Elizabeth Mikotowicz: Female Prison Artist Shares Dark Story

From Adoption to Abuse

Elizabeth Mikotowicz’s story starts with what sounds like a normal childhood in Maine. Adopted at two weeks old, she had loving parents even though they divorced when she was five or six. But looking back, she recognizes now that “there’s always trauma with adoption no matter what,” something she had to come to terms with in her later years.

The real nightmare began when she started getting into relationships with abusive men as an adult. The violence was shocking and sudden. “He literally got drunk one night and it was like a different personality,” Elizabeth told me. “His eyes changed like the way he held himself changed it was like a completely different person.” The first attack left her apartment looking like a crime scene. “He kicked me across the room I bashed the back of my head off the radiator then he like rag dog me all around the room,” she said. “It looked like somebody got killed in there there was blood sprayed like on the walls.”

A month later, another beating left her with a head injury so severe you could see her skull. The hospital gave her opioids for the pain, and that’s when the prescription trap closed around her.

The Prescription Pipeline

The pain clinic told Elizabeth she’d need to come back every two weeks for her opioid prescription. When she said she didn’t want to take opioids while pregnant, they fed her the line we now know killed thousands: “You’re on too small of a dose to get addicted.” But here’s the part that still makes her angry. When she tried to refuse the medication, they threatened to call Child Protective Services for refusing medical care while pregnant.

“There is no choice if there’s a consequence when you say no,” Elizabeth explained. The system had her trapped between physical pain from the head trauma, seizures that started after the injuries, and a medical establishment that insisted the drugs were necessary. The abuse at home got worse. Her partner would take her pills and use them himself, adding drug addiction to the cycle of violence.

After years of torture that included being strangled until her vocal cords were crushed, Elizabeth finally escaped when her abuser went to prison for three years. But the battered women’s shelter turned her away with two beds open, first calling her a liar because she wasn’t crying like other victims, then saying her situation was “too severe” and put other women in danger.

The Drug Trade and Federal Time

With no help from the system, Elizabeth found protection and work in the drug trade. “Drug dealers protected me and they gave me places to hide,” she said. She was tough enough from the abuse and traumatized enough that she wasn’t scared to die or back down from anybody. That reputation served her well in a business where women are expected to sell their bodies and “just be hos essentially.” Elizabeth wouldn’t do that. She had rules and ran her own operation.

When bath salts hit Maine and flooded the streets legally, Elizabeth figured it was safer than selling crack and heroin. She was wrong. Bath salts became the first drug that got her completely hooked, and despite the legal status, she ended up doing seven months in state prison in 2011. Then in 2013, the feds picked up the case with 14 co-defendants total.

Her guidelines started at 10 to 13 years because, as Elizabeth put it, “some snitch told them I was a general I didn’t even know there was an Army.” A judge eventually saw through the prosecution’s attempt to hold her responsible for weight she never handled, and she got 37 months.

Finding Art Behind Bars

Federal prison was actually a relief after spending over a year in county jail with no bail. “I was so happy to get out of County like I could not wait to,” Elizabeth said. The federal facility was surrounded by mountains, allowed email contact with family, and had an art room where she could get paint.

She started painting coffee mugs and other items for fellow inmates. In a place that strips away identity with numbers and identical uniforms, Elizabeth’s artwork gave people something personal. When guards raided her cell and confiscated her paints, other inmates came through. “One of the girls walked by goes don’t worry we’ll get you some more and then they came back with like way more than I even had like they came back with silver and gold and like metallic colors,” she remembered.

The Spanish girls and other friends made sure she could keep creating, understanding that art was more than just a hobby. It was survival, connection, and hope rolled into something beautiful.

Life After Release

Elizabeth has been out for about five years now and turned her prison side hustle into a legitimate art career. She sells her work and even has a clothing line that incorporates her art. But she’s also doing something else that shows who she really is underneath all the trauma and bad choices.

She rescues dogs. Elizabeth lives at what she calls “Ground Zero” where people dump their animals. When I talked with her, she’d just taken in a black puppy that neighbors had left outside to sleep in a trash can before moving away without looking for him. She’s got two other dogs, Bandit and Bowser, that “come and go when they pleased” after she nursed them back to health from infected, bloody ears.

It’s a small thing maybe, but it tells you everything about who Elizabeth really is. Someone who sees creatures that have been abandoned and hurt, and does something about it. She knows what it feels like to be thrown away by the systems that are supposed to help. The difference is, she won’t let it happen to others if she can stop it.