place to go,” Emslie told the Sun Sentinel.
Prosecutors cited the affidavit as well as a lack of sworn statements from witnesses in their decision not to file charges. It is unclear why police did not swear in Adamson, but she did speak to the reporting officer at length that night about witnessing the attack. At one point, he described her as a “phenomenal witness.”
Adamson told the Sun Sentinel that neither police nor prosecutors followed up with her after the night of the attack. A little over a week after prosecutors declined to file charges, Adamson emailed the State Attorney’s Office to express her disappointment. She did not receive a response.
Meanwhile, La Ferrera and Michele Matalon had begun following Emslie’s case. The night of the attack, police officers, alerted by Scott’s ankle monitor, had also arrived at La Ferrera’s door looking for him. The first thing she said when she answered the door, she recalled, was, “What did Scott do?”
When La Ferrera found out prosecutors wouldn’t file the charges, she wanted Emslie’s case reopened. After a few months, she spoke to Emslie, who had found a new place to stay and no longer feared Matalon. He had remained in jail since his arrest and would not be released again. His bond had been revoked in his Parkland case and his Boca Raton case, where Judge Surber granted a motion from prosecutors.
La Ferrera encouraged Emslie to contact the Broward State Attorney’s Office.
But prosecutors refused to reopen the case.
“It is impossible at this point to reconcile the statements that you initially made on the night of the incident (that you must have had rough sex, and that you must have blacked out), as well as your refusal to provide a sworn statement to police, with your ability to now recall every detail six months later,” the prosecutor, who is now the head of the domestic violence unit, told Emslie in an email.
Domestic violence cases often dropped
Prosecutors frequently drop domestic violence cases in Florida, citing a lack of cooperation from the victim.
But cooperation is difficult when people are afraid for their lives, experts say.
Often, defendants get released on bond too quickly for victims to decide whether to pursue charges. Defendants may have personal attorneys while their victims have no representation or understanding of the legal system.
“They’re just out there trying to figure it out on their own,” said Dr. Donna King, a Tampa-based lawyer and sociologist who serves as president of the Victims’ Safe Harbor Foundation. “And they’re approached by defense counsel, and they don’t necessarily know what to do.”
The way prosecutors handled Emslie’s case made her cynical about the justice system.
“When you try to reopen a case they pretty much tell you to f— off,” she said. “They said I signed that paper. I signed that paper because I was scared … How is there not enough evidence when the police report clearly states I had a missing tooth and my head is bleeding and I was bruised from head to toe?”
Now, Emslie said, “my fear is this guy’s gonna get out.”
All three women believe that, had Emslie’s case been prosecuted, Matalon would face a much longer sentence.
In October 2023, he pleaded no contest in the Parkland case, where he was sentenced to 5½ years. Later that month, he pleaded guilty in the Miami case, where prosecutors wrote that his five-year sentence would be served at the same time as the Broward one. In 2024, he pleaded guilty in the Palm Beach County case in exchange for a jail sentence of 30 days.
“Our decision to extend the plea offer in the case followed a careful review of the evidence and consideration of the likelihood of success in taking the case to trial,” Marc Freeman, the spokesperson for the Palm Beach County State Attorney, said in an email. “The plea offer was made in consultation with the victim, who indicated her agreement to the terms in a conversation with our prosecutor in December 2023.”
McMahon, the spokesperson for the Broward State Attorney, said that Matalon was sentenced “to the same prison term he would have faced if a jury had found him guilty after a jury trial.”
“Even though prosecutors did not have sufficient, independent evidence to go forward with the case involving this victim/survivor [BM], it is very important that Scott Matalon has been locked up ever since his arrest on that allegation that night, January 14, 2022,” the statement said, referring to the Broward victims by initials. “He went to jail that night and has not had one day of freedom since then — he pleaded no contest to the originally filed Broward charges of kidnapping and battery in the July 5, 2021, case [JL] and was adjudicated guilty and sentenced to 5.5 years in state prison, which he is still serving … There is no plea agreement document in the 2021 Broward case — Matalon pleaded no contest to the originally filed charges and was sentenced to the punishment recommended by state sentencing guidelines.”
In response to questions about how the Miami plea agreement was reached, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office again said that the prosecutor assigned to the case had left and they could not provide definitive information. Further attempts to reach the prosecutor were unsuccessful.
‘A serial batterer, a strangler, and a kidnapper’
For a year, Michele Matalon did not hear from Scott Matalon. Then, in September 2024, he filed a motion seeking visits with his children — this time in prison.
“The Former Husband has been a model inmate and has never received a single disciplinary review, citation or even a warning during his rehabilitation,” his attorney wrote, adding that he has taken several classes for his “self-betterment” including “Parenting from the Inside,” “Communication & Anger,” and “Inside/Outside Dad.”
The motion goes on to accuse Michele Matalon of failing to communicate with her ex-husband about the children, such as by not telling him where she lives. He requested video and in-person prison visits, saying his ex-wife should have to drive them to prison if his family can’t.
Michele Matalon’s attorney responded with a request for full custody.
“He is a serial batterer, a strangler, and a kidnapper who preys on female victims causing irreparable trauma,” the motion said. “Unable to control or physically intimidate the Former Wife from prison, the Former Husband has resorted to filing meritless motions from jail.”
The ongoing battle over the children, now ages 10 and 13, has drained Michele Matalon emotionally and financially. She has spent thousands on attorneys’ fees. A trial is set for September.
“He’s bleeding me dry,” Matalon told the Sun Sentinel at the coffee shop in March.
“He is draining her financially, abusing her while she’s just trying to protect her kids,” La Ferrera, who was sitting next to her, chimed in. “And the laws in the state enable abusers to continue to abuse their partners post-separation.”
Some domestic violence perpetrators fight for custody because they genuinely desire a relationship with their children. But many also use the legal system to “access their victims,” said King, the Tampa attorney, who herself was a victim of legal abuse.
“What I see when I look over this docket are a whole bunch of red flags related to power and control,” King said.
Not once has Scott Matalon taken responsibility for the abuse, Michele Matalon told the Sun Sentinel. Instead, her validation has come in the form of the other women he inadvertently brought into her life.
“I feel bad for the women,” she said. “But your true colors, man. It validates my story.”
Four years have passed since that June 2021 hearing. Even with Matalon’s 2026 release hanging over them, the women have moved on as best they could. Emslie is in recovery and has three children. Michele Matalon and La Ferrera have become close friends. In the last few weeks, Matalon has begun to feel cautiously optimistic about her custody case, thanks in part to the evidence from the three other women’s cases.
During one recent deposition, which Scott Matalon attended, his lawyer asked about her relationship with La Ferrera.
Michele Matalon felt proud.
“I’m thinking to myself, that’s right,” she said. “You see me on social media living my life, and yeah, she’s now my best friend. And I said, ‘Not only is she my best friend, she’s my angel.’”