She Survived an Acid Attack. Then She Married Him.

Ozan Çeltik told Berfin Özek that if he could not have her, nobody could. He meant it. On a January evening in Iskenderun, Turkey, he ambushed her on her way home from school and threw sulfuric acid directly at her face. She lost one eye entirely. Her other eye was left with thirty percent of its vision. She spent four months in the hospital and faced five separate surgical operations to reconstruct her appearance.

She was a teenager walking home from school. He was the ex-boyfriend she had left because he was violent, and who had spent a year harassing her after the breakup.

A Sentence That Raised Its Own Questions

When the court handed down its ruling, Çeltik received a sentence of thirteen and a half years. Berfin herself publicly asked whether her pain was worth thirteen years. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among those who criticized the ruling, asking what the judges would do if the same attack had been carried out on their own daughters. Women's rights advocates in Turkey pointed to the case as part of a wider pattern, with femicide and gender-based violence claiming hundreds of lives in the country every year.

For a brief moment, the case had forced a national conversation. Then the story shifted in a direction almost no one anticipated.

The Forgiveness, the Release, and the Proposal

In April 2020, roughly a year after the attack, Berfin withdrew her criminal complaint and publicly forgave Çeltik. Her legal team, which included members of the Iskenderun Women's Platform, parted ways with her over the decision. Her lawyer Mehtap Sert stated plainly that they could no longer represent her, because her choice contradicted their core principle: they do not support love that kills.

While Berfin forgave him, Çeltik was still serving his sentence. That changed when Turkish law was amended in response to the pandemic, allowing certain prisoners to be released on probation. Çeltik walked out of prison having served under two years of a thirteen-and-a-half-year sentence. According to reports, he had spent that time sending Berfin repeated messages of love and apology, begging her to take him back.

Upon his release, he proposed to her.

The Marriage Her Father Learned About from Journalists

Berfin Özek and Casim Ozan Çeltik were married in December 2021, less than three years after the acid attack that permanently disfigured her face and cost her the sight in one eye. Her family was not present. Her father, Yasar Özek, told Turkish journalists he had not been told beforehand. "She married without our knowing," he said. "I've fought for her for years, and now all of this has been in vain."

Çeltik, the man who ambushed her on the street and burned her face with sulfuric acid, is now her husband. Her father found out the same way the public did.