Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences. Many episodes discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional and physical abuse, suicide, and murder. Please take caution when listening. I am not a therapist or a doctor.
Opinions expressed by guests of the show do not necessarily represent the views of this podcast. If you or someone you know is being abused, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
If you or someone you love is experiencing a suicidal crisis or thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Thank you. Hi, I'm Kelly. I am 24 years old and I live in the Sacramento region.
I know Julia from childhood attending the same church. She was a youth leader at the time that I was entering into the junior high group. And she became somebody that I went to for questions and enjoyed her company. I worked with her children.
we have stayed in touch all of these years since. I'm so proud of her. I know that she experienced quite a lot more than she's spoken about in her experience so far, and I
I am incredibly moved that she has felt finally comfortable enough to share those pieces of her story publicly, especially because people at the church have read her blog and responded to it semi-publicly. I was chatting with a couple of people who said that it was hurtful to them to see two friends going at it.
And I thought that that was interesting. So I know that she's received some criticism for coming out, but I also don't think that it is anybody's responsibility to soften their story to make an abuser feel better. ♪ You think you know me, you don't know me well at all ♪ ♪ Think you know me, you don't know me well ♪
How would you describe Lance as a person? He's incredibly domineering if he feels like he needs to be, if he needs to establish dominance over another human. But he often appears to be pretty relaxed if he's in a setting that's comfortable, like in his home or in his family business. But he undoubtedly has qualities of a narcissist.
And that comes out quite often when he is rude to quote-unquote underlings, rude to waitstaff, always asking for the manager and wanting his bill comped. If something went wrong, anything at all goes wrong, he asks for the bill to be comped and demeans waitstaff. His own employees also, very rude to them, demeaning, belittling, almost constantly.
And so then did your whole family and your parents also attend this church? I attended the church with my mom and my siblings. My dad was not a person of faith, so he didn't come with us. But my mom ended up later in our church career being on the staff with Lance. So she worked in the office with
that she started after Julia had left. I'm pretty confident about that. How long have you known Lance? How long have you yourself gone to the church? I've gone to the church since about the year 2000. I was five years old and I first started interacting with Lance when I joined the children's department where he was pastoring at the time with his wife. And I didn't really connect with him then. And then I ended up growing
up growing into the youth group at the same time that he transitioned to youth pastor. So we interacted a little bit more in that setting, but still, I'm not sure if it was him who kept me at a distance or if I just felt awkward around an adult man, but we never really connected. I don't remember any interactions with him on a personal level during any of that time.
He transitioned into the senior pastor position when I was coming out of high school as well. And even then, our relationship was still completely non-existent. He didn't really like to acknowledge people that he didn't know well. So if anything, despite having known this man my entire life, I would just get a discreet nod or something else non-direct from him.
My ex, whenever I would bring it up and say, you know, he just texted you to text me to say whatever. There was a lot of gaslighting involved to convince me that that was my problem and not his. A very specific instance, I was tutoring my brother-in-law, who was in middle school at the time.
communicating with Lance about when I needed to come over to their house. And the times would vary because the kid had sports practices and other things going on in his life. So I would text Lance to ask, is tutoring still happening today? And I remember a specific occurrence where they were in a staff meeting at the church. And Lance looked at his phone and
told my husband, who is sitting next to him, to text me to tell me, no, it's cancelled. And this was all 30 minutes before I was supposed to be there. So if I had not asked to confirm, I would have shown up at their house with nobody there in need of tutoring.
Instead of, you know, communicating with me directly, I feel like if he had time to open his phone and read a message, he had the time to type out to me two letters. N-O. Did that feel like an attitude he had towards all women in the church besides his wife? Or was it because you were married to his adopted son that you think he created these extra communication boundaries?
Those communication boundaries existed far before I was married. On summer break, when I came home from college, I went out to lunch with his son before we were dating. And we ran into his dad on the way out of the restaurant. And I've known this man since I was five years old. He knows me. He has talked to me many times in the past.
He stopped us in the parking lot. And instead of looking at me and saying hello, he launched into talking to his son about whatever they were talking about. He didn't look in my direction. He didn't nod. He didn't acknowledge my presence at all. And they talked for more than five minutes, all the while completely ignoring me. And when he turned to leave, he said goodbye to his son, turned on his heel and walked away and didn't acknowledge me then either. So it,
I can't beat myself up for not seeing these red flags in the beginning because I didn't have a paradigm for them. But I kind of am like, why didn't I notice that my feelings were already being minimized before we were even dating? Because I told him he didn't say hi to me. And my ex said, what do you mean? Of course he did.
And it's one of those insidious things that abusers do. They use those petty things that, of course, you're going to notice. Of course, someone's going to notice not being acknowledged. But then if you say it and then it's twisted on you by the abuser, like, look at you, you're crazy. Look at you. You're being way oversensitive about the fact that he didn't say hi to you.
When the fact of the matter is, that's incredibly rude and strange. It was so rude. So rude. And my ex employed the same tactics with laughter. He would tell about those tactics when he was interacting with somebody who he didn't want to interact with. He bragged quite frequently. I don't want to say frequently. He bragged about how he could erase people who have hurt him from his mind.
including exes, you know, other people that have heard him. He told a story about how he approached his father one day and his father was talking to a woman and he outright ignored the woman, pretended she wasn't there. And then the woman walked away and Lance said, didn't you see her right there? And my ex said, no, who? And it was his ex-girlfriend who apparently hurt him very badly and
I don't believe that anymore. I think he hurt her. So he bragged about ignoring people like that in such a rude way. Can you talk about how you met Lance's son and how you became involved? I met Lance's son. I mean, we had known each other for a few years in our periphery, but I started helping him with the music venue first.
I worked at the snack bar for him. He would pick me up from my house and then drop me off after this unpaid position. But I didn't really mind that I wasn't getting anything out of it besides food because I was doing it to spend some more time with my then boyfriend, who was Lance's son's intern at the time. And eventually I broke up with the boyfriend and Lance's son and I started to get together.
involved with each other on a friendship level. And after a year of being away at university, I came back and we started dating. And what is your age difference? The age difference is about five years. And you mentioned to me he was adopted by Lance as a 26-year-old adult. Without going into too much detail about his story in childhood, he had an abusive father who was
was a con man, narcissistic himself, probably I would even say sociopathic. And when Lance's son, when he was 18, their family came to the church and he started connecting with Lance on a deeper level. And eventually when his father and brother moved on, my ex-husband decided to stay and he became a
Very close with Lance, almost to the point where he did all of Lance's dirty work. It seemed like he always had a lot of people around actually to sort of do his dirty work. Oh yeah, definitely. How would you describe Lance's relationship with his kids? This one's really tough because I love his children so much and I don't really want to say anything directly about
But they often get the brunt of his harshness. I don't know if Julia mentioned the kids' relationship with food at all. She mentioned that he had put his kids on diets to me. Yeah, from very young. It's disgusting.
Do you recall how old his children were when he started putting them on a diet? And is that a diet that him and his wife followed? Do you know? I'm not sure if they followed the diet, the adults, but from very young, like kindergarten age, the kids were put on restrictive diets.
And that has translated into the girls specifically being very concerned with, one of them is very concerned with exercise and the other one is still very concerned with restricting her carb intake or trying any new fad diet to lose a few pounds because she has rested her value solely on what she looks like.
Gaslighters and narcissists love to use body image, specifically weight, as a way to target and control people around them. Sounds like that was really a tactic for him across all people in his life. Which is a little bit crazy to me because my ex-husband is quote unquote overweight. And I never got the feeling that he had been morally condemned.
that by his father. He was pretty concerned about losing weight, but I always felt like that was his own thing, not brought on or encouraged by Lance. His health was never called into question. And that was in direct contrast to the story that Julia shared and how he treats his children. And so the children that he was placing on diets were his, were female children? Yes. I see.
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incredibly misogynistic because quite often I would be standing right in front of him with my husband and he would not look at me not acknowledge me speak only to my husband and then turn around and walk away without a glance in my direction and then when I would point that out to my husband that my father-in-law didn't acknowledge or seem to even notice that I was present I
He would always tell me, you were just imagining it. I'm sure he did say hello. Why are you being so dramatic? And that was a trend. Lance would always do this to me. Even if I would text Lance, he would ask my spouse to text me back for him. He would never, hardly ever respond to me directly.
So strange. And do you think that's because he just didn't value you enough and didn't value your opinion enough? Or was there something else that you felt was at work there? My spouse had an explanation.
And when I confronted my spouse about, your dad never talks to me, he said, I'm sure Lance is just trying to be respectful. You're a woman, and he doesn't want there to be an appearance of evil. So he always talks to the spouse instead of the wife. And I thought that that was incredibly funny.
horrible that it really felt that Lance thought that I wasn't worthy as a person to speak to directly or that my husband was somehow over me and all communications needed to be passed through the man and
before they get to me. And it was just so demeaning. Even when he would request my help at his business, he would be short a dishwasher or a busser, and then he would want me to come in and work for him for the night. He would ask my husband if I was available. And I told my husband, as long as Lance asks you if I'm available, the answer is no.
I never felt like I was his equal in anything, even being in their home. I could only feel comfortable there if he wasn't present. I could go from laughing and joking and being boisterous with his kids and he would walk in the door and the atmosphere would just change.
What other forms of abuse did you witness from Lance or the church as a whole? I have not really thought about my abuses in regard to the entire church as much as I've just thought about it in respect to how my husband treated me. But at the church, the culture was always that you had to put in the work.
Instead of, I can't remember the verse now that people use to say faith over works, but our verse that we used a lot was faith without works is dead. With the emphasis on working to earn your keep, working hard, putting in effort, and then you'll be successful. We relied quite a lot on
child labor, as Julia talked about in her episode. And almost all of the child labor came from the youth group under my spouse. And those kids put in so much work, unpaid, all the time. It's kind of not cool how much those kids are taken advantage of.
In relation to how Lance treated me, I would talk to my spouse and say, listen, I feel like he is demeaning me by not addressing me in person. And I would get the response, you're just being overly dramatic. You're taking it out of context. He doesn't mean to hurt you. And
It was just, so are my feelings not valid? Should people who hurt me have no responsibility in it just because it's not a factual thing and it's my opinion that I've been hurt, that my feelings are hurt, you know? Absolutely. And also one of the things that I've learned in therapy is that
Sitting in our emotions and processing our emotions and allowing ourselves to feel our emotions is literally how we fight trauma. It's literally how we take care of ourselves. It's literally how we validate ourselves. And most of the time when we're processing things and we're not able to get over them, it's because we've been told not to feel them or we've told ourselves not to feel them. And they don't go away. Those emotions, they stay in us whether or not we want them there.
whether or not we want to acknowledge that they're there, that pain, it doesn't go away. And so then when we walk away from the abuser and we allow ourselves to start feeling, it's incredible because it's almost like you have to relearn how to trust yourself, how to feel again, how to say, you know, my emotions are valid and I'm allowed to share them with people. I'm allowed to have hurt feelings. I'm allowed to have opinions. Has that been a process for you? Yes, absolutely.
One of the biggest fights in my marriage was how my youth pastor husband spent far too much time in the company of a teenage girl 10 years younger than him. And my feelings in that were consistently as being jealous and just too much, even though having deconstructed every abuse that I faced, I have now realized that I was not wrong.
their relationship was inappropriate. So I have known this girl since we were both pretty young. She, her family and mine were pretty close friends. She's about five years younger than me, so she's 19 right now, I think. So
I have had her in my life for so many years and I adore her immensely. I still do, even though there's a lot of tension right now. Her relationship with my spouse started before he and I got married. When he took over the youth group, it was still very small. It had shrunk a lot over the years as people left, moved on, did whatever. And so there were only about 10 to 15 kids in there.
And one of which was this young girl. And my then friend, now ex, started hanging out with all of these kids a lot more and relying on their help to build back the group. Which was his job, and that part is totally fine. So then when I started...
Dating him and we eventually got married. I mean, eventually. We got married very quickly. We only dated for 11 months before the wedding. To clarify, were you in his youth group before you started dating? I was a leader in his youth group. Okay.
So when we got married, he started relying on this kid more and I did not think anything of it because, you know, what do I care if he spends time doing his job with a kid that I love and have known my whole life? It was a non-issue completely. Eventually, though, I started to see some really strange patterns in his interactions with her that were very concerning. And when I pointed those things out to him, he got very, very defensive.
saying that if I bring light to any of his behavior, his reputation will be ruined. I would be lying. People would think that he is doing something inappropriate. And he started telling me that
I mean, eventually, very far into our marriage. He started telling me that if I were to mention my discomfort at the time and proximity to this girl, he would divorce me immediately for expressing my feelings. You talked about strange patterns. Can you speak to that? My feelings were...
Just kind of unease in the pit of my stomach, but not anything overt to point at and specifically say that he was doing anything inappropriate. I never at any point felt like she was being abused or that there was a...
sexual component to their relationship because despite my conditioning to say nothing about my husband that would damage his reputation, there's nothing that could have stopped me if I thought that she was being physically harmed.
So I don't think that that was a component while she was a student. Or, I mean, I guess I can't speak to whatever's going on now, but somebody after I did separate asked me if he was dating her. And I said, oh my god, how should I know? I don't talk to either of them.
Did you feel like there was like an undercurrent of some sort of emotional affair or inappropriate behavior physically between them? Or it was just sort of a feeling that you had that he perhaps had feelings towards her? I think for sure that his comments and interactions with her were inappropriate. And he certainly thought that she was the most wonderful human being to ever walk the earth with.
He would comment all the time about people in the youth group, derogatory terms about the young girls in the youth group, particularly calling them sluts and teases for being quote unquote boy crazy. Whereas boys were, you know, the common behavior for boys is to be super interested in girls and that's normal and acceptable. But when girls do the same things, it is not acceptable. Yeah.
So he would quite often comment that this particular girl, who was his closest confidant, I guess, in ministry, he would say that she was the only girl worth any guy's time in the youth group because she didn't care about what guys thought. And I don't think that's an appropriate way to speak about teens at all. Calling young teenage girls sluts and teases. Right. Right.
My own sister and his sisters were given these titles, sluts and teases. Wow. And she was the only girl worth the time of the males in the youth group because she didn't care what the men think. That is what he told me, that she is worth their time because she doesn't care what they think. She is actually a pretty dominant personality type.
For others that she was in charge of, I'm very willing to be obedient, though, when somebody was telling her what to do, if that makes sense.
So that's interesting because a lot of times with gaslighters, they tend to use one person that they elevate and put on a pedestal to make the person that they're abusing feel like shit about themselves and make them constantly feel inadequate and that they're not good enough so that they'll strive to get the gaslighter's love and affection and attention. Yes, she is the apple of his eye and could do no wrong. Yeah.
And there was only a couple of instances where she did do something wrong and quote unquote disappointed him. And she actually very quickly bounced back from that one. When you would express your feelings of discomfort, you mentioned you weren't allowed to discuss them in public in front of other people because it could jeopardize his reputation.
Were you allowed to discuss it behind closed doors? It was very quickly passed over as me being overly dramatic. He projected some other things onto me when I would bring up my discomfort over specific events, such as I asked him one day not to sit next to her in the movie theater. We were going on a group tour.
activity to go to a movie and I asked him to choose somebody else to sit next to and he said what are you talking about this is fine I'm gonna sit next to her maybe it was petty of me to ask but I did want to see whether he would take my feelings into consideration and he chose not to whenever I would do that and stand my ground I would be demonized I would be completely ignored and
And eventually he started accusing me of cheating on him because I was bringing attention to his own inappropriate behaviors. So he invented a scenario out of thin air.
in which I had been cheating on him for months with somebody that I babysit for. Were you alone in that? Were you able to share with friends or your family at least how you were feeling at the time? Because that seems extremely isolating to me. Oh, I was absolutely alone. My husband had strategically cut out all of the women influences in my life.
Beginning, actually, when we were going through premarital counseling together. That was the first person that he told me I could not trust was our counselor. He specifically stated after I'd answered a question honestly that highlighted how our communication styles differed. Like a very helpful thing to know when you're going into a marriage is how to communicate. And I answered honestly how I like to communicate.
So then he pulled me aside and said, you can't trust that woman. She's a gossip. You can't tell her anything. Why did you do that? So we went back to her, but I wasn't allowed to tell the truth about anything that could make him look bad. So from then on, he cut me off from my mother by telling me that she didn't like me and by telling her that I hated her.
So that relationship was exceedingly tense. He cut me off from my sister, who is my best friend, by creating very contrived drama between the two of us. I wasn't allowed to talk to the
Other youth leaders that were in our group, this girl's mother for one, and the other women who I looked up to in ministry. I wasn't allowed to talk to them because on the occasions that I did, he interrogated me about every word that I told them. And so I did not think that it was worth the hassle.
and the scrutiny to continue speaking to them. So I hid absolutely everything from everybody in my life. That must have been so incredibly difficult. It was. It really was. I felt like it would be my fault. His life was affected negatively if I were to go and say the wrong thing. So I went from being a person who trusted everybody to...
Trusting nobody. His concern was actually that he would be, that his abuse would be surfaced. Yes. He was very afraid of being exposed. How did he speak about his dad? My ex had definitely had his own style of leadership that wasn't dissimilar from Lance's, but was unique in execution, I suppose. Lance is a much better public speaker. So he is able to
weave his words better so that they make sense, so that it's poetic and beautiful if you're not analyzing it too deeply. But my ex tended to... I don't know how to describe. He tended to read things from his very limited worldview and apply his narcissistic views into the Bible and
more overtly than Lance did, I actually think. But overall, he did, does respect Lance very much because of everything that that man has done for his life. I think that Lance has created a really, he's created a follower that is so invested in the work and the message that he's willing to do anything that Lance asks.
I spent a lot of time being afraid of saying the wrong thing, being afraid of allowing people to see what I was feeling on the inside. I was afraid of accidentally letting this girl know how much I didn't like her, which in the end, I am afraid that I did do, unintentionally made her know how much I disliked her, and I feel really a lot of regret for that. But anyway, I...
After we separated, I felt incredibly validated by the response that I got from people when I finally expressed what I had been feeling the whole time. Other youth leaders, I went out to have drinks with one of my friends from the ministry, and I told her just a very tiny snippet of what I was feeling.
And immediately she said, I noticed that too. And I didn't want to say anything. Can you say how many years that she's been in the youth group or around him? I think I started to notice things around when she was 15, but I don't really, I don't, I can't really speak to when the beginning of the relationship as it stands now started because it just was not on my radar to look for in the beginning. Would you describe the
the feeling you felt as being emotionally cheated on? That one is challenging because I identify so much with the term emotional cheating. And I actually communicated to my ex once that that's how I felt. That did not end well for me that day. So I
think that it was inappropriate. It is inappropriate for any person in a monogamous relationship to spend that much time in the company of somebody else to turn to them for, you know, emotional gratification rather than going to your spouse. I felt, quite honestly, that I was the other woman in my own marriage.
And it was challenging to deconstruct that thought because of the age of the woman involved.
I thought that I was being petty and overdramatic. I felt those things about myself. I felt a very strange pulling of my heart in two directions where on one hand, I felt abandoned and ignored by my spouse. And on the other hand, I felt like I was putting an unfair level of responsibility on this child. And now I have realized fully that I
She did nothing. I have no reason to be angry at her for what I perceived to be her role in this. I have every reason to be upset at my husband for my ex husband for ignoring my very real concerns and minimizing my valid feelings. Absolutely. She's a kid. Exactly.
She doesn't have the age, maturity or wisdom to understand how inappropriate it is, which is why the age of consent is 18 years old. And it sounds like because he's been in her life long term and those things started to develop around the age of 15, that there was a lot of probably grooming behaviors going on where she wasn't also aware of what was happening to her at the time either.
Because no matter how you slice it, it's inappropriate. A pastor is basically the same as a school teacher or anybody else in a child's life who has authority. And when you take advantage of that authority and you begin an intimate relationship with a child who isn't of age to consent, that's very, very concerning considering your entire job is being around minors. Exactly. Exactly.
He expected all of the youth leaders, and he held himself to this standard too for the most part, he expected all of us to never be alone with a student of the opposite gender. If we were going to be having students in our car, that we needed there to be at least two at all times. But he did not apply this rule to this young girl.
or her brother because they were so much like family to us that it didn't seem necessary. It makes sense for adults to be able to interact with children and not suspect that something is going on, but the reality of the world is that we do need to be more careful than that. The fact that they spent time alone together isn't necessarily what's bothersome to me. It's the amount.
Because if we are such close family friends and he needs to pick her up from school and take her home, that's awesome. That's what friends are for. That's what family is for, to take care of each other when we need it. But the fact is he spent an incredibly inappropriate amount of time with her on her own. Would they, in addition to spending time alone, did they have a texting, social media, phone call type of relationship in addition to that time? The social media that they used to communicate was Snapchat. Snapchat.
Perfect. That's so great. That's so appropriate for a pastor to use Snapchat with a 16-year-old girl. Yeah. So he is very, very, very big on appearances. So he has cultivated his social media accounts so that they are
you know, highlighting the best parts of his life, which is what we all do. But he connected with the youth group, with all of the students through Snapchat quite often. I think mostly he communicated with the students who he's very close to, which include actual family, his adopted family, my family, and this girl and her younger brother. The difference that I
Holy shit.
I talk to him that much. I don't even try to talk to anybody that much. No, no, no. No, no, no. Fix it, Jesus. No. Yeah, it's too much. And other accounts that he had with streaks were, you know, like 30 days maximum and then somebody would break the streak.
My streak only ever got to like two days with anybody at any given time. I was not a Snapchat person. So when I noticed this, as he was pumping gas and he had his phone open, so I looked at their streak. I said, is insane. And he goes, yeah, we just really like to see how high we can get the number.
Or something like that. That's not an exact quote. And so everything that I did in regards to how I felt about these two people, because I wasn't allowed to communicate my feelings until they were so explosive that they just burst out. Everything that I did feels kind of petty. And so I did ask him, okay, if it's just a thing that you like to do and it's not something that you need, can you please break the streak? And he called me petty.
I'm so sorry.
And the fact that you had to even explain to him why this is inappropriate is, to me, such a sign of the control and abuse that you are already suffering. Because I feel like you would have to be under, already, quite a bit of abuse to passively accept something like that. Yes. The level of relational stress that was in my life at that moment led me to put up with quite a lot of behavior things.
Next time. We went to go see a counselor. He sat there in his chair and mediated the conditions of my continued abuse. That was the most horrific experience of my life. What you're describing is rape. Yes, absolutely. Something Was Wrong is written, recorded, edited,
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