In The Backseat of My Body

When Kate begins to recover haunting memories, she must confront a family history shaped by silence and generational harm. What follows is her quest to piece together the truth and reclaim a stolen childhood.

Kate Price's book, This Happened to Me: A Reckoning, is out now.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse and suicide.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Listener discretion is advised. Traumatic memory is fragmented and nonlinear
for a reason. My brain, but my family, wants me
to leave these memories buried. It had done its job
detaching from my body, playing possum, so I wouldn't suffer

(00:30):
my perpetrator's abuse in real time. But I have forced
my brain to follow the trail of somatic breadcrumbs. I
remember sounds, smells, tastes, and bodily sensations down the path
to my solidified memories. Even as I type these words,
my brain fights me, tries to persuade me to give up,

(00:54):
then acquiesces reluctantly, loosening its grip and letting the words flow.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
That's Kate Price, sociologist, associate research scientist at the Wellesley
Centers for Women at Wellesley College, internationally recognized child sex
trafficking expert, an author of the recent memoir This Happened
to Me. Kate's story is one of the most haunting
and powerful I've ever heard, which, given the scope of

(01:24):
this podcast, is saying a lot. It's also a story
of an extraordinary human being who refused to allow what
happened to her to consume her. Ultimately, It's a story
about memory, familial history, tenacity, redemption, grit, and grace. I'm

(01:53):
Dani Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
The landscape of my childhood was incredibly dark. Spent a
lot of time hiding, a lot of time just with
my head and a book, trying to survive, and then
also just living this dual light of presenting as an

(02:27):
athletic swimmer, a neighbor who played with the neighborhood kids,
a great student at school, but at home just living
in abject terror.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
So you grew up with your mother and your father
and your sister Sissy in Appalachia, in central Pennsylvania, in
a milltown, in a house that had been where you
were told that it had been a funeral home.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yes, that was the story that our parents told us,
and it made sense to me. The windows were much
longer than our neighbor's windows, and the lore was that
these downstairs windows were bigger because so that they could
put coffins, you know inside, you know, take them in
and out of the windows. And then the basement was also,

(03:18):
we were told, used as the embalming room. There was
a big drain in the middle that we're told was
used for bearing blood and all of these things. And
it made a lot of sense, even though I never
saw any pictures of our house being used in that way.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Why do you think your parents shared with you and
your sister, you know, who were little kids growing up there,
that this was the history of the house. What do
you think they were thinking.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
I don't think they were thinking. There wasn't a lot
of thought going into our well being. I remember watching
when my best friend Jess was over for weekend sleepover.
I remember watching the Shining when we were like eight,
and I was running out to the kitchen whenever I

(04:07):
got scared, and it just didn't, you know, not much
made sense in our home. So that seemed, you know,
hearing that it was a funeral home seemed pretty par
for the course. Because there were also two cemeteries within,
you know, one was on the exact same block that

(04:27):
I grew up on, and then the other was just
down just down the road, and the fire all was
directly across the streets, so it just seemed like this
would make sense for the home, for our home to
be used in some commercial purpose that would be linked
to the churches and the firehouse and the cemeteries that

(04:51):
were within eyesight of our home.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
So your parents they married in nineteen sixty five. Your
mom was twenty yes, and then your sister Sissy is
a couple of years older than you, and she came
along two years after they got married. But tell me
about Let's start with your mother.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
What was she like the mother of my childhood when
it was just me and her and Sissy, was really
fun and creative, and I could almost say care free.
She loved loved music. She loved Laura Brannigan and Neil

(05:32):
Diamond and CCR. And she would play these records when
we were in the kitchen, just the three of us,
baking using her mother's pyres almost butterprint mixing bowls, and
it was just we would just sing and have fun

(05:54):
and make But those really care free moments were really
relegated to just when it was just the three of us. Otherwise,
she was very quiet, very contained, and very obedient when
it came to her father, and my father.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Tell me about your father.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
My father is the ultimate shape shifter. He is the ultimate,
or was the ultimate. You know. We would be out
in public and he would use the charm offensive and
be everybody's best friend. And I mean my voice just
you could probably hear it, and it shakes when I
talk about it. And yet at home he was such

(06:41):
a different person. Particularly when he was drinking. He would
just fly into a rage and would set me and
Sissy against each other and just create chaos in our
home so that he could be the master of that chaos.
We were just always on edge whenever he was around.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
And when you said that the landscape of your childhood
was dark, you would hide from your father when you
knew that he was coming into the house.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yes, closets, particularly the closet in between our kitchen and
the living room. It was quite deep and I could
fit way in the back corner. I could smell the
wet wool and feel the snow boots. And my mother
was very orderly. She had the shoes all lined up

(07:35):
and the boots. I just I felt like there were
little soldiers, you know. I was behind a firing line
and I could push myself way in the back corner
and underneath, you know, behind the coats and the boots.
And when my father was drunk, he wasn't particularly patient,
so it was more like he would open a door
and close it, you know, and just kind of he

(07:55):
was always looking for the first person that he could find,
and I did my best to not be that person.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
How aware were you from the time that you were
a really small kid that what was happening in your house,
particularly what was happening in your experience of your father,
was not happening in other people's houses. Did you always

(08:23):
know that or was it something that you came to
know or that you just felt I.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Didn't always know it. I would say I came to
know it at about six seven eight. Those ages, that's
when they start. You start having playates, and you start
going to neighbors' houses more, you start having time without
your parents around.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
This age is also the time with your parents around,
and in Kate's case, this time, especially with her father,
is incredibly difficult, trauma tizing and dangerous. Inside the home,
her father is sexually abusing her, and outside the home
something else is happening. She doesn't exactly know or remember
what's going on. What's going on is this her father

(09:14):
is taking her out late at night, bringing her to
nearby rest areas, and trafficking her to truckers.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
What I really held on to was more, particularly with
being taken out in the middle of the night. It
was more how I felt the next day. I would
be sore. I would wake up not wearing any underwear,
like I knew something had happened to me in the
middle of the night, but once I got in the truck,

(09:47):
I couldn't hold on to what had happened. My father
would often inject me with something I've never figured out
what it was, but he would make me drink a
liquid or I would wake up to of cold feeling
of alcohol being wrapped on my arm, my right arm,
and then being injected. The biggest memory around that me

(10:10):
sensing that something was up was that when I was six,
I used my father's Cebe radio to contact Trucker, a
person that he would talk to on his Cebee radio
called Chicken Plucker. And I didn't know who this person was,
but I just had a sense that he was somehow

(10:34):
central to the harm that was being done to me
outside of our house. It's a ton of domestic violence,
sexual violence, emotional violence inside of our home. But then
I was also taken outside of our home, and I
just had a sense that this person, Chicken Plucker, was
somehow connected to that, and I was determined to reach

(10:55):
out and talk to this person.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
So you had a friend in the neighborhood, and you
and he went over to your father's truck that's where
his sebee radio was, and you try to reach Chicken
Plucker on the Cebee radio and you do it's Chicken
Plucker answers.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
He does, he does. I was lured that I was
able to.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Get him, and then your father essentially catches you. But somehow,
in this particular moment, despite his propensity for violence in many,
many other moments, this time he just kind of shakes
his head and goes, yeah, okay, wow, you did that.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah. It was like he was impressed somehow. You know.
He said to me, and Butch was his nickname for me.
He said, Butchy, you're twenty five percent me, twenty five
percent your mother, and fifty percent something different. And I
didn't quite understand what he meant at the time, But then,
you know, as the years went on, particularly the next

(11:57):
couple of years, as I got a sense that something
was just off, I understood that I was not participating
in whatever this was, whatever this messed up craziness was,
I stood apart from it. Somehow I was able to
observe it from the outside. Somehow. I joke that reaching

(12:17):
out to Chicken Plucker was my first sociological interview that
I ever did, and it's just how I survived and
how I just managed all of it. I've always been
and always will be a sociologist. You reference that there
was another child with me that was the neighbor boy,
and he was my first crush, and my father around

(12:40):
the same time, caught me getting dressed after school. Like
usually I would get home from school, change into my
play clothes, you know, and go out and play. But
this day I put on a nice dress, and I
put on my favorite witch sandals, and I combed my hair,
and usually I had on my key overalls in my

(13:04):
keymart sneakers that were all muddy.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
You know.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
I was very much of a tomboy. And my father
immediately understood what I was doing, and he grabbed my
arm and he carved the ax into my left arm
with his pocket knife. And was like, you are mine,
you will always be mine, and then really beat me

(13:26):
very severely, and I woke up in the basement two
floors down from where I was, and I don't remember
getting there. So he made it very clear that I
was not allowed to. You can't call it fall in
love at six, you know, But that just any presence
of any other male person, no matter if they were
a six or seven year old or an adult. I

(13:47):
was his. I was his property.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Do you connect that to then screwing up the courage
to go into his truck and your first sociological experiment.
Do you connect those things?

Speaker 1 (13:57):
I don't. It was not an act of defy alliance
in terms of finding chicken plucker. It really almost didn't
even have anything to do with my father. It was
the very beginning of this west for the truth that
I hold in my life, no matter if it is
about what happened to me, happened to my body, or

(14:20):
now my research into child sex trafficking, or any empirical evidence.
You know, the truth is what absolutely guides my light.
And that was the first moment that I really remember
feeling I need to know the truth, and this man
is at the center of it, and I know it.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Kate is an elementary school. Her world is expanding a bit,
and she finds herself at a birthday party for one
of her new friends. She enters a home unlike any
she's ever seen, a portal into a vastly different world.
There are Florida ceiling bookshelves, children's art on the refrigerator,
and the world a radio softly playing what she'll later

(15:03):
recognize as NPR. The house feels alive, with intellect, ease,
and above all else, a sense of safety. It's not
just the space, it's the feeling, kids laughing, no fear,
no off limits rooms. For Kate, it becomes a vision.
Someday I'll live like this at home. The contrast is stark,

(15:25):
her father's violence her mother's silence, but Kate is beginning
to realize that she has a potential ticket out learning
doing well in school. Her mother instinctively understands this and
even saves up to buy Kate her own scientific calculator.
So while her mother doesn't protect her, she does give
her a map, an escape plan.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
I've really come to reconcile. She kept me alive, She
kept me and my sister alive, and that was literally
all she could do, and even that I think is
a very big feat given that statistically, I know I
should be dead, So it's very difficult to reconcile. You

(16:11):
know that she threw us to the wolves, basically that
she saw all of these things happening and we stayed,
and yet she was completely trapped, so that I understand.
I also though, understood when she drove me to the
town library, when she got me a scientific calculator, when
she had her father get me a dictionary an Athosaurus

(16:36):
for Easter. Those were absolute streaks of rebellion, and she
was able to do those things. I think because both
sides of my family education was not valued. She had
wanted to go to college, and her father had told

(16:57):
her that she could learn everything at the factory where
she worked as she could at college. So she was
trapped in that way in many ways. And yet their
distrust of education gave her the opportunity to let me

(17:17):
help me use that as an escape patch because they
were completely unfamiliar with that landscape, so they didn't understand.
You know, she could just downplay it, or she just didn't.
We just didn't say when I was going to the library,
so I did all of these things that were just
completely invisible to both sides of my family, and they

(17:38):
didn't understand the power of them because they didn't value them.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
And also, one thing that you write is that you
knew that the only time that your father would leave
you alone was when you had your nose in a book.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
It was astounding to me. It was this power. I
can still see that moment so clearly. It was like
I was busy, you know, and I was like, oh,
I'm in a good part, you know, like leeby B
and he left me be. I just couldn't believe that
this book in my hand. I knew how powerful it

(18:16):
was for me emotionally to feel like I could escape
into these other worlds. But the fact that it had
this power that my father didn't rip it out of
my hands or throw it onto the ground was completely astonishing.
Not to say that I then walked around with the
book in my hand to protect myself like a is

(18:38):
a talisman of some sort. I certainly didn't do that.
I was more physically hiding in the closet downstairs, or
we had an old schifferobe upstairs that I always dreamed
and hoped would be like the lion which in the wardrobe,
and it wasn't. But he just left me be and
it was an extraordinary feeling. It didn't make me feel

(19:00):
like I had power over him in any way, but
I knew very similar. Like thinking back to that, his
comment that I was somehow different, that was part of
my difference that I wouldn't say he respected it, but
I think it was also part of his. He wanted
to lay his claim on me that somehow he had

(19:23):
produced this child who was smart, you know, he who
was completely worthless, had done this thing. And so it
was yet another thing for him to I wouldn't want
to say proud of, but it was definitely something that
I had a touch of something and he was responsible

(19:45):
for that.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
In nineteen eighty two, when Kate's twelve years old, her
father leaves the family for another woman, a woman only
seven years older than Sissy, get married and live in
a trailer park not too far away. Kate and Sissy
live in their mother's house, but then weekends with their
father and new stepmother. It's also at this time that

(20:11):
Kate's father stops sexually molesting her she's gotten too old.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, it was an extraordinarily confusing time. First, I do
want to say in terms of the woman his mistress.
It turns out we found out later she had been
his longtime mistress, and I'm pretty sure she was a
teenager when they began their affair, so there was that,
And yes, she was only seven years older than Sissy.

(20:42):
And the other thing that was very confusing for me
was that my father during that time was constantly asking
me if I had gotten my period. He was very
aware and made tons of comments about my changing body,
whereas my mother never talked about my period. We never
talked about sex, We never talked about sexuality, puberty, anything,

(21:07):
So that was very strange. And even though I wouldn't
say I had the words at the time, but it
was very clear he was very aware of my menstrual
cycle and to me, which I the subtext was, you
know that he didn't want to get me pregnant. So
that was very difficult. It was also very confusing for

(21:30):
me because the overarching feeling was I was so glad
he was gone that I just felt so much more
physically safe, and yet at the same time, my role
had been very much to be the center of his world.
He had literally beaten the humanity out of me. I

(21:52):
didn't know how to think for myself, so now that
he was gone, I didn't understand my role in the family.
I felt a little bit like, you know, I had
been left for this other woman, and I was completely
unmoored so much so, and I knew this consciously, I think,

(22:15):
but really understood it more as I grew up. That
my very best friend Jess from childhood, we did everything
together after meeting her in third grade, but then it
was during this time in sixth seventh grade that we
drifted apart, and I very much latched onto mean girls

(22:36):
who would just tell me what to do. You know,
on one hand, I'm this critical thinker and this voracious
reader in this this you know, budding scholar even you know,
at twelve, that's my ambition. But on the other hand, personally,
I didn't know how to think for myself. I needed
people to boss me around and tell me what to do,
and these mean girls completely were more than happy to

(22:59):
fill that.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
And also, you and Sissy had been very much played
against each other by your father, so it wasn't like
there was a united front there or a confidant or
any kind of like sisterly feeling of safety.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
No, quite the opposite. I was terrified of my sister
in the same way that I was terrified of my father.
He really pitted us against one another, and much like
I did with his violence, I knew my sister was
going to hurt me eventually, so I would just trip
the wire, you know, I would poke her, or I

(23:40):
would make some smart alec comment so she would pume
away and so we could just get it over with
quicker and so. No, there was always an adversarial relationship
that did not change at all once my father left.
But it was also by this time my sister had
started working. She had a boyfriend, you know, so she

(24:01):
was really out of the house and just surviving on
her own and making her way the best that she could.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
So one of the hallmarks of trauma and repetition in
trauma is, you know, when you're in high school, when
it came to boys, your chooser was completely busted.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
To say the least.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
I know it's putting it pretty mildly, but yes, in
the same way as you gravitated toward mean girls, you
gravitated toward boys who also perpetrated violence.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
You didn't know anything else I didn't. And at the
same time, I did have one friend Page who was
just a very kind human being, and I knew I
was supposed to want to date him, but it was
just I think for both of us, we both had
lived through a lot of trauma, and we were just
both each other's safe space anchor. And so in that regard,

(25:03):
I did know safety to a degree, But in terms
of the boys and the young men I actually dated,
it was a lot of repeating the trauma that my
brain would just go into autopilot in terms of, Okay,
I'm supposed to have sex, you know, with these guys

(25:24):
when they say they want to, and then even when
I don't want to, you just dissociate, just blank out.
And that's very much the norm. I had been taught that,
I had been groomed that, and so that's just what
I thought sex was.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
By junior year, Kate's father and stepmother have moved to Florida,
physically farther away and in some ways emotionally too. Their
absence creates space, diminishes the ever present tension that has

(26:10):
defined so much of her life. She transfers to a
new school, a new environment, and with it the smallest
beginning of something else. Choice. Emotional maturity is just starting
to flicker on her brain. Her self coming online, she
gravitates toward different friends now, the smart kids, the curious ones,

(26:34):
the ones who feel safe. And yet she's crying all
the time, quietly, constantly. The grief, the fear, the weight
of what she still can't speak, not even to herself,
begins leaking out in tears she can't explain. Only one
adult notices, a guidance counselor who not only sees her,

(26:56):
but tells her about something huge therapy.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
My mother asked if we could move my senior year
of high school, and I didn't want to go. I mean,
this was I had been going to school with these
kids since literally kindergarten. You know, that's why I grew
up in a small town, and that's what you do.
So I did not want to go, but I understood,
you know, we were pulled all the time. She couldn't
afford the heat, I was hungry all the time, Like

(27:22):
this house was just it was a lot for her
to manage, and it ended up being quite one of
the best moves. Ever, I made great new friends. And
this was at a town there was a big hospital there,
so so many of the kids in my AP class,
the higher level classes, they were doctors kids, and so

(27:44):
there was the expectation of going to college. And that
was very different than the town where I'd grown up.
So that was wonderful. But I was crying constantly, and
I was not doing well academically because I just couldn't focus.
But I did meet this guidance counselor, and this is
one of those moments of alignment in life that it

(28:07):
turns out that her husband his family owned the grocery
store where my father had worked when my father was
in high school and when my parents were first married,
And so this guidance counselor knew my father as a
teenager and actually shared with me that her family had

(28:31):
offered to send my father to the local university to
pay his whole way, and he had declined. And it
was I can still feel it. It was such a
gut punch to me because I was working so hard.
I'm in high school, I'm working two jobs during the

(28:51):
school year, three jobs during the summer to save up
to get to college and here. My father had been
offered this full ride, full free ride, had turned it down,
and it just really illustrated the chasm between me and
my father and what I wanted in life and what
would be my trajectory. But that said, that guidance counselor

(29:16):
was the first person who ever told me about therapy.
She told me about it. She gave me an a dress.
I walked out of my high school in the middle
of a winter snowstorm, didn't take my coat. I was
wearing an acrylic sweater, a mini skirt that I had
sown by myself, in black tights and black loafers. And
I walked downtown and I found therapy, and it was

(29:40):
a revelation. I never knew anything like this had ever existed.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
And with that therapist, one of the things that you
write in your book is that you weren't willing or
able to go beneath the surface, which makes so much sense,
because you were keeping a secret from yourself.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
In a way.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
I mean, it was leaking out of your eyes and
tears in dissociation and not being able to do well
in school even though that was you know, everything to you.
But there you were with somebody you know, with a
door closed in an inner sanctum, but you couldn't. It
was just literally impossible.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
It was completely impossible because I also knew that I
shouldn't be there. I was seventeen, and since I was
working and could pay the copey by myself and I
was close enough to being eighteen, they let me see
a therapist without telling any parents. I never told my mother,

(30:44):
and she was working all of the time anyway, and
so even though I was in high school, it was
even beyond a latch key kid. She was around, certainly,
but I never had a curfew, or I mean, I
drove with friends from college. I had made some friends
at the local university because I was taking classes there,

(31:05):
but I also had a radio show on Saturday nights
at WBUQ, and so like, we drove to the other
end of Pennsylvania to see Love and Rockets, who was
one of my favorite bands at the time, and I
stayed out all night, and I went to school the
next day in this wearing the same clothes, and she
didn't say a thing. Nobody at school set a thing.

(31:27):
It was the same thing that happened when I ran
away to see a friend at Smith College. I ran
away for a week. No one said a word, so
I was really kind of on my own, and that's
I was just bloating and surviving on a daily basis.
There was just no words, and there was also just

(31:47):
not the safety. I mean, I think about, you know,
knowing so much with trauma, like you can't access things
until you feel safe. And so when I think about
this therapist's office, it was literally on the same block
where my grandmother's boyfriend had a bar, and I remember

(32:08):
that was my very first memory, was being sexually assaulted
by my father in that bar when I was in
diapers and we were also on the other and it
was like two blocks away of the projects where my
father had lived with his mother and three brothers, and
so I was just oh, surrounded by intergenerational trauma that

(32:34):
the safety wasn't there, The acknowledgment was less than there.
Not to mention all of the drugs and the alcohol.
I mean, the neighborhood where my father grew up, the
nickname was the Bloody Third because the men who lived
in that part of town would show up on Monday

(32:54):
morning at the mills that were all throughout the town
with bloody fists. Bloody knuckles from bar fights that spilled
out into the streets over the weekend. So I was
completely and utterly immersed in it. And so it was
just the reality. It was just my reality of things.
And yet I knew something was terribly wrong because I
could not stop crying.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
It makes so much sense, and it was, you know,
sort of the first step toward trying to get to
something in the deep interior that was so buried. But
it wasn't going to happen then. Wasn't going to happen
with that person, No, not at all.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
The other thing that was really distressing to me, too,
was for the first time in my life, I couldn't
do schoolwork. I had taken an AP calculus class. I
was so excited at this new school that they had
AP classes because they didn't have them at my old school.
I thought, oh, this is fantastic. I literally would just
put my head down, and because I just I couldn't think.

(33:50):
And I had the same last name as my father,
and my last name did not square, you know, with
my GPA, with my family named in square with my GPA,
and so people just they just brushed me aside, and
if anything, they were actually angry at me for doing
so well in school, and when I entered that my

(34:11):
senior year, I was tenth in the class, and they
were very angry about that because the Tupton seniors got
their picture taken for the yearbook, and not only students
didn't want me in that picture, but neither did administrators.
The assistant principle made it very clear he did not
want me in that photo, and they all got their

(34:33):
wish because I dropped to thirteenth over the course of
the year because I just did not do well, particularly
in this ap calculus class, because I just could not function.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
At eighteen, Kate leaves home, bolstered by a strong financial
aid package and a quiet determination to begin again. She
starts at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, then moves, travels, evolves.
She goes to India. She goes to the Audubon Expedition Institute.
The path isn't straight, but it's hers. Along the way,

(35:09):
her name begins to evolve too, from Kathleen to Kathy
to Kate, each version shedding a layer, moving closer to
who she really is and who she hopes to become.
These are years of motion and becoming, of stepping into
a life she's building from the ground up. Through it all,

(35:30):
her father is absent, but even from a distance, his
presence looms waiting, unresolved.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
Once I figured out that I could get college credit
for seeing the world, I took advantage of that and
was much more interested in doing experiential programs than I
was sitting in a classroom at a traditional four year college.
And it was during my first year that school, Autowan

(36:02):
Expedition Institute, that one of my classmates was like, you know,
you're not a Kathy. You're not a Kathleen, You're a Kate.
He's like, you're much more at You're direct to the point.
And it was really shocking to me that people had
seen me like I felt really seen. But I had
certainly felt myself changing on the inside since I was

(36:24):
experiencing the world outside of Appalachia. But to realize that
the people around me and that my peers were seeing
me so differently and in a way that felt so right,
I really took on that part. It was like gat yeah,
And I remember telling my mother and being like, er
is she's going to think about it? And she was like, Oh,

(36:45):
that makes so much sense. I called you Katie did
when you were little, and after I'd really changed my
name to Kate, she started calling me Katie did all
of the time. She really embraced it, and I think
it was for her a manifesting of the vision of
what we had been working toward for so long that
it was like, yeah, Okay, she's really making it in

(37:08):
this world outside of what my mother even understood. And
she just saw that I was being embraced by this
world that she had no clue how to navigate or
had ever entered. She would drop me off at a
bus station or an airport or a train station, and
that was the extent of it, you know, and then
the pole I would send postcards, but she didn't experience this,

(37:32):
and so I think she was really really thrilled and
embraced it by calling me Katie did.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Well. And isn't Katie did. I'm betraying my lack of
knowledge of the natural world here, but isn't it Katie
did a kind of insect that can fly?

Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yes, I had never thought about that. That's very true.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, I mean she was basically saying fly, you know, completely.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
No, she loved the B fifty two song Roam that
was always her song for me. She said, just go,
just completely go around the world, and she made sure
that that happened. She couldn't help me pay for it,
except for the right as I was getting ready to graduate,
she took out one student loan for me and insisted

(38:15):
that my father did the same, and that my grandfather
paid for my train ticket. And that was extraordinary. I
never seen her stand up to these men before, but
she did it because the end was really close, the
end of my undergrad education, and she was going to
make sure that I was going to graduate.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
As Kate builds her life as a young adult, she
hardly ever sees her father, nothing beyond a brief visit
now and then. But now a few years have passed
and Sissy's getting married.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
I just absolutely did not want to see him. I
didn't really want to see any of my family other
than my sister and my mother. My sister and I
still were not close at all. I was in fact,
I was shocked when she chose me to be her
maid of honor. But that really just spoke to very expectation.

(39:08):
In Appalachia, the family comes first, no matter if you
have an acrimonious relationship, you know, whatever it may be,
your family always comes first. So I was excited for
her day. You know, her husband seemed very nice, his
family seemed very nice, and I was really happy for
her because while my expectation from my mother was, you know,

(39:30):
that I would I would leave, my sister's expectation from
our family, both my mother and my father was that
she was allowed to go to college, but only so
that she could find a good man to marry. And
it seemed like she had found a really great guy
from a great family.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
There are these points in your story, multiple multiple points
where your father lays claim to you, and one of
these happens at Sissy's wedding.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yeah, I was so scared that he was somehow going
to ruin her day because he always managed to demean her,
demoralize her, or put her down. So it was just
kind of waiting for it. But instead he tracked me
the entire time, and at the reception, I can still
feel the whisper on my neck. He leans into me

(40:25):
and says, you are the most beautiful woman in the room,
and my skin just crawled off of my body. His
wife was there, My sister was a beautiful bride. My
mother was there, and for him to single me out
and say that and then just saunter over to the

(40:47):
bar was so just clearly was meant to put me
right back into my place. That it was like, you
can travel the world, you can do I read all
the books you want, you can do all of this,
but you are still my property. And I know how
to turn the knobs to get under your skin, and

(41:11):
I'm going to do it. And that's exactly what he did.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
A couple of years later, Kate's about to turn twenty
one when she gets a call from her stepmother that
her father has attempted to take his own life. Shortly thereafter,
Kate's mother is diagnosed with cancer and given a grim prognosis.
This one two punch happens as Kate is in a
really good place in her life, and it's like a
giant finger has come down and pressed the pause button.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
I'm traveling the country, you know, I'm just really starting
to come into my own I can even hear it
in my voice, you know, I'm meeting interesting people from
all over the world. I'm working for a student environmental
action organization to take some time off from school because
through all of this I was going to school, but

(42:02):
then I would need to take short period like a
semester off or a year off to make money because
I was completely paying my own way. But I was
managing to get these really interesting jobs, you know, as
a nineteen twenty year old driving around the country organizing
campus environmental groups was pretty fantastic. I was even getting
a little comfortable with dating. I was meeting really smart,

(42:25):
interesting guys that were kind. I was just really starting
to feel like this is going to be my life,
you know. I was spending time in these intellectual hubs,
these big college towns, and just really started to feel
like I was really putting a lot of separation between
my family, my hometown, my self. I was really able

(42:48):
to fly under the radar, and I thought, Wow, this
is my life is really coming together. It was very exciting.
My father guilt tripped me into coming to visit him
in Florida after out of the psychiatric hospital after he
tried to complete suicide and I was taking a break
from care taking. My mother and I took a road

(43:08):
trip to go see friends from college and from my
organizing time, and I would go to see him and
my car got towed when we had gone out for
ice cream, and granted I was paying for everything, I
was filling his cupboards with food. This was the first

(43:32):
time he had ever been alone, and he really played
the sympathy card of like, would you come take care
of the old man? And I thought that my mother's
diagnosis and my father is attempting his own life in
this period of time. In my brain, as trauma does,

(43:52):
I had them happening years apart. I just saw them
as two very distinct different times in my life, and
yet they were happening concurrently. I just had to separate them.
There was no way in the world that I could
think about it in real time. But it was during
this visit with my father, you know, and things were
actually going pretty well. I mean, granted I was caretaking him,

(44:15):
it was very codependent, but he took me to my
first alan On meeting and I'd never asked him why
he wasn't going to AA. But I was just happy,
you know, I was like to be going to alan On.
I was like, oh, maybe I could see myself doing this,
you know, me seemed like healthy people. My father was
talking about this book Toxic Shame, and these are just
like wow, kind of these glimpses that I had seen

(44:38):
from therapy when I was in high school. I was like,
all right, you know, maybe my father's getting some help.
But then during that same visit, my car was towed
and we were at the TOLT and I didn't have
any cash left. I think I had bought these groceries
and we went out for ice cream and I had
paid and all of this, and I had a credit

(45:00):
card from Io was traveling, but I just didn't carry
it with me. It's just not something I did. And
my father flew into an absolute rage, screaming about his
soon to be ex wife. And I had been sitting
on the ground and I looked up and my father
had his fist pulled all the way back like he
was ready to clock me. And just locked eyes with

(45:23):
him to just like, look, I'm an adult, I'm witnessing this.
You haven't hit me in over a decade, you know,
but here you are. I see you, And he just
put his fist down and we just didn't We didn't talk,
but for me, it was just like, ah, there he is.

(45:43):
There's the father I know, and he will never change
and I am growing up and he is always going
to be this petty, callous, little wounded boy.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Do you have that flashback before or after your dies?

Speaker 1 (46:01):
It was right before. It was about eight months before
she died. She was given six months to live and
she ended up living a year and a half.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
But the flashback is after you recognize your father's fist.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yes, yes, it was. It's in between that time before
she died.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, so in a way, I mean it's it's always
so interesting to me, the way that the psyche works,
the way that memory works. You're near home, I mean,
you're near You're near your childhood when this happens, and
you also have just had a dose of your father
fairly recently. M talk to me about that flashback that

(46:39):
you have.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
I was actually hanging out with a boy I really liked.
I never expected to meet a boy, a guy in
my hometown that I had a ton in common with
and I could have actually imagine a future with. And
he grew up near Wolfsbar. And we went to the movies,

(47:01):
and we tried to go to this diner, and the
diner was closed, and so we went to a restaurant
in a refurbished warehouse called the Murray Complex. And I
was incredibly nervous. I was so incredibly nervous because I
really liked this guy and was getting all sorts of

(47:21):
mixed messages and it was not a great relief in retrospect,
not a great relationship, but at the time I was
just in it and I was so thrilled to be
there with him because he had been dating someone for
a long time and then they broke up, and then
he called and asked me to come meet up. But
when I pulled it in to this restaurant, just the

(47:44):
sound of the gravel, I was just like, m that
sounds familiar. And then when we were sitting in the restaurant,
I was drinking a cup of coffee and I just
had this feeling of I have been here before, for
I have been here before. And I didn't say anything

(48:04):
to him because I was so nervous, and it was
just so strange to me to be on a date
that kind of felt like some of the dates I
was going on with environmental guys, you know, like guys
in other states, and that felt normal, like no date
had ever felt normal in Pennsylvania. And so we sent
a night and as I was driving out, hearing the

(48:28):
crackling again and then we said goodbye, and I was
about to get on the highway that I had to
pull over because it was smells of motor oil and
hearing engines and seeing walls of the inside of the
factory and just other kids and seeing men in what

(48:50):
I thought of as church clothes. But then I was
coming to understand where was really like opfice attire, you
know what. I grew up very working class, blue class,
so people dressberry, blue collar. But now realizing that these
were men who probably worked in an office, you know,
short sleeves and ties, and it all just hit me

(49:11):
and I just had to stop. And then it receded,
and I just drove home like there was nothing. I
couldn't place it. And yet there were so many things
that were happening in my life. My mother was sick,
and my father tried to complete suicide, and I'm back
in my hometown after really starting to feel like I

(49:31):
was putting my life together away from there, and I
had just been on a date with this guy I
really liked, who I never thought would have asked me out,
and all of these things, and so it was just
a okay, I'm just going to step that aside because
I was just in total survival mode.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Where did you put it? When you set it aside?

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Just these recesses of my life. Julian Baker, the singer
songwriter that I loved so much, she has this lyric
she said, something is in the backseat of her body,
and that's just the backseat of my body is where
I put it, you know, even that it's like I
put in a truck. There was nowhere to swear it

(50:09):
because it was also, while this flashback was much more
pronounced than I had had in the past, the location
of the Murray Complex was in this place that I
had always kind of considered what I had called this
over there part of Wolfspear. I'd never really spent any
time over there, and so I was actually in this place,

(50:30):
and I had also to get there, had to drive
past the rest area where I always also had this
like something happened to me there, but I don't know what.
I don't know what that is, and so it was
just in that category. But it was like, maybe I'll
figure that out one day. I was, honestly, in the moment,

(50:51):
was more feeling excited. I had been on a date
with this guy, and I was just so interested in
putting as puched between myself and my childhood as I could.
And this time of being of moving back home. I
had quit my organizing job the day after I've got
my mother's diagnosis. This was just this in between time

(51:15):
that I've just got to I'm just going to be here.
I'm going to be here with my mom, and then
I'm going to get back to this life. You know
that I put a pause in and I will all
do that. I put it in the backseat of my body.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
We'll be right back. Kate's mother dies at the age
of forty eight, Sissy's twenty six, and Kate's twenty three.
At their mother's memorial service, Kate experiences one last time

(51:54):
of her father attempting to lay claim on her.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
My mother made it very plain that she did not
want a traditional church service like me. She didn't like
being the center of attention. She also, I think, while
she never said this to me, the subtext was she
didn't want a funeral service in a church because she

(52:20):
was very angry with God for taking her mother away
from her when my mother was sixteen. My maternal grandmother
died when she was forty, and my mother was sixteen,
and so my mother really didn't want to have anything
to do with the church, even though my maternal side

(52:41):
of the family was very pious and founded churches in Pennsylvania,
and so she did not want that. So even that
was already contentious because her stepsister was very angry about
this fact that she didn't want a church service. But
my mother had found her power in her death and

(53:02):
she's like, Okay, I'm dying. This is the way it's
going to be. And my sister and I really held
on to those wishes. So I was standing and talking
and I guess we would call it a eulergy. I
ended up running my mother's memorial service. As I was
up there talking, my father was sitting in the front
row and he interrupted me talking and said, I love you, Butchie,

(53:29):
and I felt completely compelled and manipulated to say I
love you too, Dad. And yet this was my mother's uneral,
and yet I knew I knew exactly what he was doing,
and I couldn't call him out on it. But it
was so important to him to have this public display

(53:50):
of affection, mutual affection. He had been playing this game
much longer than I had. But I really knew what
he was doing, and I was furious with him, but
I didn't say a word. I didn't say anything to him.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Now it's the mid nineteen nineties. Kate's living in Cambridge.
She's seeing a therapist at her university, but they're not
making much progress. That therapist tells Kate that there's someone
she wants her to meet, another therapist, one who specializes
in trauma. And that therapist is doctor Besil Vander Kulch.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
So my mother never told me to do anything in
my life, but right before she died, she was like,
moved to Boston. You love it there, And I knew
she was right. So I moved to Cambridge and eventually
started working at Harvard University. And it was about a
couple of years after she died, and I was really
getting settled and not really finding my way. I hadn't

(54:49):
really met any friends, but I'd started working in academia
when I was working at Radcliffe and just surrounded by
these absolute amazing feminist scholars. And I was really starting
to grieve my mother and started seeing a therapist within
university health services, but she and I weren't making much progress.
And then one day she came in and she's like, look,
I have somebody. I saw this guy speak at a

(55:11):
conference at her medical school, and I really want you
to go see him. I only found out later that
both this therapist and Bessel were very, very very worried
about me because I wasn't making any progress with my
first therapist, and so it was like, all right, time
to bring in the big guns. She told me this
man's name Besill vander Kolk, and I'd never heard of him,

(55:34):
but this was in the very early stages of the intranet,
and so you know, after about our third session, I
looked him up and was like, oh, okay, that's some publications.
And so I walked into my third session with him
and I said, wow, so you're kind of a big deal, huh,
And he was. He just smiled, kind of cupped his
head and was like, yes, some people would say so,
some people seem to think so. And it was the

(55:55):
very early stages of EMDR and he was really one
of the first pioneers of that, and I was just
willing to try. I was not crying all the time,
like high school, but I was really struggling in Cambridge.
Moving to Cambridge from Appalachia, even though I had been
traveling the world. It was like moving to Mars. I mean,

(56:17):
it was to be in the epicenter of education after
growing up in this place, you know, where my mother
had to hight you know, to take me to the library.
It was just it was very strange, and after living
in the country and moving into the city and it
was all very exciting, but I was very unmored. You know.
My mother had told me what to do in terms

(56:38):
of my academia was going to be my way out.
She told me to move to Boston, but we didn't
have a plan for me beyond that, and now here
I was and I was without her, and it was
really incredibly, incredibly difficult. So he ended up being really
the first safe man in my life that I would
not say, like a father or anything like that. I

(57:01):
don't want to, you know, no paging doctor Fred with
daddy issues. But he would tell me like, this is normal,
this is not normal. You know. As I would be
telling him these things, you know about my family, he
would be like, you know, that's not normal, and I'd
be like, no, I have no idea, Like even in
terms of my sister and I, you know, not getting
along and how we were pushed apart. You know, he

(57:24):
would just be like, you know, that was deliberate, and
to me, it was just the air of which I breathe,
you know, the water I was swimming in. And so
he really helped me parse all of those things out.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
And at the same time, it's not immediate that you
tell Vessel that your father sexually abused you. And it's
also definitely not immediate that you are able to access

(57:54):
again that flood of memories that began in Wilkespeare And
you know, and I think that that's really important because
so many people think you go to therapy and then
it all happens like with the snap of a finger.
You know, these layers and layers, you know, working with
besl and doing EMDR, which you really take to and

(58:17):
you know, which is just this extraordinary modality. But still
it's a process, and it's a process where you don't
even know what you're trying to process in this process.
Right at first, Kate's work with doctor besil vander Kolk
is about grief, her mother's death, her move to Boston.

(58:39):
But then comes the question, tell me about your father.
Kate isn't sure what to say, how to describe him,
or how to possibly describe what might have happened to her.
But around this time, Kate also happens upon a resonant
book in the student center, Father Daughter Incest by doctor
Judis Hermann. The book names what she has never been

(59:01):
able to. The book describes her father, describes what might
have happened to her, what did happen to her. She
also rereads Darthy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina during this time,
and the story resonates as well. She decides to watch
the film adaptation, and when she does, a flashback overwhelms

(59:23):
her far deeper than before the past she thought she
knew begins to rewrite itself.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
I felt brave enough to watch the film adaptation, and
it was the first time that I had ever seen
a visual depiction of child sexual abuse. And I cried
and cried and cried so hard my eyes literally swelt,
were swollen shut. It just all was coming forward. And

(59:54):
it was also two things in terms of safety. One
in alan On they call it the geographical cure. You know,
I was three hundred miles away from my hometown. The
other piece was the safety of working with vessel like
that my body just sensed like this is a person
who really gets it beyond talk therapy, you know, like

(01:00:15):
we talk about the phrase our issues and our tissues.
You know, he really understood like it wasn't just me
talking my way out of this, that it was my
secrets were in the fascia, you know, in my fascia,
like in with literally the connective tissue of my body.
And that was all just starting to open up as
I felt safe, and it was almost like in retrospect,

(01:00:40):
realizing that my body was just absolutely so parched and thirsty,
you know, for this, and it was just like blood
is going to come out, and you're ready. And so
that's exactly what happened. A couple of days after I
had cried so much watching the Bastard out of Carolina,
there was a no'er Easter coming. I had been watching

(01:01:03):
the news, you know, in terms of my little tiny
television that I had bought in my little tiny studio.
It was the first time I was living alone, and
I closed my eyes and it was like a slideshow
of men. They were in trucker hats and had beards
and mustaches and flannel shirts and jeans, and metal belt

(01:01:23):
buckles and cowboy boots and glasses, and I could smell whiskey,
and just I could just see all of it. It
was like a flash booze about. It was one hundred men,
and it went on for minutes, and then it stopped
for thirty seconds, and it all just started right back
up again. And I knew in that moment that these

(01:01:47):
were all men that my father had sold me to.
I just knew. I heard the rattling of the engines
and smell the gasoline. It was like literally all of
the puzzle pieces of me having those somatic memories of
driving by the rest area for all of those years,
and just having those feelings in the flashbacks and the

(01:02:08):
sound of the tire of the gravel. It all just
made sense.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Where could Kate possibly put those images memories that had
been stored so deeply inside her. There was nowhere for
this new understanding to go. She became suicidal and called
her therapist, who told her to go to the infirmary.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Because at this time I was still seeing my university
Health Services therapist and Bessel. I needed that much support,
and I was also going to multiple grief groups and
multiple alan on like I was just living all of this.
It was pouring out of me and I needed I
really needed the help and support us. I also didn't

(01:02:54):
have any friends. I had followed a couple of friends
from high school to Boston, but they had both moved
to want a law school and went to graduate school,
and so I was very much on my own. So
that's how I filled my time as well. It was
fixing myself because I was also during this time, I
had been told it was all my fault and I
believed it. So I felt I need to fix myself,

(01:03:14):
and so that's what I'm going to do. So we
had the plan with my university Health services therapist that
if I ever needed something and off hours, I would
call her first, because Bessel did not see patients in evening,
and so I called her and she toldally flat out,
She's like, I'm going to get into a lot of
trouble for this, but go to University Health Services because

(01:03:37):
otherwise I'm going to have to admit you into mcclean's
and I don't want to do that because you need
to see Bessel in the morning. I don't want you admitted.
And that's exactly what happened, and snow was coming down,
and I took a cab and the cab driver complained
about driving in the snow, and I gave him a
big tip, and I was like, look, if you hadn't
driven me here, I would have killed myself. I didn't

(01:03:58):
even I just slammed the door and I went upstairs
to University Health Services. And it was very clear I
was on suicide watch because they took me to a
nice hospital bed with nice crisp sheets and cotton blankets.
But the lights were on all night long, and they
came to check on me every once in a while,
and the nurse gave me warm milk. And it was

(01:04:21):
the first time in my life that I ever felt
cared for and comforted and recognized that I was in
a really bad place in the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
The next morning, Kate goes to see Besil. Now the
two of them are in full possession of all the
information what Kate's really dealing with. With Besil, Kate begins
to do emdr IYE movement resensitization and reprocessing therapy, which
is enormously effective in treating trauma. By the age of

(01:04:55):
twenty eight, she feels ready to confront her father and
tell him what she knows.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
He responds by not responding to me. He turns to
his now third wife. I mean, granted this was on
the phone, but he turns to her and said, well,
now she says I raped her. He never denied it
to me. He just turned to the person in the
room that you know, he was living with his wife

(01:05:23):
because he had to manage the situation. Like I said,
he had created chaos in order to control the chaos,
and he needed to control the chaos. So I found
it very interesting that my father has never ever denied
it to my face or to me directly, which to

(01:05:44):
me said volumes. It was more about managing the world
around me and the world around him. And he just
told me to never call him again. And I never
called him again. That was the last time we ever spoke.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
In the fall of two thousand, Kate places a personal
ad in the Boston Phoenix, and the god of personal
ads smiles upon her. One and done. She meets Chris,
a journalist will become her husband. It takes a lot
for Kate to tell Chris the entirety of her history,
but she does. She is safe, she trusts him, and

(01:06:23):
he needs to know Kate and Chris mary and settle
into a book lined apartment reminiscent of the home she
had once visited at her best friend's birthday party. That
home full of love, warmth, curiosity, and possibility. They embark
on the adoption process and eventually adopt their son, n.

(01:06:45):
But still there's something gnawing at Kate. As she writes
in her book, I knew on the deepest level, down
to my bones, that my memories were real, but as
a social scientist, I needed empirical evidence to be sure.
How could she fact check her memory? Chris intuited that
she needed help and suggested that she perhaps contact a journalist.

(01:07:09):
Thus began a ten year professional relationship and friendship with
a journalist named Janelle Nanos. Through a painstaking halting process,
Janelle begins to work on Kate's story. Janelle needs to
talk to Sissy. She also lets Kate know that she'll
need to speak with their father. Kate is, of course

(01:07:30):
terrified and ambivalent. She and Sissy haven't been in touch
in years. But then one day out of the blue,
Kate receives an email from her sister about an insurance
policy of their moms. This opens the door a tiny crack,
but sometimes tiny is enough. The two sisters start to
form a relationship on their own terms in adulthood. During

(01:07:55):
this rich time of discovery, there is also one conscious
memory that has never kicked to the trunk of the car,
the name chicken Plucker. What did it mean? Why did
it stay in her consciousness all these years?

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
So Janelle and I had been working together, I think
a couple of years by that point, and I had
recent around this time, I had recently learned about a
wonderful organization called Truckers Against Trafficking and was just like,
I'm wondering, you know, I don't know, do they maybe
know about this person or whatever? And so I literally

(01:08:31):
just googled the term chicken plucker and found out that
it was trucker's slang for pedophile. And I contacted Janelle
and she was just like, oh god, it was yet
another piece. I kind of felt like we kept getting
these breadcrumbs of validation as we went on, because right

(01:08:52):
I had talked to chicken Plucker, like no one could
tell me like that. I did not that this person
did not exist. I talked to him, and I knew it,
and that was a very solid memory that I did
not question at all.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
Then at some point after that, you learn from Cissy
that your father also sexually abused her, which is something
that you never thought had happened.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
Never. I thought that she got all of the physical
abuse and I got all of the sexual abuse. That's
just how I thought he operated.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
So then there is this moment where you and Sissy
and Janelle are together.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
I believe, yes, at a Barnes and Noble in wolfsbear.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
The things that happen in Barnes and Nobles, yep. And
at this point all you know is that Cissy was
also sexually molested by your father. But then Cissy proceeds,
and you've never told Cissy about being trafficked.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
At this point I told her a little bit, but
certainly not details. I didn't want to. I didn't I
want to activate any memories for her. It seemed like
I had much more concrete memories than she did, and
so I didn't want to send her down a spiral
that she had not experienced.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
But so at this Barnes and Noble in wilkesbere Sissy
begins to talk about having been trafficked herself, and she
uses the same exact language, language that you never used
with her, but that you had spoken in depth with
Janelle about.

Speaker 1 (01:10:33):
Yeah, at that point, I've been saying the exact things
to Janelle for seven.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Years, and then Janelle hears Sissy saying the exact same things.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
M hm, verbatim in terms of the well in the garage,
you know, down to the smell of the oil on
the blanks that we were wrapped in. And Janelle and
I just looked at each other, wide eyed, and it
was extraordinary. And here Sissy thought she had said something

(01:11:02):
wrong when Janelle and I were looking at each other,
because she too was so used to always messing something up,
you know, as our father had taught her. And it
was like, no, actually, quite the opposite. You're saying this verbatim.
And it was right after that conversation that Janelle was
so salient to me. Janelle said, Okay, that's two. Like

(01:11:25):
I could see her investigative journalist in operation. You know that,
It's like, okay, we now have two victims on the record.
This is you know, this case is building well.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
And also what I thought you meant when you said
now we have two is that it's like data. You
have the chicken plucker meaning truck or slang for pedophile.
And you have Sissy absolutely like layering her story on
top of your story and it's the same story. And
so then Janelle has that powerful reporters instinct that she's close.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
Right. Yeah, she even said you know that it so
fast forward a few years and she said, you know,
we're really we're close, We're really close. And I was like,
you mean to like getting the smoking gun, and she
was like, I don't know, we're close. I was like, oh, okay,
you know, we had never talked like that before.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
So the last piece of this is the smoking gun,
is Janelle actually finding finally after a lot of stonewalling
from a lot of people and a lot of you know,
we're just going to mind our own business, tell me
about what you hear from Janelle and then how that
sort of rewrites some of your own understanding of your

(01:12:48):
family history.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
Yeah, we were in Pennsylvania and at that point Janelle
had come with me. She was working at the Globe
at this point, so was my husband at this point,
and the Globe had sent a photographer with us. We
had really amassed a lot of people were going on
the record saying they believed me. Only one family member
went on the record to say they believed me, but
still other people around, like we had talked to magistrates

(01:13:12):
and victims' advocates and people certainly remembered the rest area
that I was referencing was definitely associated with adult prostitution.
No one had ever heard of any child trafficking, but
one police officer did remember from his time as a
state trooper that a child had been kidnapped from a

(01:13:34):
house very close to that rest area and then showed
up three days later at a truck step forty five
minutes south. So I was like, okay, we're really kind
of getting evidence. And Janelle just kept knocking on doors
and talking to people who would not reply to our letters,
the letters that we had sent, and we had had

(01:13:54):
a very busy day we had gotten This was the
first time I had ever gone back to the rest
area since I was a kid, and we were taking
photos there and Janelle was like, Okay, I'm going back
to your mother's friend, Gloria. She was out when I
went there, and I'm going back there tonight. She had
also found my first stepmother and was talking to her,

(01:14:18):
and I was like, okay, and a storm was coming
and I ended up going back to the Airbnb. And
then later that night I was terrified that Janelle was
in a ditch on the side of the road somewhere,
because her little rental car was this little, tiny smart
car and we had done so much together, but this
I was sitting home alone and Janelle came in and

(01:14:41):
the look of horror on her face. I just had
the thought, Okay, Janelle's about to break my heart. And
I always thought it was my first stepmother who would
have information. I didn't know maybe she was even involved,
But it turns out that it was my mother's friend Gloria.
So a few years before my mother got sick, had
told her friend Gloria that she my mother had caught

(01:15:06):
my father pimping out Sissy and me on his cebee radio.
She heard him the first time, did confront him, heard
him a second time, and did confront him, and he
told her leave me alone. I know what I'm doing.
And I heard that information, and I just completely the

(01:15:30):
tears just came.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
Just ugh.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
It was the best and the worst moment. I mean
it was the best because this was something I had
been searching for for so long and knew, and here
was this empirical evidence, but it was the worst knowing
that it was my mother. She knew. I just kept
saying she knew, and she threw us to the wolves.

(01:15:56):
And after I could breathe a little bit, you know,
Janelle told me some more of what Gloria had told her.
Was that we did leave. My mother did take me
and Sissy out for about a week, but then we
came back. And what my sister and I were able

(01:16:19):
to piece together then was that I really do strongly
believe that my mother thought the trafficking had stopped then
because he stopped trafficking Sissy, but he started taking out two.
I was about six, and that's when he started taking

(01:16:42):
me to the rest area, and so he just got
much more secretive. I do believe on some level she knew.
She must have known. That's something that Besil had said
to me since the moment we started talking about Yeah,
you know, I was like, no, she could never know.
My mother would never do that, and she knew, she
absolutely knew, And so that was incredibly difficult to square.

(01:17:09):
And yet on a gut level, I completely understood she
had no options. This was nineteen seventy two years. You know,
I was born in nineteen seventy, two years before Roe
v Wade. She was not allowed to go to college.
She was trapped. She had nowhere to go, and so
she kept us alive. And the other piece is that

(01:17:32):
Gloria did say to my mother, Okay, well we have
to do something about this, you know, and my mother
was like, no, you can't say a word. This is
our lives. So it was her keeping us alive was
really her priority.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
In Kate's book, she writes, it would have been easier
to allow myself to miire in the shame of my family. Instead,
I found my calling. This powerful sentiment underscores something that
Besil vander Kolk has written about, which is that when
it comes to the depths of trauma, the people who
tend to recover most are the ones who are able

(01:18:14):
to make meaning of their experience. Janelle's piece ten Years
in the Making, is titled Kate Price Remembers Something Terrible.
It was published in The Boston Globe in twenty twenty two.
The same year it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
Making meaning was definitely something that Besel helped me understand
pretty early on in our relationship. I mean, I'm so
honored to say he's been my therapist for thirty years now.
Who in the world would have known that the Body
keeps the Score would become such a tremendous success and
has helped so many people, And I'm honored to be

(01:18:55):
part of that. In terms of what I decided to
further research on child sex trafficking, Bessel was a big
part of that conversation. My husband was a big part
of that conversation. I was getting feedback that people were
finding my research and my take on this emerging human
trafficking movement in the early aughts. People were finding what

(01:19:16):
I had to say helpful, and I was like, I
think it could help this I could help make a difference,
you know, which aligned with I wanted to be a
nurse when I was little, so I wanted to help people,
and Bessill was like, Yeah, I think that could be
a really good thing for you. In the same way
of when Chris and I were thinking of adoption, Bessel
was like, Yeah, I think you being able to parent

(01:19:39):
a child who's been through trauma would be a tremendous
help for you and the child. So he was a
big part of those decisions for me and Chris. I
took him to see Bessell I think maybe six months
after we met, just to let him know, let my
husband know, you know, what he was getting himself into,
and so he really understood the full scope because it

(01:19:59):
is not easy managing trauma and being a partner to
someone with extensive trauma. So we've really, you know, I've
been able to build a professional life and personal life
and I'm really thrilled to say, no, my son is
twenty and he came to live with us when he
was four, and he's really thriving and saying with my career,

(01:20:20):
it was always my intention to get back to the
Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College after getting my
PhD and being able to do research on child sex
trafficking and familial child sex trafficking that can then be
turned into policy and practice and really help inform trauma

(01:20:41):
informed services in the way we understand child sex trafficking.
So I'm incredibly proud of that work and I'm just
grateful to be able to help people. And I get
emails from fellow survivors of familial trafficking but also non
familial trafficking or child sexual abuse, or you know other
women who grew up in Appalachia with the pretty restrictive

(01:21:04):
worms of at least in the seventies. You know, we're
meant to be a wife, and that was it to
not have dreams, ambitions, or even thoughts. And so I'm
just grateful to be able to lend my experience to
those fellow people who were trying to navigate this world
without any sort of roadmap, and especially when we're being

(01:21:24):
told it's all our fault and we're crazy. And I've
heard too many stories of people taking their own lives
for that very reason. So I feel incredibly honored and
compelled to keep doing the work that I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
Here's Kate reading one last passage from her extraordinary memoir.
This happened to me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:53):
I'm returning to this place because, in thinking about my
son and how much we've loved and protected him, I
cannot abandon vulnerable and exploited children in the same way
my sister and I were left by our parents, extended
family and community to fend for ourselves. Having become the

(01:22:15):
woman that I so very much needed as a girl,
I am growing a new community here that began when
I started to investigate my history. I now have a
collection of trusted allies, and I no longer have to
fight this fight alone. I am returning to this place
knowing I am safe, I am loved, I am home.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zakoor is the
story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, please
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find

(01:23:13):
me on Instagram at Daniwriter and if you'd like to
know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check
out my memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.