After being stabbed and shot, women’s boxing legend rebuilt her life in Charlotte
For a little while, at least — at the Charlotte high school formerly called Vance — Christy Martin wasn’t Christy Martin.
For the first few months after starting as a substitute teacher there in the fall of 2013, she was Christy Salters, an unassuming woman in her mid-40s who showed up when she was requested, kept her head down and tried not to draw attention to herself. She had a degree in education, so the job made sense on paper.
But her résumé and her plainclothes appearance belied a past that was anything but ordinary.
Christy Martin was a pioneering figure in women’s boxing, rising from a college student who entered a “Toughman” contest on a dare (and won) to national prominence in the 1990s after signing with promoter Don King and fighting on the undercard of a Mike Tyson pay-per-view. Her aggressive style, a landmark 1996 Sports Illustrated cover and a dominant record helped establish her as one of the sport’s first female stars — a blue-collar West Virginia native nicknamed “The Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
And when she started at Vance, she was just three years removed from narrowly surviving a brutal attack in her Florida home, stabbed multiple times and shot in the chest by her then-husband, Jim Martin — who publicly trained her for decades while privately abusing her, according to her testimony and court records.
All of this would eventually be dramatized in a movie based on her life: “Christy,” a biopic starring “Euphoria’s” Sydney Sweeney that was mostly filmed in Charlotte, was released in theaters in November 2025 and is now available on demand.
But in the fall of 2013, she was happy to be anonymous.
“I really didn’t want anyone to know,” she says, explaining that she was careful at Vance to refer to herself only as Christy Salters. “Because people sometimes … want to ask a lot of questions about Mike Tyson or Don King, and I was kind of past that point in my life.”
“I just wanted people to know me for me.”
It didn’t take long for her secret to get out, though — and for Charlotte to become a place where Christy Martin decided it was OK to be Christy Martin again.
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Living a different kind of double life
It was the prospect of love that brought her to the Queen City in the first place.
In the aftermath of the November 2010 attack, it became public that Martin had long been hiding the fact that she was gay — and had reconnected with an old high school girlfriend in the months leading up to it. That girlfriend was living in Charlotte, and Martin moved here after recovering so they could be together.
Martin also attempted a dramatic comeback from here. Just six months after surviving the attack, she returned to the ring — landing on a Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. undercard at the Staples Center in L.A.
It ended in disaster, with the bout being stopped after she broke her hand punching opponent Dakota Stone. Then it got worse. During surgery to repair her hand, she suffered a stroke that left her with lingering double vision and made being in large spaces visually overwhelming.
Just like that, her career as a professional fighter was over.
It was crushing. For a stretch, she stayed largely in bed — depressed and struggling to get moving again. But eventually, she got back on her feet, as her personal life continued to shift — through Jim Martin being found guilty of attempted second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison; and through the end of her relationship with the old high school girlfriend.
And once on the other side of those things, Christy Martin began living a different kind of double life.
In one, she maintained a connection to boxing. She tried training some fighters here, at Ultimate Gym in Charlotte (which has since moved to Belmont), then started to get into promoting fights. But she wasn’t making much money.
So she created another, as that substitute teacher at Vance (renamed Julius L. Chambers High School in 2021 to honor the prominent civil rights attorney). What began as a day here or there quickly became routine. Teachers came to know her as reliable. Students — too young to know her career — treated her like any other substitute.
Until the day a fellow former boxer outed her.
A change in relationships at school
A few months into her time at Vance, a familiar face crossed her path: Kelvin Seabrooks, a former International Boxing Federation bantamweight title holder (and a Charlotte native) who was working as a security guard at the school. The Charlotte native — older than her by just five years, so of a similar era — recognized her immediately.
Her response was instinctive. “I was like, ‘Seabrooks, don’t tell anybody!’” she recalls.
Word got out. And what followed wasn’t a dramatic reveal so much as a gradual shift.
“It was interesting to see how relationships changed. Some other teachers that maybe hadn’t been so polite to me or nice to me, all of a sudden became a little nicer. I’m like, Yeah, yeah, I already know who you are, man,” she recalls, chuckling. “Maybe you didn’t know who I was, but now I definitely know who you are.”
Among students, the reaction was different. They weren’t particularly impressed by her boxing résumé — most didn’t know or care much about the sport’s history — but they were fascinated by something else.
“I got more cred because of being shot and living through that than the boxing career,” she says.
It was a strange kind of currency, but it was real. And it forced her, in small ways, to begin acknowledging parts of her story she had initially kept separate.
One moment that stuck with her involved a student who asked to do a senior project with Martin focused on domestic violence. As they sat across the table from each other to discuss the project, Martin listened as the girl posed a question that hit harder than expected:
“How does it feel to be a domestic violence victim?”
Martin pushed her chair back. “Baby,” she told her, “I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor.”
‘I’m truly a coal miner’s daughter’
By 2015, she had found her stride. She was working every day as a substitute at Vance. She put on her first boxing event that year as a promoter, at CenterStage in NoDa, where more would follow.
Then on top of that, inspired in at least some small part by that student, she launched Christy’s Champs, a nonprofit focused on supporting people affected by domestic violence and family abuse. The work on that started simply, by helping people cover hotel stays and providing basic resources, but grew from there.
Meanwhile, Martin also had reconnected with an old rival turned sparring partner named Lisa Holewyne and they fell in love long-distance — Holewyne lived in Texas — before marrying in 2017. The following year, Martin moved to Austin to join her new wife.
By then, she realized she had a story to tell. She shared it widely first through Netflix’s “Untold” documentary series (her installment, “Deal with the Devil,” began shooting just prior to her leaving N.C. and was released in 2021); then in a 2022 memoir, “Fighting for Survival,” which she wrote under the name that made her famous in the first place despite having legally reverted to her maiden name, Salters, in 2012.
Now there’s also the new film, with Sydney Sweeney starring as Christy Martin.
She didn’t do any of it for attention, she says. She did all of it to help others. “There’s so many different forms of domestic violence,” says the now-57-year-old Florida resident. “I think the movie definitely brings that to people’s attention.
“I always refer to myself as the ultimate underdog. I mean, I’m truly a coal miner’s daughter from a town of 700 people in southern West Virginia. ... I made it to the top of the boxing world — and then I made it when I got up off the floor (after nearly being killed). So if I can do it, anybody can.”
As for Charlotte? You won’t see her time here depicted in the movie. But looking back, Martin doesn’t see her time here as a detour or a footnote. It was something more foundational than that. She came here, in part, to hide from her past.
Instead, while here, she found a way to embrace it.
“Charlotte played a big role,” she says, “in getting me back up.”
Meet Christy Martin in Charlotte
Christy Martin will make two public appearances in Charlotte on Saturday to promote the movie, her book, and her foundation. From 1-3 p.m. at Kendra Scott in Birkdale Village, she’ll do a meet-and-greet and sign items; Kendra Scott will donate a portion of proceeds from sales to Christy’s Champs. Then from 4-7 p.m. at Eleven Lakes Brewing Company in Cornelius, she’ll meet with fans after a screening of “Christy.” Details: here.
This story was originally published April 8, 2026 at 5:07 AM with the headline "After being stabbed and shot, women’s boxing legend rebuilt her life in Charlotte."
