Dr. John King's Survivor Story: Male Sexual Abuse Recovery

Dr. John King's life changed forever on a Thursday in August. The memories that had been buried for decades suddenly resurfaced. At 45, this indigenous Australian man found himself curled up in his backyard. He was sobbing uncontrollably as his wife discovered him in the aftermath of what would become his defining moment of truth.

"It was daffodils," King recalls. He describes the trigger that unlocked suppressed memories of his childhood. "Every spring, I would walk to school, and the lady next door had planted daffodils along her little green bank. And every spring, the daffodils had come up. And it was one more year that I'd made it." That spring day in Dallas, stepping over those same flowers, King experienced a total recall. He recalled the male sexual trafficking and abuse he had endured as a child. These were the events that his mind had compartmentalized to protect him until that moment.

The revelation was devastating yet liberating. For the first time in his life, King could put words to his experience: "I had been sexually abused. It was the first time I added that phrase. It was the first time I told, I said the words, I was a victim of sexual abuse. And it was the last time I ever used that phrase." This moment marked not just an awakening to his trauma, but the beginning of a transformation. The one that would eventually lead him to become an advocate for male survivors and a witness in the Epstein case.

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