In the midst of divorce proceedings against husband George Zimmerman, Shellie Zimmerman said she has doubts about what really happened in the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin last year, she told Matt Lauer in an exclusive interview.
“I’m conflicted on that,” Shellie told Lauer on TODAY Thursday. “I believe the evidence, but this revelation in my life has really helped me take the blinders off and start to see things differently.”
Lauer pressed further, asking, “So you now doubt his innocence, at least the fact that he was acting in self-defense on the night that Trayvon Martin was killed?”
“I think anyone would doubt that innocence because I don’t know the person that I’ve been married to,” Shellie responded. “I have doubts, but I also believe the evidence.”
Despite these doubts, Shellie vehemently denies that George profiled the teen.
“He did not profile Trayvon Martin,” she said.
The “revelation” Shellie referenced came after a domestic dispute between the Zimmermans.
On Sept. 9, authorities in Lake Mary, Fla., were summoned to the house the couple once rented from Shellie’s father, after she called 911 to report George was threatening her with a gun, according to police reports, which provide a conflicting picture of the sequence of events. Neither side filed a complaint over the incident, and Shellie said that she now wishes she had pressed charges.
“In hindsight I should’ve, and I really regret that, but I’m on probation and the officers made it very clear that day if I pressed charges we were all going to go to jail and I would’ve been the only one to stay there,” she told Lauer.
TODAY reached out to George Zimmerman’s representatives, and they said they were not interested in commenting.
Shellie Zimmerman, 26, filed for divorce from George Zimmerman, 29, on Sept. 5, less than two months after he was acquitted on July 13 of a second-degree murder charge in the 2012 shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. In court documents, she claimed the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
She told police that she and George, her husband of nearly seven years, had agreed that she could take some of her belongings from the home while he was not there. However, according to her attorney, Kelly Sims, when she showed up, he was there with a “400-pound bodyguard” identified as friend Wesley Robinson, 29, and a “blonde friend” identified as Samantha Scheibe, 27, and began recording her. She responded by using an iPad to tape him, Sims said.
In police reports from the time of the incident, Shellie claimed her husband smashed her iPad on his leg and cut it into pieces with a pocketknife, while George said he took the iPad after she tried to hit him in the back with it. Her father, David Dean, told police that George punched him in the face. Robinson described Dean as the aggressor, telling police he had to intervene to restrain an enraged Dean “so that George could get away from him.”
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