Kim Lee, the American wife of "Crazy English" founder Li Yang, has filed for divorce after she went online to expose her experience of suffering domestic violence in September.

"Crazy English" founder Li Yang yesterday admitted for the first time that he beat his wife and apologized to her and his three young daughters for "committing domestic violence." [Weibo.com]

Beijing Chaoyang District Court accepted the case yesterday in which Lee demanded custody of their three daughters and an equal division of the couple's property.

In the lawsuit, Lee said she was deeply hurt when her husband told the media that he married her not because of love but only to do an experiment on studying American family education.

Lee claimed her husband regarded their three daughters as mere "guinea pigs" for his experiment, the Legal Evening News reported.

The relationship between the couple became worse after Lee in September went on the popular microblog Weibo.com to complain that Li physically abused her at times.

"You knocked me to the floor. You sat on my back. You choked my neck with both hands and slammed my head into the floor," she wrote in the blog. "When I pried your hands from my neck you grabbed my hair and slammed my head into the floor 10 more times!"

She also posted photos showing her bleeding left ear, swollen forehead and knees.

The posting stirred a huge wave of public outrage against domestic violence and forced Li to apologize to his wife and three daughters. But after the apologies, Li stopped supporting his family financially, putting Lee and the couple's three daughters in difficult situation, the newspaper said.

"True, I spoke out, but my husband went on to hurt my family more through his words and TV appearances," Lee wrote in a letter to the Anti-Domestic Violence Network of China Law Society, an NGO that aims to eliminate gender-based violence.

"He used our family suffering as a means of self-promotion. This is quite tragic," she wrote.

"If Li Yang had sincerely apologized and turned attention to real (mental) counseling, I believe our marriage could have been saved," she wrote. "The only way for my girls and I to have a happier, healthier life is to leave Li Yang."

Yao Yue, a mental health counselor who has given therapy to the couple, told the newspaper that "Li refused to receive psychological treatments but kept receiving interviews with media."