Kristina Joksimovic’s life was stolen, and the media won’t even say her name

Trigger Warning: This article discusses violence against women and femicide at length, please read at your own discretion.

38-year-old Kristina Joksimovic had a life. She was a mother of two, a businesswoman, a mentor to other women, and a former finalist in the Miss Switzerland pageant. She built her own future, made her own path, and should have had years ahead of her to see her children grow. But in February of this year, her husband took all of that away. He strangled her, then dismembered her body with a jigsaw, garden shears, and a blender. He “pureed” her remains, dissolving her in chemicals. 

Kristina’s case has been plastered across news outlets, yet you won’t find many headlines calling out this violence for what it is: femicide. Instead, media reports are eerily clinical, and they won’t even use her name in the headlines. She is constantly referred to as “Miss Switzerland finalist,” as if her identity hinges on a pageant she entered over a decade ago. As if her only relevance was her beauty and the horror of her death. The headlines focus on the grotesque, on the sensationalism of a body pureed in a blender, but where is her name? Where is Kristina’s story as a woman? A mother? Erased. The world does this to women—both in the violence enacted against us and in how it chooses to talk about it.

Her husband, Thomas, claimed he killed her in self-defence, saying she attacked him first with a knife. But that’s not what the forensic evidence says: Kristina was strangled, not stabbed. Yet, somehow, his self-defence still made its way into the news—a subtle, insidious suggestion that maybe, just maybe, she provoked him. Maybe, in the twisted view of patriarchy, she deserved this brutality. This isn’t self-defence—it’s femicide. He didn’t kill her out of fear; he killed her because he could. And after he killed her, he took his time cutting up her body and disposing of her like she was trash. This wasn’t a crime of passion or panic. It was cold, calculated violence.

Kristina Joksimovic is dead. And her name needs to be remembered, not just the brutal way she was murdered.

Her murder, as gruesome as it is, feels all too familiar. The details are shocking, but the story? We’ve heard it before, over and over. A woman killed by the man she should have been safe with. The man who was supposed to love her. 

We are fed the same tired story over and over again. A man kills a woman, and he claims she provoked him. Self-defence. A moment of madness. But how many times do we have to hear these lies before we stop giving them airtime? Kristina is not the first woman to be killed by a man who used these excuses, and she won’t be the last. We know this because the world continues to treat men’s violence as inevitable, as something that just happens. But it doesn’t just happen. These are choices men make.

In the UK, two women are killed every week by a partner or ex-partner. Every. Single. Week. In March alone there were already over 50 murders of women by men in the UK, I can’t even image the number now. Across Europe, femicide cases are rising. And in every case, women are left dead at the hands of men they trusted. But the story of Kristina, like so many others, doesn’t stop with the violence itself—it extends to the way society responds to it. Or more often, how it fails to respond.

Where is the outrage? Where is the collective grief for Kristina? Too often, when women are killed by their partners, we are left to scream into a void, hoping someone will finally listen. We need men to speak out. We need them to stop pretending that this isn’t their problem. Because it is. We’re tired of the silence, tired of the performative “good men” who do nothing while their counterparts murder us. We are done with men telling us they’re different, that it’s not all men. Tell that to Kristina. Tell that to her children, who are now left without their mother because their father decided her life was his to take.

Why does it feel like, as we push forward for equality, men are retaliating with more and more violence? Here’s my take: for centuries, men have controlled society, institutions, and women’s bodies. As women carve out more space themselves, as we demand our voices be heard and our rights respected, they push back. It’s a desperate, violent thrashing of a system built on male dominance, trying to reassert control.

We have been here before. In the UK Sarah Everard’s murder, Sabina Nessa, Ashling Murphy, Carole Hunt and her daughters. In the rest of the world, Rebecca Cheptegei, Gisèle Pélicot, Moumita Debnat – the countless women who have been raped, assaulted, beaten, or killed simply for existing. It’s 2024, and it feels like we are still fighting for the right to be safe in our homes, our streets, our bodies.

This is what violence against women looks like. It’s not just headlines; it’s lives stolen. It’s the children left behind. It’s women living in fear of the men who claim to love them. It’s Kristina Joksimovic, who deserved so much more than to be remembered for how she died. 

And still, the media continues to strip away the humanity of these women. Kristina’s case is a grotesque spectacle, reduced to shock value. The world is more interested in the fact that her remains were “pureed” than in the fact that she was a mother, a woman with a life, a name. Why are we more fascinated by the brutality than the woman? Why are we still letting men control the narrative, even in death?

Kristina is another victim in a long, unending list of women killed by their partners. And I’m angry. You should be too. Kristina Joksimovic should still be alive. Instead, she was murdered, dismembered, and discarded. But she is not forgotten. And we won’t let her be another nameless victim in this war on women. We remember her, not for the horrific way she died, but for the life she should still be living.