Since November 1992 Shannen was dating heir to the Max Factor cosmetics Dean Jay Factor (b. August 1, 1965).
On March 19, 1993 Shannen moved into Factor’s $5,200-a-month rented Tudor-style house in the Hollywood Hills.
Factor and Doherty began a vacation together in Hawaii on April 12, 1993. They were accompanied by her costar Tori Spelling and her boyfriend Nick Savalas son of actor Telly Savalas. During the trip, said Factor “we took full advantage of the romantic setting.” He proposed marriage—and Doherty accepted. But within hours, they were fighting. “Shannen came back with a black eye and said she`d been hit by a surfboard,” says her dad. “In reality he`d hit her.” Factor`s version in his declaration: “After having been kicked and beaten, I pushed her off me. Unfortunately she tripped, fell and cut her eye on the doorstep.”
On April 19, 1993 with “Beherly Hills 90210” on hiatus, Shannen began work on the set of a movie, the erotic suspense thriller “Blind fold”. Shortly after shooting began, she began an offscreen romance with her costar Judd Nelson (b. November 28, 1959), even though she was still living with Dean Factor.
Over the next few weeks, Factor said he pleaded with Doherty to continue their engagement. But on May 13, some days after Doherty moved out, said Factor, she returned and yet another fight ensued. The next day he filed a complaint with the LAPD. He said in his deposition, “I decided the nonsense had to end.”
On Tuesday May 25, 1993 Dean Factor made a petition to the Superior Court of California for a domestic-violence restraining order against Shannen. In the petition, he explained: "I was weary of the verbal assaults and locked myself in our bathroom. At this point she threatened to shoot me and said, “I’m going to drop you!” I knew she had a loaded 9-mm automatic.... I heard the chamber pulled back; at that point, I hastily exited the house through a back door connected to the bathroom and escaped."
The allegations in Factor’s 15-page declaration remain deeply disturbing. According to him, once, Doherty tried to run him down with a car. Another time, he claimed, she threw a log through a window to get into his house. During one argument, he maintained, she “threatened to hire a few guys to beat me up and to sodomize me ‘on the front lawn.’ ” He ended his petition by saying that even though he was taking steps to prevent harassment, “I will live in fear.”
By midweek, according to Factor’s attorney, Edwin Lasman, an understanding had been reached with Doherty in which his client’s differences with her were resolved, eliminating the need for further court proceedings. An announcement of the agreement was expected by the week’s end.
For her part, Shannen said: “Don’t believe everything you read,” she coyly told fans during a May 26 TV interview. “To paraphrase Mark Twain, half the things you read about me are untrue, and the others are lies." “I don’t hit people. I wasn’t hit as a child, and I don’t believe in it” she told a reporter.
Speaking in his daughter’s defense, Shannen’s father, Tom Doherty, offered a different spin. “He’s been doing [the abusing], he initialed the charge, but she’s the victim.” Indeed, in a confrontation between the 5’10” [1'78m], 175-lb [79'3kg]. Factor and Doherty [who is 5'3", 1'60m], it is hard to imagine Shannen as anything but a victim. And yet Factor swore that lie was usually on the receiving end. He admitted in his petition that he slapped her and that once he threw her into his swimming pool but he said he was acting in self-defense.