Colorado Republican nominee Victor Marx holds a campaign call with his donors. Then he admits to shoving his wife against a door: ‘I’d do it again’

Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, told donors on a Tuesday evening video call that he once shoved his wife against a door. He said the shove was meant to startle her and to show that she could protect herself, and he told them, “I’d do it again.”

His wife, Eileen Marx, joined the call with her arms around his neck. She said she answered with a “rear choke” defense. Both of them hold black belts in karate, and Marx said people have compared them to the couple in a 2005 action film.

“People have called us the real Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” he said, referring to the movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. He added, “How many wives actually grab a backpack and put a tomahawk, night vision, put a grenade in their coat pocket – we’re not normal.”

The couple recount the shove, an earlier version of the story, and other incidents Marx says happened

On the donor call, Marx said critics were leaving out what he called the full sequence. “Show the before and after; they don’t want the full truth – that my wife was fake-crying, suckered me in,” he said. He described checking on her, then said, “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh are you OK?’ and she does a spinning back kick into my [groin].”

After that kick, he said, “I was like, ‘OK, you actually can protect yourself.’” He later added, “I’d do everything again except get close to her to let her kick me, because she’s sneaky.”

He gave a similar account on a local radio interview on Friday. There, he said he shoved her “just to startle her” and again said she was “fake-crying.” Eileen Marx said the encounters were not domestic abuse in her view and that they showed her she does “need to train.”

She tied the incident to training that came years later. “What he did – eight years after that, I got my first-degree black belt,” she said. She said she grew up in an abusive home and that what happened with her husband led her to teach women’s self-defense classes. “This was nothing like domestic abuse. This was a karate lesson in our house,” she told the radio show.

Marx has said coverage has wrongly cast him as a domestic abuser, and he has described the episode in more than one way over the years. In 2021, he laughed while recalling “grabbing her and slamming” his wife after she suggested he could protect her. “It was a decent push,” he said at the time. “She hit that and started crying, bent over, facing the opposite way.”

Separate accusations have also been raised against him, including claims that he threw his toddler across a room and pulled a knife on a psychiatrist who was trying to treat him. Abuse allegations have surfaced around other Republican candidates, as Max Miller was accused of abuse by his ex-wife.

On the radio, Marx said both stories were true. He said he “grabbed” his son because the child was “hurting his sister,” then said, “I picked him up, launched him, onto his bed. That’s when he started crying.”

He said he first shared that account as a warning to young fathers who do things “they don’t want to do,” and he urged people to get psychiatric help. “I did not hurt my son,” Marx said.

The couple co-founded the All Things Possible ministry. Marx served as its chair and president until he started his campaign for governor last October.

A September report by The Guardian said critics have called the ministry “potentially dangerous,” said the group funded out-of-state surveillance projects and hired private security contractors in the last year, and linked it to a “network of other self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have attracted significant controversy.”

In a local television interview in June, Marx said he was forced to kill someone when he was seven years old. Asked whether he had killed more people, he replied, “Does it matter?”