Ashley Hoyle talks to students Jan. 23 in Wichita about her experience with date abuse. Hoyle won first place in a national Love

Wichita ? When she tells the story now, the pivotal moment sounds like it came out of the script for a play, like the ones she stars in at Northwest High School.

Ashley Hoyle, her self-esteem destroyed by an abusive boyfriend, withdrew from the world.

One day, her mother took her by the hand and led her to a mirror.

“Who do you see?” Kandy Hoyle asked her daughter.

Her brown hair and hazel eyes were reflected in the mirror, but Ashley didn’t recognize the girl looking back at her.

“I didn’t see the fun person I love to be. The person I want to be,” she recently told an auditorium full of high school students gathered at Wichita State University.

Minutes earlier, the 18-year-old had played a short video about teen dating abuse that she wrote, directed and starred in. The film won a national contest for Love is Respect, the national teen dating abuse helpline.

Because her video was chosen, Ashley was the national spokeswoman for National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Week.

She also won a trip to New York. While there, she had lunch with contest judges Tim Gunn, chief creative officer for Liz Claiborne and star of “Project Runway,” and Jaslene Gonzalez, winner of the eighth season of “America’s Next Top Model.”

Meeting famous people isn’t really the point. “It’s more about the people I get to help,” she says.

When Northwest teacher Brian Latta told his digital film production class it would be making public-service announcements about teen dating abuse, he said Ashley, who is “quite a thespian,” was inspired.

She wanted to use her own experiences and to make the point that abusive relationships aren’t always easy to spot, but are going on all the time.

But Ashley says she didn’t know exactly how to convey the idea in a one-minute commercial, so she enlisted the help of her drama teacher.

The film opens on a typical hangout scene: About a dozen kids are at a party, lounging, listening to music, playing pool.

The words “Did you see any teen dating abuse?” flash on the screen.

The scene rewinds and three abusers are revealed: one verbal, one physical and one emotional.

Abuse can happen to anyone, Ashley says, stepping in front of the camera. Then she says, “I spoke out, and you can, too.”

At first he was incredibly attentive, almost the perfect boyfriend. He was popular, a cool guy. She trusted him.

But after awhile he stopped letting Ashley hang out with her friends and started insulting her.

“He would tell me I wasn’t pretty enough without makeup,” she remembers. He’d say things like, “I like that outfit, but I would like it to be tighter so I can show you off.”

In private, he pushed her, grabbed her, left bruises.

Three times, she says, he put his hands on her at school.

He pushed her into a locker. He slapped her in the middle of the hallway. When she said she wouldn’t be his date for homecoming, he grabbed her wrist and wouldn’t let go.

“When we broke up, he threw me to the ground, in front of my parents,” she says.

Ashley can’t clearly say how she found the strength to end the relationship. One day, she just said she needed a break. For the next six months, he kept calling, she says. One day, she deleted his number from her cell phone.

Recovering her self-esteem has been a painful process, aided by counseling and the help of a few friends who stood by her, Ashley says.

The experience made her grow up, she says now. “I had to rebuild myself,” she says.

She’s seen her ex only once since they split up.

When she ran into him, Ashley says he was with a new girlfriend. She’d like to think he changed, but from the way he touched his new girl, she didn’t think so.

Asked what she would say to him now, Ashley pauses to gain control of her emotions.

She didn’t make her story public to hurt him, she says.

“It doesn’t matter if he believes that or not, or if he hasn’t changed,” she says. “It’s about them” – the other teens who might relate to her experience.

“Be careful,” she tells the kids at WSU. “Be there for your friends. Reach out in whatever ways you can.”