267: What if you were forced to keep the nanny's secret?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Not being in control of who I was, it's a sort of panic that is continually burning. In your attempt to kind of smother that out, that's where you smother more than just that up. You end up smothering the rest of your identity.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 267. What if you were forced to keep the nanny's secret?

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My parents both came from a religious background. They grew up Mormon, both kind of small towns, small areas. But both of them were sort of the more adventurous ones in their family. They traveled a lot. And immediately after getting married, they moved overseas. For a time, they thought they couldn't have kids. So when I came along, they were pretty excited. And then they moved from London back to the U.S. and started hunkering down for a family.

I've got three more brothers and sisters soon after me. Being the oldest, I always felt pride that I was the oldest. The other kids looked to me, and I was generally a type A personality, so I'd go after things. I would be involved in a lot of things and a lot of sports activities. It's the older brother that sometimes people look to and serves as an example or a role model for some of the others.

My personality was a little odd. I was just, you know, a little bit of the crazy kid climbing trees and rocks and just kind of jumping off higher cliffs than everyone else, you know. And so I did have a little bit of a daredevil personality. I was really into gymnastics. That was something I got into when I was into competition gymnastics, competitive gymnastics, where I would travel around the U.S. and compete. And it took most of my time when I was from a pretty young age, I think, because I was

really hyper. My mom got me in gymnastics to get rid of my energy. We were always, you know, walking on our hands. We were always doing flips. And so I think everyone thought I was a little strange. Our family was close. My dad was at work most of the time. My mom was, for the most part, a stay-at-home mother. So I was close to my dad. I was close to my mom. You know, we're brothers and sisters. My mom and dad were very close.

It was a very idyllic childhood, a very happy life. I didn't really want for anything.

The neighborhood I grew up in was towards the upper class area. Pretty big house with a pool and there's a lot of people that seem very happy and have it together, where in reality, not everyone does. And I think there's a little pressure on that front to be kind of the perfect person, to be the one that has all your kids doing classes and have the nice house. I think partly as a result of that pressure,

My mom got in the habit of kind of getting an au pair type situation where we'd have someone come from abroad and help out with cleaning, help out with the kids. After eight or nine or so, we kind of always just had someone living with us. And that's just the way it was. It was always a nanny or a student. My mom always attached, you know, really closely to the nannies we had or au pairs that we'd have.

I don't think my father gave the greatest emotional support and they would always become best friends with my mom. So I think for her, it was also, you know, that was the second reason to have someone in the house. There's just someone else to kind of give her emotional support and be a friend and something that she needed. And she thrived off. My dad was at work a lot. So we do stuff with my mom and the nanny and the nanny was very much part of the family.

It was a little strange that they would leave after a year or two and someone else would come in. Some would work out better than others. Some would stay for a longer time, some a lesser time. I always liked having someone else in the house. It just made the house feel more social and open. It was always a very accepting environment for everybody and anybody. I was always friendly with the nannies. They were quite a bit older than me. They would usually be 18 or above, early 20s.

And they were mostly from England. We had others from other parts of Europe as well. Some I would form a closer relationship than others. It was always just like kind of a sisterly relationship. I believe I was about 10 years old when we got a new nanny. The old one left for some reason, a new one came. And this one in particular was beautiful.

a lot of fun. She was about 21 or 22 at the time she came, but she was just a lot of fun, like a bundle of energy and very charismatic. And right away, you know, the family loved her. She would do all these activities with us, scavenger hunts and, you know, movie nights. And immediately, you know, we sort of trusted her and liked to be around her and my family as well. My mom and her became best friends. Over that first year from 10 into 11,

She started paying extra attention to me. I was kind of her favorite. She would always tell me and the others, oh, you're my favorite. And she would pay special attention and do fun activities with me. You know, I loved it. And I felt special because I just got extra attention, you know, for everyone else.

She started having issues with my friends, kind of turned into a little bit of control issues. You know, she would say, I don't like it when you go with your friends because then I don't see you and it makes me feel sad. Or, you know, how about instead of going with your friend, we hang out and we play some more games today. I haven't seen you enough today.

You know, initially that's still flattering. You know, someone wants to see me spend time with me. But then it started being like, I don't really like you seeing that friend anymore. You know, it doesn't make me feel good. Doesn't make me happy. Why don't we just stay and we do stuff together? And it started taking a turn. She would start to say what if she was happy, if I did something or wasn't happy. And, you know, I wanted to please her, of course, because I was sort of under her spell.

We got to the point where I pretty much had to go to her to ask permission to do anything with my friends. And if she said no, I couldn't really do it. And if I went against her wishes, she would get very pouty. She would get mad and she would make that apparent to my parents, especially my mom. And then my mom would have a talking and say, what are you doing? You know, why, why have you made her so upset? Why are you upsetting her? Has that progressed until I got 11? Pretty soon it was towards my parents too. And she would say, you know, your, your mom doesn't love you as much as I do. You know, you can't trust her.

She doesn't have your best interests in mind. You have to do what I tell you. I'm the one that loves you. I'm the one that really loves you. I would be like, okay. I didn't really know how to handle it. I'm an 11-year-old kid at this point. I didn't like it. It made me feel trapped and it made me feel strange, but I didn't know. I didn't realize the context. I just didn't really realize it was happening, you know, because I'm not looking at it from above. At the time, it just felt strange and a little weird, but I couldn't really figure it out.

She made me stop taking gymnastics because she thought that was too much time that I was away from her. So she would come up with stories that I had to tell my mom. For when my mom said, why don't you want to go to gymnastics? And she would coach me on these stories and what to say when I woke up in the morning and how to get out of it and how to say I want to quit gymnastics. I don't like it anymore. After about six to eight months of doing this is when she would start saying, let me give you a back rub. Okay, now will you give me a back rub?

And then she'd say, don't touch me there. It tickles. And then she'd say, touch me there. I like how it tickles. Touch me there again. It's like the classic frog in the boiling pot. It was such a gradual thing, you know, over weeks and weeks and weeks. I don't really, you know, recognize it for what it was. And so, you know, I thought it was interesting. I'm, you know, a little kid and I thought, oh, that's, you know, she likes it when I touch this part of her back.

But more and more, it would be, you know, now touch me here, now touch me there. And again, whenever I would say no or go against her wishes, she had that control over me where she'd start crying. She'd say, you know, you don't love me. You're making me so sad. How could you be such a mean person? How could you be so bad?

And at the time, 11 years old, that's, you know, your emotions aren't developed enough to know you're being sort of manipulated. So I really believed it. I thought, you know, I just felt I had to do these things. They progressively got more and more sexual in nature. She would start with games and she would be like, all right, let's, let's get under the covers and let's, let's do the kissing game.

She would make a game of it. So it'd be like, you know, oh, this is fun. I didn't really notice the inappropriate part because it was coupled with like a fun thing. You know, it's like a quote unquote game. So if you go into the covers, she'd kiss. And then the next day I'd be like, this time let's kiss. But you know what's really funny is when you stick your tongue in my mouth.

And it's probably really gross, but, you know, try it. You know, so we do something like that. And then it would be like, this is a really fun game. You're going to grab a piece of ice and, like, put it on this part of me, on my nipple or something, you know, over my clothes. Oh, my gosh, that feels so crazy. I can only stand it for a few seconds. Until, you know, eventually she's like, you know, I want to show you something that feels really good. I'm going to kiss you in a certain area. I'm going to suck you in a certain area. And it would be like, oh, on my hip.

on my knee, on my thigh. And it would, you know, every time it would get closer and closer, you know, what's happening, but you know, you're getting kind of conditioned to go along with it. Cause anytime you say stop, well, why, you know, why that makes you feel bad. That makes you feel horrible. Now, by the time I'm 11 years old, she's sexually abusing me on, on a regular basis, a weekly basis, sometimes multiple times a week. It became sort of a new normal.

You know, oral sex is a normal thing she'd do. And then she would always say like she wanted me after I was 12 to have sex with her. But that's just something I knew I knew I wouldn't do. I just for whatever reason it was religious or otherwise, I just felt like that was a point that I couldn't return from. I would always sort of like be dirty or something, you know.

And so I wouldn't. So she would get like a brush handle, like those big handles and she'd hold my hand on it and then she would do it herself. But I remember just feeling almost to the point of wanting to throw up from just the smells and the sounds. And that was something that, Oh, it's just awful. There's nothing I could do about it. Even at 11 now going into 12, I'm,

I just felt like dead inside, you know, because it just didn't feel right. It was something wrong and I didn't know how to stop it. I couldn't tell my mom. I couldn't tell anyone, friends, brothers or sisters, because A, the shame, B, she had that control over me. So if you tell people about this, I'll tell them what you've done to me, you know, and then I start to think, oh, maybe it is my fault. Maybe I'm the one that's been doing these things.

It had affected the relationship with my family, of course. I mean, in particular, my mom, because of course, I feel like I can't tell her these things. And that creates a distance. When we were in the thick of it, you know, she really had me around her finger. I thought she loved me more than anyone else. I thought she was the most special person. I thought we had this special bond, even though I didn't like what we were doing. You know, she had me in that kind of frame of mind. I was culpable. But then she wouldn't let me stop.

She had me sort of isolated from my friends, from my family. It was just hard to get away from her. My family went on a trip to Mexico, I remember. And I remember being away from her and just feeling like 100 pounds lighter. I just felt so good. And just, I remember thinking about when I'd have to go back and just dreading it. Dreading it and thinking, I don't want to go back there. I don't want to go back to that house. The way that I was dealing with all these things,

emotions eternally has a lot to do with my religious upbringing, because that is really the only guide I had. I would listen, I remember at church, and they were saying, if you've done something wrong, you can repent, and it's as good as gone. So, you know, I had this idea in my mind that I could just say I'm sorry, and I wouldn't be punished by God.

But part of that kind of repentance process is it would be as long as you say sorry and you don't repeat that behavior, you'll be fine. And so I would say the sorry part and I wouldn't want to repeat the behavior, but I would get sort of pushed into that behavior. And so I remember just feeling kind of a darkness settle in and kind of helplessness that I just didn't know what to do with. I didn't know how to process it. It just became something I think ultimately the only way I could deal with it was to put it somewhere that

and close the door because I didn't have the tools at the time. I just really didn't know what to do with all that. My only option was to bottle it up. And when I bottle it up, then you have nothing. You have no emotion. You don't have the ability to say no. You don't have the ability to say yes. You're just kind of a zombie at that point. She would tell me at times that she had been sexually abused when she was younger, that she knew what we were doing was wrong, that she was going to repent of it and change her life. It would just never stick.

She was basically, you know, Mormon like us and went to church, didn't drink or do drugs or anything like that. You know, she was otherwise from the outside, pretty normal. Even if people saw something and once or twice, my mom did see something. Like she came upstairs once and like I was in a bed with her and like her underpants were on the floor or something. And she said, what's going on? And she was just like, oh, nothing. She made up some excuse and I got out of the, you know,

No one suspected. No one suspected because her behavior was very normal otherwise. You never would have known. I had a friend's mom once. I guess perceptive people will always be able to discern these things. But she said to my friend, she said, you know what? And he told me later, he said, there's something not right going on between those two. And I can tell. And she asked me once, she said, hey, is everything okay with you and the nanny? Of course I can't.

I can't tell because there's so much weight on that decision to tell that I can't even lift my head, you know? And so, you know, I said, no, everything's fine.

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One reason this relationship was so toxic but so effective is that it is based on love. It's a fake love, but she's giving me attention. I would almost go to say she's giving me love. She believed she loved me. But I was still too young to even process what that really meant. I don't know what love is.

Over time, because I think mixing in the sexual aspect of it, it changed that dynamic into, okay, she doesn't actually love me. She just wants me because I give her pleasure. But there was an element there of messed up love. Once I was about 12 and a half, you know, and I started...

just getting a little, I guess, more mature. I wanted to go out and hang out with my friends more. I just kept pushing back a little more and a little more, and she would get more and more desperate with trying to hang on. And so when she saw that saying like, oh, you're making me sad, you don't love me anymore, wasn't working, and I kept saying, you know, I'm going to go hang out with my friends. I don't really want to go into your room tonight. She's like, well, then I'm going to tell your parents what you've done, you know. I'm going to have to tell your dad. I'm going to have to tell your mom. I'm going to have to tell your brothers and sisters.

That would scare me back into going down in there. Not being in control of who I was. It's a sort of panic that is continually burning, kind of like a fuse. And you get afraid that at some point it could reach the bomb. It's just something is wrong and I can't change it. But you don't want to panic forever because it's just not psychologically possible.

And your attempt to kind of smother that out, that's where you smother more than just that up. You end up smothering the rest of your identity and really losing your identity, just becoming a little bit like a robot. The sense of not having any control, I think, had been established while I was 11. She had really spent her time getting sort of this emotional control of me, and that was the hardest thing to break. And that was, I think, ultimately the most...

damning part, you know, more than the physical stuff is when you feel you don't have control, you know, and other people can make you do things you don't want to do. It just makes your sense of self very confusing. Suddenly I have this deep, dark secret. You know, I'm different. When I place myself in any social situation, I would look around and I would say, this is not happening to any of these other people. And so within my family, it made me kind of emotionally distance myself.

Outside as well, I think it put up a lot of barriers because I felt special in a bad way. I felt I was not a good person in some way and these other people were. My relationship to who I was was being hit from two sides. First of all, that's puberty gauge.

So that's when you're first starting to think, ooh, girls are gross to, you know, ooh, girls are cute. So I had this strange time of my life when my body reacts because I'm starting to go through puberty. And so that would confuse me as well because I think like, I must like this stuff. I must be okay with it. Otherwise, my body wouldn't react the way it does. And that would make me feel even worse.

Eventually, something just clicked where I just became more and more resistant, just thinking, I don't want this. I don't want to feel like this anymore. It's been too long. I feel like I'm not even a person. Getting older, I think a lot of it was my social life. I started making good friends at school, and they were hanging out all the time. They were at that age where they're going to parties or doing fun things, and they would always want me to come. When I would get away and go, I had so much fun.

And, you know, I just thought, I can't keep doing this. You know, I don't want to do this anymore. And I don't care what the consequences are. All her threats, you know, would have less and less hold on me over time. I could tell she was starting this behavior with my younger brother. So I was 12. He must have been, you know, 9, 10. She was starting to pay extra attention to him, call her in her room and close the door like she would with me and play these funny games.

And I went to her and I said to her, if you do anything else with my brother, I'm going to tell my parents immediately. And she got scared of that. She stopped that behavior. I think at the same time she saw her power on me was lessening and there's nothing she could do about it. And she started to get scared and go into kind of a big depression where she wouldn't leave the house for like weeks at a time and stop doing any of the housework. And it became an issue at this time.

My mom and dad started going through a divorce. They would have gotten a divorce either way, I believe. But with the nanny being there and being my mom's best friend, she did not like my dad. She had a very bad relationship with him. And I always felt even as a kid, she kept pushing my mom and pushing my mom to divorce him.

Outside of what was happening with me, everyone was kind of going through a hard time. So I also didn't feel like it was something I wanted to bring to anyone's attention to add to the kind of dysfunction that was already there. I was already at the point where I had become just so emotionally distant from everything that I didn't care. I just didn't care anymore that she was depressed, that she was sad. And that was what I think she could see that she was helpless against is I had complete anxiety.

Because I was in the shell or a cocoon. That's when the suicide threats started. She started saying, if you leave me, if you don't come to me, if you don't continue this, I'm going to kill myself. And it's going to be your fault for a 12-year-old kid. That kind of stuff on your shoulders is just crazy.

And I would try to talk her off of it and say, no, you can't do that. And she would love it if she could get me to the point where I was crying and, you know, begging her to not do these things to herself. Previously, when she had made those sorts of threats, yes, it did scare me. But for whatever reason, I was becoming so kind of emotionally dead at that point. I think I'd been just exhausted.

Eventually, I just stopped saying anything. I just wouldn't even say I don't care anymore. She would say that stuff and I would look at her and I would just walk out of the room. And honestly, I didn't care. One day, my mom said, oh, we haven't seen the nanny for a day or two. Can you go down, make sure she's there, tell her to come up for dinner. I went down, there was like an empty bottle of pills on the side table. It was all dark and she was on the bed. And there was a note there that said, send flowers to my dad.

And even at that point, I didn't care. I felt absolutely nothing. I just shrugged and I went upstairs and I said, I think the nanny just committed suicide. Of course, my mom flipped out, called the police. They came and pumped her stomach and found that she'd taken like two pills. It was basically all staged for me. She did it again one other time. So, I mean, these were just attempts to get me back under her control. And at that point, because of those incidences,

My grandparents got involved and they said, you can't have someone living in your house that's committing suicide or attempting to when you have kids. And that's when she finally left the house.

When the nanny left the house, the biggest feeling I felt was just relief. Just that I didn't have to deal with that situation anymore. I could put it behind me. I fully just became involved with my friends to the point where I was almost never home. You know, found jobs at an early age so I could just kind of always be out of the house. She moved out and I think she went through some hard times because she

I imagine it caught up to her conscience because she went through a large period of depression. But the family still kept very close to her because she had not only built relationships with my immediate family, but the whole extended family. And she was literally like a part of the family. You know, she would still come to all the gatherings. She was still at the house all the time. During this time, the next few years after she moved out of the house, but was still part of our family's life, we largely just kind of ignored each other.

But, you know, all the time, at least a few times a year, wherever family functions, she would pull me aside and she would say, you cannot, you cannot ever tell anyone what happened. You know, I would go to jail, please. You know, so she, it was still like this unspoken kind of dark secret. You know, I had kind of put it in my mind as, oh, this is like a silly thing that adolescent boys do. It's not such a big deal. We can still be friends.

It was something that I hadn't even dealt with yet. I didn't perceive it as sexual abuse because sexual abuse, whenever I would hear about it or whatever it would be told, it was in the context of a male abusing a female. I would think, well, I guess it happens the other way, but if the guy reacts physically, then they're a part of the collusion.

Since I, in some part, participated, even if I'd said I didn't want to do it, even though it was destroying my life, I just didn't know it was even a possibility for women to sexually abuse boys. Whenever I would start to think about it, my chest would get heavy, it's hard to breathe, and it wasn't pleasant.

There was still a part of me that I couldn't fully embrace and become completely expressive and jovial and happy. There was always like, you know, something holding me back a little bit. As I got older into college, you know, the difficult part is she was still a constant reminder because the nanny was still at all family functions. She would still from time to time remind me that I couldn't tell anyone. And so I couldn't fully bury it.

And I had on my conscience, just on an emotional level, but also on the kind of religious level where I still felt at that time like, oh, I'm going to go to hell because this is something I did. The first time I talked about it to anyone, my university was doing a study of survivors of sexual assault. I talked to a researcher about it. The first thing they questioned my story, they were saying, are you sure you didn't initiate it? And I thought, you know, I never initiated it.

in the religion I was at 18, it's time to go on that mission. When you go on that mission, you got to take care of all your past problems, you know, make sure you don't have any lingering sins type of thing. So then the second time was to a church leader when I said this stuff happened, you know, because I wanted to, you know, fully be kind of absolved of this thing before I went on my mission. Again, he treated it like, oh, that's it. Okay. Yeah, these things happen. You're all good.

I was pretty gung-ho religious, and so I did feel guilty. I felt like it's something that's going to hold me back from heaven, all these kinds of things. Because sexual sins are kind of a graver nature, and there's more consequences in the Mormon faith that could potentially affect my eternal progression, all these kinds of things. It's horrible. It's just horrible.

And when I finally came clean about it to this religious leader, I felt like, well, that's the nail on that coffin. Like, I don't have to ever visit this again. Luckily, it didn't affect me, you know, is what I tried to tell myself. It's almost like maybe I'm making too big of a deal of it. I know it's strange, but then I would think, no, but when I hear people say that, like, a girl got raped or a girl got, like, it's a huge deal. But I'm telling them basically the same thing happened to me. And they're kind of brushing it off.

I didn't fully acknowledge that there was a permanent piece of this issue that had attached itself to my personality. And so I kind of just put it even one level deeper. Even though she was 11 years older than me, when I was in college at some point, she married someone that was my same age and looked very similar to me. It kind of bothered me. Then she started having children and I didn't process it at all.

I went on a mission. I had a generally good experience. I came back and everyone in my family called me the robot, you know, because I just didn't seem to have many outward emotions at all. It drove this wedge that somehow solidified between especially me and my parents. And it was just hard for me to be home. I found it very easy to live in foreign countries where I didn't really have to think about my past and no one knew me. I could kind of reinvent myself.

I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I lived in Egypt for two years. I lived in Palestine. I lived in Jordan. I ended up just kind of traveling around. I made a lot of new friends, learning languages, studying, just doing things so I wouldn't really have to go back home. I finally did come home and just immediately moved to the East Coast. I had several girlfriends during that time, but it was always a little bit different.

Eventually, I met someone and fell in love and got married. We got married when I was a little bit older because I'd done a lot of traveling and living around. It wasn't until then until she made me realize that what I'd been through was not normal and was not something that was my fault, but it was actually something that was affecting my behavior and my personality in a big way.

We got married and we had four kids. And, you know, there are many reasons that lead to divorce. But, you know, one thing that I was forced to deal with as a result of kind of the breakdown of a marriage was this issue of my past and how I hadn't ever dealt with how I felt. The nanny wanted to come visit my house because she was coming to the area with her husband.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that's that's fine. My now ex-wife who knew everything. She was the only person who did was like, why would you, you know, why would you invite her to your house? I'd be like, I guess I guess you're right. I guess that's a little strange. She said, you know, you were raped. I would say no, it wasn't. But like that started opening up a little bit of a can of worms. The more I started thinking about it.

I decided to go to see a therapist and start talking about these things. The first few I went to were like, there's other people where they kind of questioned. One almost was like, why would you be ashamed that as a 12-year-old you got action? He's like, I know 12-year-olds would be proud of that. That just made me feel sick, like I wanted to throw up.

I finally found a therapist that was the right fit. And one of the first things he did was he said, you know, you should tell the family because it's not good that this person's still interacting with the family. And how does that make you feel?

Along with that feeling of starting to accept what happened and go through it and realize that it wasn't my fault at all and feel it realizing that, you know, actually I was being taken advantage of. A lot of anger came out, you know, and I started to feel like this year and a half of events in my past has now had a part in my life for over 40 years. And meanwhile, this person is just happy, you know, just no one even knows anything.

I did mainly two sorts of therapy. One was parts therapy, where you take each of your emotions and sort of imagine them as a person or almost a separate part within you that controls those emotions and things, and you start to have conversations between these parts. So some parts can explain how they feel, why they feel that way, and it just really helps you get down to the bottom of why you're feeling the way you're feeling, and that helped a lot. The other one was

using this EDM therapy where it sort of things hooked up to you to kind of distract you, really distract your body while you start to think of these traumatic experiences that happened to you. Just the way I would feel in the whole situation, I would put myself back in there, you know, with all the smells and the sounds and the lights and dark room and it would just freak me out. It would just make me tremble and

Suddenly I was remembering details that I hadn't remembered in 40 years and going through them. And at the end, they say, how traumatic is this experience on one to 10? And it would just, every time you do it, it usually go down one or two levels till finally after several weeks of this therapy, I could, the most traumatic experience I had, I could think of, I could talk about regularly without getting even a reaction and just to a point where I can talk about that without feeling like a knife in my heart.

talking about it without, you know, hyperventilating. It was just doing those kinds of things over and over that eventually made me able to talk about it in a way that I felt comfortable enough where I could then talk about it to my family. So I finally just sent an email out to my immediate family, and the reaction was not what I expected.

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follow-on implications, you know, like the blast creator that it creates when you drop family secrets. My mom told me I should call her and talk it out with her and that we could all be friends again. And I had to explain to her why that wouldn't help.

It put some of my brothers and sisters in an awkward situation because they'd build these friendships, their kids are friends with her kids and how they disentangle it. But the way I framed it is, you know, I've told you now what's happened. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to keep this person in your life or not. I think all dark family secrets exist.

or messy and difficult. But what happened when I told my family is sort of two camps evolved. Some feeling sorry for me, others not really believing it and still being friends with her, which hurts because I know for a fact that if it had been a 12-year-old female member of our family, I don't think that would have been the reaction. I think people would have been abhorred and they would never associate with that person again. But

Part of the reason some people feel they can't is because it was with a boy. And that just makes me feel sad that there's that kind of double standard. You know, their family members have completely cut off contact. You know, some refuse to believe it, some sort of suspect, but they have such good relationships with that family that they feel kind of obligated to at least continue superficially a relationship.

Last I heard, she claimed she had amnesia. She doesn't remember any of this, but of course, all these years she's told me not to tell anyone, so I don't think that's true. It's been eye-opening just because

I'd always kind of heard the thing where people don't believe or blame the victims and stuff. And to just see it for myself that someone's more liable to believe the perpetrator, you know, who would have a reason to hide something than the victim who has no reason. And it was really hard for them to come and admit the thing. But when I just looked at it from the perspective of

having my own kids and you know having an 11 year old and thinking oh my gosh if this had happened to this 11 year old like that's just horrific that is just horrific if anyone's had a 10 or 11 year old and can think of how vulnerable they are and how much damage you can do to someone that age and i don't see how they could they could just ignore it or think it's just something that happens

You know, it just made me mad that she had taken that little piece of my adolescence that continued to affect me for 40 plus years. The part that just scared me so much at that age was the vagina. I just was so afraid of that, that it took me many years, almost even after marriage, to be comfortable with.

The way she would touch me, things she would do, you know, became sort of triggers for me. If anyone would touch me in that way or do something that way, I immediately felt a sense of like shame and guilt. And I just had to like walk away from the situation, you know. I went back to a lot of those scenes and kind of thought about how I'd felt and why I'd felt that way and tried to process why. Something like intimacy, you know, which is such an important part of any relationship.

For it to start out as something that I felt shame about and gross about and disgusting about and something that it shouldn't be was horrible, you know, to have that taken from me. You know, distrust of women and, you know, emotional and intimate settings and just emotional guardedness, fear of being really intimate. And to have something that, you know, now I look at as something that can be beautiful, all these things, and, you know, at that age can be so traumatic. It took me so long to...

Here, it wasn't my fault. For the last 40 years, whenever I go to that situation or open that box, I'd continue to think about it from an 11 or 12-year-old's perspective. And that's the only way I could see it because that's where I left it. And so it was just frightening and it was just too much, you know. But just as a result of, you know, these different kinds of therapy methods, you get to a point where you can take this horrible experience

set of experiences that happen to you and see it for the first time from a new angle and blame the person who really is responsible for it and not blame yourself for it. And just, you feel this relief that, you know, like you just got a hundred pounds lighter and it's just so liberating.

Coming out with it to my family and really to myself during this time was also a, you know, a relief. Now it's not a secret. Everyone knows, you know, the pieces can fall where they may. That's just, I think for me, it was a big part of the healing process. You know, it went from anger to sadness to, you know, then just being completely open about it.

And now these little warning signs that I feel like adults around me should have picked up on, like bringing me down to a room and closing the door. I don't understand how a parent wouldn't pick up on that. Strange that he's been in there for a half hour. He's been in there an hour and there's no sound coming in there and they're not opening the door.

It's something that I feel like I would pick up on now if someone, a family friend, was always getting upset with a younger child, that they're not treating them right, that they're not giving them enough attention. I mean, these are things that I feel now should have been warning signs. I'm different. I'm different since I started going to therapy. And one unintended consequence was I just left religion completely.

The period from when I first fully decided to confront the sexual abuse, four or five months after that is when I told my family. A year, year and a half, maybe two after that is when I got divorced. Three years after that is when I left the religion. You know, and it was just, it's very hard to be in such an all-encompassing religion and to leave it. You know, it can...

be traumatic even because you have to take on a little bit of a new identity. It's brought out a different side of my personality that makes me kind of angry that I'd kept it hidden for so long or I didn't feel like I was able to fully express myself for that long. At the same time, those 40 years of unhealthy or broken relationships with my family, it was me that was emotionally distant, not them. Those aren't very easy to repair.

It's hard to shake, even though, you know, you find you've dealt with these issues, but these remnants of the way you interact with people is something I'm working on. A lot of the drama that happened is still happening, you know, with my family in regard to the nanny. She's still there, you know, she just this last Christmas, people were going to invite her to come. And some people in the family said, well, why would you invite her to come? And then others got offended, you know, so it's still a big issue in the family.

And so it's just always strange, you know, because part of you thinks like, I want that person to pay for what they did. It's horrible what they did to a little child. At the same time, she has children. They shouldn't pay for what she did. But I just always make the comparison. What if it was a man, a male friend of the family that did it to a female in my family and one of my daughters?

I would absolutely want them to face justice and I would absolutely be very vigilant about there's no way this person can ever see this person again. It's just strange to me, a little bit confusing, you know, it doesn't, it makes me feel a little bit hurt. When I first told my family and my mom and everything,

She was like, oh, she's really sorry. And it's really shaken her up. And she's apparently, she said she's contemplating suicide. Right back to the old tricks she's always done. And I felt like saying, like, I know these tricks and you're following for them too, you know, but I'm not going to say that to my mom.

I know the trick she's using with all the people in my family that are still on her side. She's very convincing. She's very charismatic. It's just really sad that, you know, she can't somehow get justice. You know, or I can't get justice, I guess. All of this is her fault. You know, she's the one that did this, so I can't get mad at her.

anyone else for their reaction because I see at the end of the day it just goes back to mostly just blame her for for being the cause of it yeah of course it would be nice obviously to to see her pay for what she did because I certainly paid the hardest thing I've had to face through this whole challenge or through this whole experience was sort of in a way losing part of my youth in

That's the time when you're not supposed to be feeling like a zombie when you're at that age. It just kills me that I went through so many years being so confused and so different than what I normally would have been. Stealing a part of my youth is what kind of upsets me. The other part is the relationships that it damaged because I was so emotionally far away as a direct result of that.

I don't feel like it ruined my life. I can't say that I was never happy. I was, you know, it just, but it took little pieces. You know, that's hard sometimes to think about when you're nearing 50 now. And, you know, I wish I would have just dealt with it and come out with it 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I just would have made such a big difference. I find, you know, that many people have gone through a lot of things. And so it,

It helps me be able to empathize more with others. What's kind of helped me the most is just having a support group, people that kind of understand me, that don't judge me for it.

Sexual abuse, I just feel like is such an insidious damage. It affects you in ways that I don't think any other kind of abuse does because it's a combination of mental abuse and physical abuse. It's put together. It's extra potent. And when you're at a young age and you don't know how to process or deal with those things, it robs you of so many other things that have lifelong ripple effects.

I don't want to say I've completely moved past it, but I've been able to put it in a place where it doesn't affect my future. Now it's just sadness and wishing I could just go back and have a talk with a 12-year-old kid and just explain that it's not your fault. You know, there's a way out. ♪

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment, but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.

To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery+.