The Queens mom clinging to life after her estranged husband allegedly mowed her down with an SUV Tuesday shared her struggles with a “relationship filled with abuse and betrayal” just days before the incident, The Post has learned.
Sophia Giraldo, 41, ran a life coaching business for women, according to her website, in which she described herself as “a survivor of Betrayal-Trauma & Abuse.”
“I’ve just been thinking about my expectation and how as a result of trauma I tend to expect the negative,” Giraldo said on her podcast, “Unfiltered and Free,” in an episode released Dec. 23.
“That’s just one of the fallouts that I’ve had to walk through and I’m walking through,” she said. “I tend to expect the worst thing to happen, the worst-case scenario. You know, all those things. And I want my new year to look different.”
The mom-of-three is now listed in critical condition at Booth Memorial Hospital after the harrowing caught-on-video assault around 5:20 a.m. outside her Parsons Boulevard home.
Her estranged husband — identified by neighbors and police sources as MTA bus driver Stephen Giraldo — was taken into custody in the alleged vehicular assault. Charges were pending, police said.
The white Ford Explorer — which had the couple’s three young boys inside at the time — smashed into a fence after hitting Sophia Giraldo and flipped on its side. The children were not physically injured.
“She is a very loving mother,” neighbor Angelica Quin, 38, a dog walker said of Sophia. “She would always be getting them ready for school. It’s just really sad. She seemed like a good mother who was very devoted to her kids. She was always with her kids. They seemed happy, very happy.”
A worker at the mom’s building and neighbor said she lived there alone with her kids — ages 11, 9 and 6 — after moving in about a year and a half ago. Public court records show she filed for divorce in August.
Sophia discussed the troubled marriage in her podcast, which she launched on Oct. 26 and has since recorded nine episodes — the most recent on Dec. 23. She described the podcast as “a show where we have real and raw conversations about living life after betrayal and abuse.”
She said she knew first-hand about “navigating a life turned upside down by a toxic relationship” during a Dec. 12 episode.
She also discussed her decision to end the marriage.
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“When I talk about saying yes to the best, I’m really talking about looking at the good versus the best,” she said. “You know, this can show up in so many different ways in your life.
“The main way that this showed up in my life was when I was trying to figure out whether or not I was going to leave my marriage. I spent a long time in the thick of a lot of emotional unrest, a lot of toxicity, a lot of abuse.
“It was almost as if my brain was saying, ‘You got this, you got this, you got this.’ And I did have it,” she said. “You know, I had three children, three boys, and I knew that it was never my intention for them to grow up in a single-parent home. That was never my intention.
“And so whenever I started thinking about the fact that, okay, this is really out of control Sophia,” she said. “Something has got to shift. I always would think about my children and what was the best decision. Was this going to be the best decision for them?
“One of the things I thought was, you know, am I willing to let my children grow up in toxicity just so I can say that there’s a male in the home?” she said. “For me, it did wind up that I did exit my marriage and I actively trust that, you know what? God knows what’s best for my children.”
Neighbors said the couple’s three children were taken to the hospital with their mom and were expected to be picked up by an acquaintance after the Tuesday morning incident.
“The mother is very nice,” one local told The Post. “The kids were very well-behaved. I never saw her husband, though. Never. It’s terrible to know it was her.”
A group of MTA workers who showed up at the scene of the crash on Tuesday described Stephen as a “good guy.”
“We’re here for him. It was a terrible divorce,” one said.
The MTA said he was being held out of service without pay pending the outcome of the investigation.
Additional reporting by David Meyer
