275: What if the demons were too large to see?
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I don't even know how I'm supposed to respond. I don't even know what I'm supposed to feel. I don't even have an emotional reaction at this point. I just sit in shock. And as I did with every other time in my life, I go, I'm going to fix it. I'm going to help. I'm going to figure this out. And we're going to get through it together because that's how I keep my family together. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 275.

What if the demons were too large to see? This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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My parents didn't really get along very well, and I don't have early memories of them happy. It's almost like anytime we tried to do anything as a family, there would be a fight and a blow up, and that would be the end of it. When I was nine, my dad hit my mom.

so hard that she had multiple root canals. And she, you know, went to the police, filed divorce paperwork. And, you know, at nine years old, I didn't really understand what was happening other than my dad wasn't home anymore. And he told us, I hit mom, I have to go. I do have one younger sister who's about four years younger than I am. And it was really just me and her and my mom after that. We saw my dad birthdays and holidays, but the, like every other weekend didn't happen.

He had no custody, no rights to us at that point. I was very upset with my mom for taking my dad away. You know, I knew that he'd hit her the one time, but I didn't really understand why he wasn't allowed in our lives. He was my dad. As I got older, I started finding ways to try to see him and talk to him and build a relationship with him in secret from her.

And when I was about 12, I was going like door to door selling tickets for a fundraiser. And lo and behold, two blocks away from my house, my dad answered the door. And I discovered that his girlfriend lived two blocks away and started finding ways to go over there and see him. I would go to the tennis courts and he would play tennis after school. And he started telling me his side of the story.

She did this to me and she took everything from me. She took the house, you know, she took full custody of us and she hasn't allowed us to see him. I know I felt at the time like I was actually building a relationship with my dad in a different way. I was becoming a teenager and had a lot of questions that I didn't really have answers to because yeah, I didn't remember them as happy. I didn't want them to be together, but I didn't understand why she kept him from us like that.

It just further deepened my wounding with my mom. You know, at 13, I thought I should be a full grown adult and I should have all the freedom in the world. And my dad really talked to me that way. He always was very focused on my intellect. And I looked at him like he gets me and she didn't get me. So as a teenager, I gravitated towards the person who made me feel like I was a grownup.

I was very disconnected. I went to school, but then I snuck out of my house and I got involved with older boys. I became very promiscuous. I don't even know what I was searching for at the time, but I basically decided I was going to be a grownup and do whatever I wanted.

My mom ended up putting me in an all-girls high school, like a church school uniform, the whole shebang. And I think she thought it would help me to be away from the distraction of boys. As I hit puberty, which happened for me about 12, 13, I developed very, very quickly. I grew three breast sizes in a year, and all of these men are giving me lots of attention.

My school is across town, so I'm taking the city public bus to school and back. And even in my Catholic schoolgirl uniform, I'm getting a lot of attention. And so I started to really enjoy all of the attention I was receiving. I felt like I had all the power in these situations, not recognizing, of course, that the attention I was receiving was from, you know, at the time, probably 18, 19, 20, sometimes 30-year-olds.

As I started sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night, I started meeting up with some of these men that I met on the bus. It was like this freedom escape from the real world. I got to just be, you know, what I thought was a grown-up.

At 16, I got a job and I was working as a barista at a coffee shop. A lot of people coming in talking to me, a lot of the Marines would come in and give me attention as well. And then one started coming on all the time and we started hanging out and things with my mom were actually getting more and more escalating and I wasn't wanting to talk to her anymore. I wasn't wanting to share with her anything anymore.

And she started to realize that I had become sexually active. And at that point, I felt a huge amount of judgment. I was like, I'm doing what I'm supposed to. Leave me alone. And it got to the point where I really wanted a really bigger relationship with this Marine that I was seeing. And I had asked her, you know, can he spend the night? And she said, absolutely not. Not in my house, basically. And I said, OK, well, I'm not going to come home anymore. I was 17 or so at the time, and I stopped coming home.

And I started couch surfing and I started sneaking into the barracks. I would still go to school, but I wouldn't come home anymore. I wouldn't interact with her. Eventually, I realized that if I got married to my Marine boyfriend, that we would be given a house. And so I handed her marriage papers at 17 and asked her to sign them. She did because I had stopped coming home and she figured at least I would have a house. And then she wanted to control how I got married. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. We're going to the justice of the peace tomorrow morning. Like we're doing this now.

And it was actually my dad who showed up as a witness for that marriage. And we moved in to a house. And actually, for a short period of time, we lived with my dad and his girlfriend. They had a little studio apartment attached to their house. And so we lived there for a few months while we waited for base housing to be available to us. And my dad thought it was great. My husband and I and him, we would have beers and drink and basically party with my dad.

I think my dad had always felt like when we got older, we would seek him out and we would see the truth of his experience. And that's when our relationship would happen. And that is what happened. That husband was a bit of a drunk, you know, and I'm 17. Remember, can't go to the bars. We can have parties at our house, but I can't go do the things that he wanted to go do.

And then after about a year of our marriage, he was getting ready to get out of the military. And at that point in time, I really wanted to leave Hawaii. I had lived on the island my whole life. I was 18, didn't have a relationship with my mom. At this point, we were not even talking. She was very emotional and wanted me to talk to her, and I really didn't. His family was living in Colorado.

And my hope was, well, maybe when we start over and we get away from the military and he'll stop drinking so much. We actually lived with his family for a while. His dad thought, you know, maybe she can help him get his act together, I think. But as soon as we moved out of that house into our house of our own, the drinking started, the partying started, the friends started, he stopped coming home. And at that point, I said, I'm done. I'm done with the drinking. I'm done with the not coming home. I'm just done.

I had found a job in Colorado working in IT, working as a help desk for a credit card processing company. And I really liked my job. I was making a lot of friends. I started dating. I was all of a sudden the grown-up that I'd always wanted to be. It was this feeling of, oh, this is what I was looking for. I was completely on my own. I was completely independent. I could buy anything I wanted. My bills were paid. I got my freedom.

One of the men I worked with started to be a little bit interested in me, but he was married and I was just kind of like, yeah, yeah, that's whatever. He's kind of trying to connect with me on this idea of our failed marriages. He was talking about his wife and how things weren't good between them. And so I was kind of sharing where I was with my soon-to-be ex-husband at the same time.

He was very engaging with me. He very much wanted my opinion and would talk to me about different things. And this was the first time I'd met somebody where I thought he really intrigued me. He invited me to go on a car ride. He actually said, my wife, she took off. She went to go visit her family. I think that's it. And it's over. You want to go for a drive? And I said, okay.

So he picked me up and we went for a drive and drove around for a couple of hours. And then he dropped me back off and he came inside. The next thing I know, we end up sleeping together. I think this is just going to be fun. We're both newly single. We're just going to have fun together. So we start this roller coaster and I start to develop feelings and I start to really want this. But everything in me is like, but he has to actually leave her. This isn't okay. Things are so bad. Why hasn't he left yet?

And then he would show up and he would tell me that they had another fight and it's happening for real this time. And I would believe him. This goes on for a year until she does finally move out and he does finally break up. And I went, oh, my gosh. He tells me that it had been me all along and he only really loved me and he wants to be with me. We're talking and she's moving out and I want to like go out in public with him.

And he's like, no, no, wait, people think I just broke up with her. He basically said, you know, I'm just now really newly single and I want to go have fun. And he started asking me to bring other people into the bedroom with us. He wanted to watch me with other people.

You know, at this point in time, I had kind of left my promiscuous ways and was really trying to focus on being with one person and in a more serious relationship. And I didn't want to go back to those days. I was starting to realize they weren't the healthiest of choices.

But I'd also for a long time really romanticize them as you know how experienced I was and all the things that I had done. And he really liked talking about those things and he really liked I had some pictures of me as a teenager that he really liked and I was excited to show off you know to this older man how experienced I was and how non shy I was and all of these things but I also didn't want to go do that again.

I held my ground and eventually he dropped it. And I was like, I just want to be with you. I don't want to do those things. He told me that I was the fourth person he'd ever slept with. And so he made it like, you got to experience all these things. I want to too. But at some point he eventually stopped asking and

I actually really liked this idea that he was more innocent. It felt secure. It felt safe because, you know, with my first husband, he was out drinking, doing God knows what with people all the time. There was never a recognition of who I was as feeling special to him.

I had never really felt special to anybody before. And I felt like it was my responsibility to help him process his things and process his emotions of his previous marriages. Because to me, it was like, you don't see what an amazing person you are. So let me help you see it. It really wasn't much thought of I'm not okay, or this isn't okay, or I'm upset, or I'm scared. It was really, how do I help him?

So we continued our relationship and we bought a townhouse together. We moved in and we started doing traveling. We went to Vegas. We had fun and we worked at the same place. So we would drive to work together, come home together. He understood me. He heard me. We would work on work problems together. And I really enjoyed his perspective. And I really felt like I was learning things from him. And at the time, I believe this is the one for me. He's the one.

And then I got pregnant. At this point, I'm 22. And he freaks out, says, you know, maybe I was going to want to have babies one day, but not yet. And I'm like, well, we're in a serious relationship. We live together. We're having a baby. So he probably didn't like eat or sleep for two weeks with how upset he was about it. And I felt immediately isolated.

I felt all of a sudden like I didn't know what was going to happen, but we'd been here before. I just have to hold strong, let him process his things. He eventually started to come around and seemed to get excited about the idea. I really wanted to get married. He kept dragging his feet because this would be his now third marriage, and he didn't want to feel like he was another failure again. And I'm like, well, we're having a kid. I eventually said, screw it, I'm not going to wait anymore. And I proposed to him.

He said yes, and then I planned a wedding in six weeks, and we got married when I was six months pregnant. Things changed really fast after the baby came. My whole identity shifted all of a sudden to being a mom. So I ended up quitting my job, and all of a sudden he was very less available to me. If I called after work and said, when are you coming home, he would just say soon, and sometimes hours would go by.

I got really, really frustrated about it. And I wanted to keep that connection with him, but it seemed like it was gone. So I just focused on being a mom. We moved into a new house, into a bigger house. And within a month of moving there, I ended up pregnant again.

I was a little bit terrified to be pregnant this quickly. But my husband, he's working long hours. But then when he does come home, then he does pay attention to us. And so it's like he's super far removed and things are hard and I don't know where he is and I don't know what's going on and I'm frustrated. And then he would come home and apologize and I'm doing all of this for you guys. You know, he was now financially providing for us and just let it go.

Then we ended up pregnant with a third baby. And at this point, I was feeling like I was wanting to do something else with my life, but then I had another baby. But I also had this realization, like I didn't know how to do life anymore that wasn't just mom. Like that was my whole identity. His dad, who lived in the same town, was sick with cancer and things started to deteriorate with his dad pretty rapidly.

I started to see my husband go downhill from a mental health perspective. He started to get really depressive and even more withdrawn. You know, he would come home after work at 8 or 9 o'clock at night and sit in the driveway for an hour before he could even come in the house. I would try to talk to him and say, you know, maybe we need to go see somebody or get some help. And he would say, no, no, I was depressed as a teenager and I know what that is. This isn't it. His dad passed about Christmas time after my youngest was born.

He started traveling even more and he wouldn't even call while he was gone. And one night he just doesn't come home at all. Hours go by and it's 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock. And, you know, I'm still nursing my youngest and like, I got to go to bed. I'm not waiting up for you because he'd been so absent. I left alone and I went to bed. And then I woke up about 2.30 in the morning to feed the baby and he's still not home.

He usually slept downstairs on the couch and I snuck down there and he wasn't there. And I looked outside and his car wasn't there. And where the hell is he? I called the hospitals. They didn't have him. They didn't have any unknown people. So I went back to bed. There's not much to be done. And then at five, I woke up again to nurse and he's still not home. This is like all night now. This isn't just a little bit late. This is all night. Something is wrong.

And his phone had been going straight to voicemail. And so I got the idea to call non-emergency dispatch. And they said, yeah, let me transfer you to the jail. And I was like, okay, I'll call you right back because I don't think he's there. Then the lady at the jail answers and says, yeah, we have him.

What? What do you mean you have him? You know, my thought is, you know, is he drunk? Is it a DUI? You know, what other sort of small like charge might there be that he might be locked up for? You know, no idea what could possibly be going on here. It makes no sense. And she says he's been arrested for attempted human trafficking with a $250,000 bond. I about dropped the phone in shock. I hung up and I started Googling.

As far as I know, human trafficking is shipping containers and borders and people. And we're in this small Colorado town. There's no border here. There's no, huh? It's really where I'm at. And I also start to have a fear response that if he's arrested for this, do they think I'm involved somehow? Are they going to come get me? I don't really find a whole lot of information on Google on what it specifically means because it's a very broad charge. And so I need a plan.

"He needs help" is my reaction. He needs my help. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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I called bail bondsman's the bail bondsman's answer the phone at 530 in the morning. And they tell me that most of the time in these charges that the bail actually gets reduced in the next couple of days and at a bond hearing. And they expected it to get reduced to $100,000. And the lawyer says kind of the same thing that they usually reduce the charges, but he agrees to meet with me that morning.

Okay, I got a plan, I think. We're going to go talk to the lawyer, put the money up, and I'm going to go help him. I'm going to get him out. So we make an appointment to see him with my baby. And they call me back, actually, and say, the baby can't come because of the nature of the charges. He can't visit with anybody under 18. And I'm like, what? But that's his son. I don't understand. Oh, my God. He is actually in trouble for something.

And my phone rings and I have to accept the charges for the call. It's my husband. He says they wouldn't let him call me all night. This is the first time they let him call me. He sounded very scared, very upset. And I said, it's okay. It's okay. We're going to get through this. It's okay. And what he says is, you know, there was some kind of an ad that he responded to and he didn't think any of it was real and he was really trying to help them. And my thought process is like a what? Like I don't comprehend a word that he's saying.

All I can hear is he did do something, but he wasn't trying to hurt anybody. Somehow this is blown out of proportion. I have to help him. That's all I can hear, even though he's telling me the story about an ad that he responded to. I have this belief that there's a mistake. There's some kind of misunderstanding and we just need to get the right lawyer on it. And it's just going to it's just going to go away because this doesn't make any sense to me.

We go to the bond hearing and there's more defendants in this case and they're all charged with the same crime and there's federal agents everywhere. It's like this huge operation has happened and they come out in orange, they're shackled on their ankles and their hands and everybody looks disheveled and filthy and they start reading the charges and going through the bond hearing and we start to understand that this is some kind of a sting operation.

In his particular case, they were hoping to up his charge from attempted human trafficking to human trafficking, and they asked not to reduce his bond. My husband is visibly crying in the jury box where they're all standing, just a mess, and all I can feel is I have to help him. They don't reduce his bond, but I am just determined to get him out. So I had already transferred money just in case, and I was able to get the cash to go get him out, and so I did.

He comes out dressed in the same clothes he went to work in two days ago. And he's a mess. And he gets in the car and just starts crying and bawling and says, get me the fuck out of here. Okay, I'm on it. I'm getting out of here. And I start driving. What happened? How did you end up here? You went from work to your mom's house and then jail.

So he starts kind of saying the same thing that the lawyer had said, that there was an ad that he responded to. He didn't think any of it was real. He was just trying to help. And I'm like, an ad for what? And he says, oh, oh, escorts. Huh? How long has that been going on? Like since forever. He's very flippant. Just since forever.

And I'm like, what? I don't even know how I'm supposed to respond. I don't even know what I'm supposed to feel. I don't even have an emotional reaction at this point. I just sit in shock because then he starts to go, when they offered kids, I didn't think it was real.

I had to see if it was real before I did anything because I was going to report it, but I didn't want to get in any trouble and I'm so stupid. And he just keeps going on and on and on. And then he starts talking about, should I run? You know, I know we'd forfeit the money, but maybe you guys could meet me later or something. And I was like, no, like, calm down. We're going to get through this. It's going to be fine.

All I can hear is the fact that he's admitting to seeing escorts since forever and basically got swept up into a sting operation where he was trying to help them. And as I did with every other time in my life, I go, I'm going to fix it. I'm going to help. I'm going to figure this out and we're going to get through it together because that's how I keep my family together. He has to stay at his mom's house because he can't be around the kids. So I drop him off at his mom's house and I go back home.

My mind is going a million miles an hour. Am I going to get in trouble too? I start backing up my computer because, you know, your whole life is on your computer. Your bills, the baby photos, everything. And I start being worried they're going to come take things in my house and I feel like I'm being watched. I remember going outside, you know, to just get some fresh air because I couldn't hardly think and there's cops driving up and down my street over and over and I feel like they're just watching me. We ended up hiring more lawyers.

My husband tells the lawyers that he has search history about how to report things to Homeland Security because he didn't even think it was real. He thought they were just out to scam people, but he really needed to make sure so that he wasn't going to get in trouble. You know, he said he even had a draft email composed to report this. And so I was hopeful that that was going to show his intent was different. And then the articles in the paper started to come out.

There was more information than the articles than I actually knew at the time. But at the same time, it didn't not match what he said. It was just much more detail. Basically, the original ad was 19 and up, and then they'd offer an 11, 14-year-old. And then those men who proceeded to have the conversations and meet up with them and potentially even exchange money were the ones that were arrested in the sting operation.

I don't actually know at the time how you find escorts or what that looks like, but the article basically said each man went to varying degrees of meeting up and or exchanging money to have sex with these minors. Addresses aren't private information. You can Google people's addresses easily. And I felt like there was a giant red A painted on my door when that article came out because I knew that these type of charges elicit huge responses in the public.

And that if somebody could figure out where we lived, what was going to happen to us? And was I even safe in my own house? I'm focused on what is going to happen to me and what is going to happen to the kids. And are we safe? I'm not going to take my kid's dad away like my mom took mine away.

And so I write a letter to the court asking for supervised visitation, which we do get awarded. The supervised visitation is like a big daddy play date. They think it's the best thing ever because the truth is they had never actually had focused attention and time from him before. Now he would come over and spend two hours focused on them. We would all play together as a family. It was all of a sudden like I had the relationship and the family that I always wanted back.

Even though he was admitting to cheating on me with a bunch of prostitutes, basically, the way I was processing this is like that he was going through this huge mental health thing and then he's now waking up and he's waking up and he wants to be part of the family again. And that's all that I ever wanted.

And so I started getting babysitters and finding ways to see him and started flirting with him. And it was like we almost went through a second honeymoon of sorts while he's having these amazing playdates with the kids and we're at the house together. Then we start talking on the phone like 24-7. He's in my ear constantly. I don't even have a thought anymore without him right there.

If there was any anger or any emotion coming up, it was immediately shut down and I wasn't allowed to feel it and it didn't matter because he was home now. And just like it didn't matter when he didn't come home for work for hours and hours, the moment he was home, I was okay again. And it was the same feeling.

It's coming up really, really loudly for me that just as my mom took my dad away and didn't allow me to have a relationship with him because of what happened between their relationship and then they didn't have a good relationship. And yes, he hit her and yes, they shouldn't be together. But to me, him cheating on me with escorts wasn't something that meant he should not have a relationship with his kids.

I was like on a mission, which was directly connected to the fact that my dad was taken away from me when I didn't get a say.

As part of the criminal trial, his lawyers had him get evaluated for probation. And so when that report came out, I actually did ask to see it because I'm still trying to kind of wrap my head around this. I'm trying to understand. And it's talking about his sexual history. And so he's claiming there was 50 prostitutes over his lifetime and that they were not just women, but men as well. I don't care about who people are attracted to, but it was another you kept that from me.

You didn't tell me that part." And he was very ashamed of being attracted to men. So I tried to stuff all that down again and not be upset about it. You know, every time the conversation about the escorts would come up, he believed he was paying them money and they enjoyed it and he was helping them. He kept saying, "This is going to be my rock bottom and then we're going to be stronger than we ever were before." His lawyers receive a plea deal offer and the plea deal was even better than they expected.

They thought that he would have to serve some jail time, but the plea deal offered only four years of probation. And so I'm like, but if you're innocent, why aren't we fighting it? Why are you pleading guilty when you have all this stuff that says you were innocent? You're innocent, right? And he's just like, yes, but they're offering me a plea deal that's no jail time. Like, I can't not take that. That's a no brainer.

The plea deal comes with sex offender registry. It comes with a felony charge. It comes with sex offender treatment and four years of sex offender probation, which is different than other probation. It's much more monitored. And I'm not happy, but I also on some level, like I don't really want him to go to prison for 10 years either. We go to court and he stands up and pleads guilty to solicitation of a minor. And, you know, in that moment, he regained all of his parenting rights.

All I felt was relief that he wasn't going to go to jail, relief that he was allowed to come home to see the kids and live there again. I had hope for the future. I had hope that things were going to get better and that he was going to address his deviances. He was going to continue therapy. He was going to figure out what had been pulling him towards escorts this whole time and that we were going to build this amazing life. He'd worked in IT security. He's probably not going to get another IT security job as a felon.

I start to realize pretty quickly here that I'm going to have to go back to work. And within a couple of months, I found a position that I actually thought, hey, this is exactly what I used to do. I could do that. And I got the job. And I was shocked. Like, oh, my goodness, I'm going to go back to work. I hadn't been working in six years. And what am I going to do with the kids? Because he couldn't pick them up from school or take them. But he could keep the baby. And so I would just have to manage the dropping off and picking up of the other two.

Working was really good for me. I didn't even know how much of my identity I had wrapped around this family experience. And all of a sudden, my husband wasn't in my ear or in front of my face 24-7. I started to build a different sense of identity. I started to realize that I had been living in a bubble. I started to feel like my safe place had actually started to shift. And it was no longer that my husband was my safe place. It was actually my job that was my safe place.

The relationship between my husband and I also started to shift because I started to actually process the fact that he had been cheating on me 50 plus times. And I started to feel like every time he wanted to be intimate with me, there were ghosts in the room. I started to feel like every time he looked at me, even that's how you looked at them. That's what you did with them. I started to be revolted and I started to push him away and I started to not want to look at him. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to process it. All I knew to do was to numb out.

I started coming home and drinking a half a bottle of wine before I could even look at him, before I could talk to him because I was disgusted. So he surprised me again by filing for divorce. He filed a paperwork saying he was the primary parent and so I was the one who needed to move out. It was ridiculous to me. He couldn't even go to those kids' schools or any of their activities and he was going to claim primary parent status.

It was another betrayal. It was a, who the hell do you think you are? After everything I did to support you, you're going to do this? Like, what? I was probably angrier than I had ever been. Even after all of the infidelity and betrayal, I was more angry at him trying to establish dominance and try to kick me out of my house and away from my kids than I have ever been.

So we went to the temporary orders hearing and, you know, it was really the first time I stood up in court against him. You know, he's a sex offender on probation for trying to meet an 11- and 14-year-old. Like, he's admitted he's pled guilty to this offense. The judge did say he needed to move out, and I was really grateful for that, but I was also pretty scared what was going to happen with a 50/50 arrangement.

He moved out and then we started this arrangement of the kids were actually going back and forth four times a week for a while, which was insanity. He could park like two blocks from the school and the kids could walk to his car. And that's how we picked them up because he wasn't allowed on campus. And nobody seemed to think that this was a problem.

I eventually started to realize that my husband was telling them that the reasons we weren't staying together was because mommy is mad at daddy. And so mommy is mad at daddy. And so therefore it's mommy's fault, basically, because I was the one breaking the family up. I was frustrated. I was exhausted. I didn't know what else to do at that point. And so I told my lawyers, well, I guess that's what we do. We settle. And it would be a 50-50 arrangement.

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Then I started to notice some really different behavior happening in my middle child. I had picked him up from school early one day because he'd had a presentation at school and he was super excited that I got to come because we don't usually get one-on-one time with mommy. And he wanted to watch a movie and get some ice cream. And it was this big, exciting thing for him. And we put the movie on and he climbs in my lap and he starts to try to make out with me. There's this energy of almost sexual towards me. And I'm like, whoa, buddy, get off. He's six at the time.

And I'm like, what is going on with my child? And I start to have this feeling coming up in me that there's something darker happening in that house and that what is he being exposed to? I'm driving to school, take the boys to school, and I pull up into the school and my middle son says, sometimes I suck on daddy's fingers. I don't even know what to say.

Because I don't want to shock him. I don't want to scare him. I don't want to shut him down. And I start to realize that my kid is being groomed. And then, of course, it comes rushing back into my face. This was a man who was arrested for trying to have sex with 11 and 14 year old. Holy crap. It's right in front of my face the whole freaking time. My motherly instinct is to grab my kids and drive to Canada. And I can't do that.

I'm in the middle of a court case, in which case it would be considered kidnapping to even leave the state. And so I talked to the kids therapist and told them what happened. And she said, if he had said that to her, the next question she would have said is, can you show me what that means? And so she suggested that I ask him to show me. And so another week or so later, I did. I asked him to show me and I recorded this conversation. And what he showed me was his thumb going in and out of his mouth, just exactly as you might fear.

I called her back and told her what he showed me. And she said, if he'd done that, I would have to call Child Protective Services. I'm a mandatory reporter. That's what I would do. So I called Child Protective Services. I reported everything. And I reported all of that to his probation officer and his treatment therapist. The caseworker meets me and we're talking a little bit. And then the guy is trying to talk to him. He says, hey, your mom told me about that game you play with your dad where you suck on your fingers.

And my son is so scared, he's hiding under the kitchen table. Like he's terrified of this man. And he just goes, no, we don't do that anymore. This is a man who's supposed to be able to interview children. My six, seven-year-old child who's clearly scared of you, and this is how you're going to interview him about a really sensitive thing? I keep trying to tell him, you know, he's got prior arrest. Like he's got a history here. Like this is clearly grooming behavior.

And, you know, the guy says, yeah, we know about all of that and we're going to go talk to dad now and we'll get back to you. The caseworker eventually got back to me a couple of weeks later and said, well, probation polygraphed him and cleared him. So we're dropping it.

And I'm sitting here going, wait, the man has full access to my children. He's on probation as a sex offender. And I can't even see his file and what you're questioning him on. I was so scared. I was so upset. I felt so helpless. I felt like the system was basically going to end up where I shared a custody with a man who was going to abuse my children. And I didn't know what to do.

This is my rock bottom point right here. This is where I feel like my head had been buried in the sand for so long and that this is what was happening and nobody seemed to be able to help me. Nobody seemed to be able to do anything and that I was just going to have to be at the mercy of the court and hope that they would see that this wasn't okay, but there wasn't a whole lot more I could even do. ♪

I had talked to a couple of coworkers about what was going on, and one of the HR ladies at my job, she says, I have an uncle who works for ICE, and I'm going to call him and see if he can help. So she calls him, and he puts us in touch with Homeland Security, who puts me in touch with the arresting officer, who ended up being the guy putting the cuffs on him back in 2016, who connects me to the local police officer who was standing next to him back in 2016. Both of them vowed to help me and said anything we can do to help.

One of them gets the Child Protective Services case reopened so that they can actually do a real forensic interview with my son. Then my realtor actually suggested that I call the district attorney. The district attorney says, I can't really do much, but I can unseal the case file for you. And so he gets me the case file and I finally get to see what actually happened back in 2016. I actually get to see the full text transcript between my husband and the undercover agent.

Any last question that I have of whether it was real or whether or not he was going to actually go through with it is gone. I get to see it for real. And I get to understand that there's no shadow of a doubt that he would have gone through with this. And it was right there on the screen.

I also started doing as much as I possibly could to try to protect my kids. And I started reading to them books about body safety and keeping private parts private. And one of the books I was reading talked about, you know, if somebody ever shows you pictures or videos with naked people on it, that that's a red flag and you need to report it. My middle son, the same one who's experiencing all of this, says, oh, but it's OK if it's animated, right?

I asked him about their bedroom situations at their father's house. I had heard that they moved bedrooms around a little bit. And he tells me that his room is separated from the others and it's downstairs. And he's most of the time he sleeps with daddy. And I asked him, what about the others? He said, no, just him. And then I asked if his dad ever comes into his bed. And he says, yeah, sometimes. And I was just like that motherfucker.

We went to court with a three-inch binder full of recordings, documentation, case files, all of it. And his side of the stand had a couple of stacked pieces of paper. Anything that they might throw at me, I was ready for.

It was an eight-hour court hearing. And we stood up in court to basically say, with his mental health issues, with his history, with his everything, could he be abusing and grooming the children? And every time, the answer was yes. And then eventually, it was my husband's turn on the stand. And he just kept going on and on about how upset he was with me that I wouldn't talk to him and how he just wanted to talk to me. And he didn't even want to do this in the first place. And he was basically crying on the stand, playing the victim.

He used up so much of his lawyer's time that they only had five minutes at the end to cross-examine me. And then it was my turn. I got on the stand and it was the performance of my life.

Everything that I had witnessed specifically that wasn't in the report had to come through me. So I not only had to show specifically what the finger sucking incident looked like, but I needed to talk about being shown videos or pictures. I needed to talk about the sleeping situations. I needed to talk about seeing the case file for the first time just within the last month and actually finally learning what had happened in 2016 and why I am doing this. And, you know, the judge watched me the whole time.

Generally, they don't make an order right in that moment, but the judge was appalled that he was sleeping with the children, actually. She was completely appalled, and she ordered him on the spot to not sleep with them anymore. She was going to immediately reduce his parenting time down to two afternoons a week, no more overnights, and if he didn't comply, he would only ever have supervised visitation. I just was able to take a deep breath in that moment, and okay, fine.

We're getting somewhere. It's going to be okay. This was March of 2020. So what we didn't know was two weeks later, the pandemic was going to hit the world and the world was going to shut down. And so when the kids went remote for school, they were quarantined with me. And they still had three or four hours with him twice a week. The very last time he messaged me and said he had a runny nose and he wanted to take all precautions and did I want to just keep them? And I said, absolutely, absolutely.

And that was the last time that they have ever seen their father. It's coming up on three years now of zero contact. And we have not received a call, email, dime, nothing. My kids don't even remember him in the same way. They know he existed. And there's a few memories here and there. But they don't think of him as their father anymore. At this point, it would be really, really hard for him to ever come back into our lives after basically abandoning them. And I have no desire to open that door.

COVID allowed my kids and I to heal. They were home full time with me all of a sudden. And our relationship got to actually get better in a different way. And I got to become their safe person again. And they got to talk to me and my job went remote. And that was challenging. Yes, but I didn't care.

For us, it was really healing. And I used that time to learn everything I could possibly at this point about, you know, spirituality. And I jumped into learning other healing modalities so that I could actually work on healing myself and recognizing the patterns that had caused this experience in the first place.

I really wanted to make sure that I addressed those things and I didn't do this experience again and that I could help my kids heal from the experience they had. And I learned everything I possibly could. And I ended up completely switching trajectories. I didn't care about working for IT anymore. I wanted to help people.

So many people end up sharing custody with their abusers and their children's abusers. And knowing that, and knowing that me, a very white, very privileged, still had a very hard fight in the family court system, I knew I had to do something more and I had to change things.

I really want to raise money to help people who don't have those financial resources and really are in unsafe situations because there's not that I'm aware of another organization out there that specifically helps people with the custody fights from their abusers. There's a lot of resources for all kinds of other things, but not that one. To me, it's unacceptable that money is determined who wins and who loses in so many custody cases.

Most of the time, people are punished for being in their trauma. Because if I had left when he was originally in jail, I wouldn't have had the fight I had. I wouldn't have had to explain why I supported him. So many people stay in unsafe situations because they are bonded to their abuser. They are literally addicted to that. It is not something they can control. And they end up being punished in the family court system because of it.

To me, that needs to change. And I'm going to do everything I can to raise awareness and raise money to do exactly that. You know, looking at the choices that I had made and feeling like I had actually caused on some level my kid to be put in a situation where he could be groomed. Like that's a huge emotion. And really a lot of guilt and shame can be brought up. Even after we got out of the situation, I would beat myself up and I would say like, how did I not see it?

I had to learn and I had to really recognize that, you know, I had this belief that my kids were going to be okay if they had their dad in their lives. And that, you know, and so it was my responsibility to support him so that they could do that. I had to realize I was backwards. I was so backwards that actually my kids needed me to be okay. They regulate their emotions and their feeling and their sense of safety in the world off the people that are taking care of them.

It took me a while to even not be scared to leave my house, even after he vanished and we didn't hear from him again. Not that he could even do anything, but even the idea of passing him in the car would send me into a panic. My body remembers all of these unsafe things, and you can't talk your body down, really. All you can do is experience it, and it takes over.

The more understanding I got of how my body was working and why I was having the responses, and the more understanding I got of why the patterns were created and what from my childhood created this experience and how my teenage years made me a perfect target in a sense for somebody like this and how my need to be loved by a father-like figure meant that I attracted the men that I attracted. And all of those kind of understandings helped me at least understand that it's in some level

I could release this blame and judgment I held for being in these relationships, and I could help teach my body what safety meant in a new way. It was actually my sister who suggested I talk to my mom

She said, you know, mom kind of went through the same thing. Like maybe she would understand a little bit and she could be somebody you could talk to. And I started reaching out to my mom more and she really became somebody I could talk to. And she got why I made the decisions I did. And it really brought us back together in a different way. And we're all just trying to learn and grow and we can have compassion for our family members.

We don't know the whole story. And as a kid, I definitely didn't know the whole story. And, you know, she's shared more with me about how she felt after my dad hit her and how she felt their entire marriage. And it was very, very eerily similar to how I felt. I really actually started to feel more seen by my mom. And I'm really grateful to have that reconnection and to see her journey and my childhood with a different lens.

I want people to see that no matter what your childhood looked like, no matter how bad it gets, that you can come out of it, you can change. And the experiences that we have created that have repeated over and over again, they get to teach us things. They get to be lessons and they get to be lessons that we don't just learn for ourselves, but we get to learn and share with the world.

And my hope is that at some point, people don't have to hit rock bottom before they wake up and they get it and they realize what they've done. And they can learn through hearing what other people went through. And they can actually retain some of that so that we don't have to go through trauma to wake up and to change our lives.

Today's episode featured Amanda Quick. You can find out more about her and contact her on Instagram at AmandaQuickHealing. You can read more about the many layers of her story in her memoir, The Sex Trafficker's Wife, a story of truth, faith, and trust in self, available on Amazon or wherever books are sold. You can also find more links and reach out on her website at thesextraffickerswife.com.

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