Bulimia is a chaotic pattern of eating characterized by repeated episodes of eating binges followed by purging. This study was part of a 1-year follow-up of an investigation of family environment and psychiatric history in women with bulimia. All consenting subjects were sent a packet of questionnaires designed to examine current affective state, self-esteem, eating disturbance, and abusive experiences in adulthood. Fisher's Exact Test was used to compare the frequency of battery between bulimic women and controls. Repeat, one-way analyses of variance were used to compare means across the groups. All analyses were performed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. The findings show that significantly more bulimic women than controls reported having been in relationships in which repeated physical battery occurred. Both battered and nonbattered bulimic women scored significantly higher than controls on measures of eating and self-esteem-related pathology. Battered bulimic women were significantly more depressed than controls. Battery was also associated with self-blame. This study proposes that these women compose a more severely distressed subgroup of bulimic women. Further, similarities between these women's destructive relationship to both food and the batterer are considered. There has been substantial focus on childhood physical and sexual abuse in bulimic women, but in this study the focus is on the need for heightened sensitivity to the presence and implications of recurrent abusive experiences in their adult interpersonal relationships. 3 tables and 28 references