If you haven’t heard me talk about this play yet, then we’re probably not very good friends. YEP! Straight into it with the truth bombs. But, this is only just the beginning. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover here folks, so strap in and get comfy.
Might as well start at the beginning...
It was the dawn of a new day... Just kidding, I’m not that poetic. At least not in this medium. But let’s not get off topic here. We’ll start with the location: the Pearl Company, at 16 Steven St., in Hamilton, Ontario. Enough comma’s for ya? Anyway... word on the street was that this place wasn’t gonna be around much longer. So I put word out that I’d be interested in performing there before it closed down.. It’s been 8 years since I’ve acted on the stage, so what better time than the present to get back on the horse? Whether you believe in the law of attraction or not, I’m telling you, I willed this into my life. Their first pick for the role had stepped down and suddenly they needed a blonde girl with pale skin.
The title of the play: My Father’s House.
“Damn,” I thought, “well this’ll be right up my alley.”
My father’s house - my actual father, not talking about the play here - was hidden at the end of a winding driveway that looped around an old cedar tree. He built the vast majority of that house when I was just old enough to use the Easy Bake Oven, making snacks for the men at work. We would have massive bon fires in the front yard, ten to twelve feet high; burning the brush my father cleared from the trails he forged deep in the “back forty,” as he called it. Though those events brought joy and excitement as we danced around with sparklers and glow sticks, the wood burning stove inside was the birthplace of one of my earliest darker memories.
I watched the flames dance though the tiny glass window of the iron stove while laying on the floor, resting my head upon the belly of our cat, Amy, enjoying the rhythmic movement of her fluffy white belly as it rose and fell with every breath, until suddenly, it stopped. My father bravely called upstairs to my mother,
“Linda! Bring me a garbage bag!”
“What for?” She asked.
“Cat’s dead! Gotta go to the dump!”
He wasn’t known for being particularly delicate.
If these scars could talk they would tell all kinds of stories about that house. Jumping off the pool table into a plastic bag of broken beer bottles, slicing open my foot; falling face first into the kitchen floor - thanks to my step brother who pulled the chair out from under my face - splitting open my forehead, right between the eyes. Then of course there are the emotional scars, like that time my jeans got stuck in the spokes of my bike and it felt like I cried in the driveway for hours while the rest of the family ate dinner. I don’t remember how I got free, just that there wasn’t any corn on the cob left for me by the time I got inside. I discovered my love of pickled beets at that kitchen table; I stirred my ice cream until it melted into soup, I was also forced to eat oatmeal there.
Good memories intertwined with the bad like a yin yang. I stencilled pink roses on the walls of my loft bedroom, and searched for my pet rats - accurately named Mr. & Mrs. Houdini; I carved pumpkins and huffed gasoline, played Spyro and discovered playboy playing cards, climbed trees and collected cigarette butts; I ate peanuts out of the shells with my Dad in the middle of the night after falling off the top bunk… He was monitoring my potential concussion. I woke up in the morning and let him know that he didn’t have to wake me up in the middle of the night if he wanted to eat peanuts and watch TV together - zero recollection of having fallen out of the bed at all.
But the darkness finally took over as the millennium came to an end. My stepmother had recently moved out and had taken my siblings with her. Now when I visited my father every other weekend it was just us. I organized all of the toys they had left behind, not quite sure how to play on my own. 28 days after ringing in the New Year - the night my father put our car in the ditch on our way home from a party I was way too young to be at - the house took it’s second life, along with it’s own. A murder-suicide, like a ship claiming its captain upon capsizing, the greatest bon fire of all.
So when I heard the title of the play I thought, “I don’t know what this is about, but I know this is meant to be.”
I sent in my headshot and resume, came in for an audition the next day, and two days later we were in rehearsals. It all happened so quickly. So effortlessly. By then I had read the play in its entirety, and I couldn’t wait to dive into the memoir from which this play was derived.
My Father’s House, written by Sylvia Fraser, was published in 1987. The memoir recounts the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her father from early childhood, through her teenage years. Sylvia was born in 1935 in Hamilton, Ontario; meaning that the abuse took place in the 1940’s, decades before pedophilia was formally recognized as a psychiatric disorder. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like take a little trip in the time machine.
DeLorean : Documentary… same same.
In 1974 Jan Broberg was kidnapped by close family friend, Robert Berchtold. To quote Julie Miller’s article for Vanity Fair, “ [he] did not just kidnap Broberg once; he entrapped Jan’s religious parents in such a web of trust, shame, and complicity that he managed to convince the family to drop the most serious kidnapping charges against him, continue letting him spend disturbing amounts of time with their young daughter, and—in the most shocking twist of all—he eventually kidnapped her a second time.” Not to underestimate the power of psychological manipulation, but this was before the internet and true-crime television, and her parents were people of faith and forgiveness; they simply didn’t have the tools to identify this man’s behaviour as predatory and pedophilloic.
My point is that 30 years later, the world still wasn’t talking about child sexual abuse. So just imagine how incredibly taboo it would have been to talk about something like that in the 40’s. A time when most eligible men had been shipped off to the war, making husbands a scarce commodity; when a loveless marriage would be endured by all in fear of “what the neighbours might think;” when you and your children’s survival depended on the breadwinner of the family to provide food and shelter. Just imagine the kinds of things your subconscious self would guide you away from acknowledging, simply to ensure your survival.
The signs you wouldn’t see, the sounds you wouldn’t hear, the questions you wouldn’t ask. 🙈🙉🙊
Ignorance may not have been bliss, but it was better than acknowledging the truth.
In 1989, at age 7, Wade Robson was sexually assaulted by Michael Jackson. The assault went on for several years. Wade described his relationship with Michael as just that: a relationship. They were in love.
Do you remember your first love? Some say you never fully get over it. I still wear the ruby necklace my first love gave me when we were 14. I rarely take it off. That relationship affected me deeply. It sets the tone for every relationship that follows, as I’m sure yours does with you. Imagine, though, that your first love was an internationally recognized superstar, decades your senior. Imagine that’s the dynamic under which you’re learning about what it means to love and to be loved.
The result then is a child who’s entirely convinced that there’s nothing inappropriate about the relationship, and that they themselves feel like an active and willing participant. He’s not hurting me, he’s helping me. He’s not a pedophile, he’s a partner. It’s not child sexual abuse, it’s love.
In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Robert Weiss explains that pedophiles often “‘age themselves down,’ becoming childlike (in their own minds) as a way to relate to and feel a sense of connection with their victims.” The man built a theme park in his backyard, I think it’s safe to say that MJ had the mindset of a child. Not surprising considering he didn’t have much of a childhood. He started performing with the Jackson 5 at age 6. Curious that he would be attracted to kids around that age… curious indeed.
I say this, not to make excuses for him but, to better understand why it happened. That’s the big question. Why? Why do rapists rape? And why am I so desperate to know the answer?
To be honest, this was the hardest section of the article to write. I had babbled on about details of the documentary but what was my point here? What was I working so hard to prove? That the child was innocent? That he had been made into a marionette, dancing only as his master commanded? That each string attached to his body was a learned pattern of thought and behaviour carefully designed by his abuser to control his every move, his every thought? Who am I working so hard to convince here? You, the reader?
Or myself? Is this article just an excuse to work through my own guilt and shame as a result of my own history of sexual assault? Am I just trying to convince myself that it wasn’t my fault? Am I trying to understand how I was groomed as a child to fall prey to the men who wanted something from me? Is the sexual energy that seeps out of my pores - the energy that has always defined me - in fact a manifestation of theirs? The child as the seductress. How was I coerced, manipulated, conditioned, taught - to act? And how was I “rewarded” for playing the role well? With attention? Sexual harassment? Abuse?
Or maybe it’s neither of us. Maybe this is just an open letter to my past abusers.
I want you to know how deeply your actions affected me. How your momentary lapse in judgement has had lifelong and rippling effects on my psyche. I need you to take responsibility for your actions. I need to hear you apologize, sincerely, for hurting me. I want you to feel the guilt and shame that I have carried around all this time. I was you to feel the weight of it; sitting on your chest when you try to breathe; crushing your heart when you try to love; holding you back when you try to run; pushing you down when you try to stand; squeezing your throat when you try to scream. Maybe then you can atone for your sin. Maybe then you might feel some compassion. Maybe then you can be an ally.
WELL, now that that’s out of my system… Back to Wade.
For a myriad of reasons, Wade didn’t identify the sexual activity that occurred between him and Michael as “sexual abuse.” It’s no surprise then, that in 1993, when Michael was accused of child sexual abuse against Jordan Chandler, Wade defended Michael at a press conference admitting that they had slept in the same bed but denied that anything sexual had occurred. Michael and his lawyers coached Wade prior to being interviewed, and at age 11, he gave a very convincing performance. Michael eventually lost sexual interest in Wade, aged 14 by this time, but they maintained a sporadic friendship. So, in 2005, when Michael called on Wade to testify as his first defence witness, for yet another accusation of child sexual abuse, Wade obliged - needing to continue protecting the lie.
In his interview, Wade explained his draw to participating in the documentary was to speak the truth as loudly as he had to speak the lie. The truth will set you free…
Michael told Wade that if he told anyone about their affair, that they’d both go to jail. Sylvia’s father told her that he’d send her cat to the pound for gassing if she told. Though Wade held onto the lie well into adulthood, and Sylvia’s cat had long since passed away, the subconscious agreement not to tell remained, for who could predict the consequences of telling? Whether it takes a few days or a few decades, let’s commend those who have the courage to speak their truth, not condemn them for waiting so long.
One of the most powerful parallels between Wade and Sylvia’s stories was a simple interaction with their spouse. “What’s wrong?” Each replying with confusion, “I don’t know.”
Wade was aware that the activities took place, he just didn’t label them as “sexual abuse.” Sylvia, on the other hand, had repressed the memories entirely. And yet each went on a similar journey of destruction, fuelled by a sense of being lost, never fully understanding why. It wasn’t until they each spoke their truth that they would figure it out.
In 1994, R. Kelly’s then tour manager, forges documents so that 15 year old Aaliyah and 27 year old Robert Kelly may be married.
I literally can’t say anymore about this aside from strongly recommending that you watch the documentary in it’s entirety. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details but what I will say is that it’s important to differentiate between pedophile and hebephile. The latter being more applicable to Kelly since his victims tended to be in their adolescence at the time of the abuse.
The undeniable commonality between Michael Jackson and R. Kelly is their use of wealth and fame to “pay off victims and [their] families, […] hire spin doctors to keep their careers on track, and high-powered lawyers to keep them out of prison,” explains Dr. Robert Weiss. Although offenders like Robert Berchtold, and Sylvia’s father didn’t have either of those tools at their disposal, they utilized other items in their tool-belt. Berchtold, as a “well-respected” member of the church; Fraser, as the patriarch and breadwinner of the family.
As Jimmy, in Leaving Neverland, explains, “everybody’s loving him, it’s like everybody’s on board.”
The commonality here, the thing I’ve learned from watching these documentaries and reading Sylvia’s book, is that these children were groomed by their abusers, rendering them complicit.
“Grooming is the slow, methodical, and intentional process of manipulating a person to a point where they can be victimized,” Eric Marlowe Garrison, a sex counsellor and author, tells Allure.”
[ Side note: Props to Allure magazine for sneaking in some useful information on how to recognize grooming behaviour, along with keeping us updated on Kylie’s newest skin products, of course. ]
The human mind is like plasticine, easily manipulated until the brain is fully formed - at the age of 25. We need to arm the youth with knowledge. It doesn’t have to be about fostering fear, but talking to them from the start about a good touch and a bad touch, about consent, about creating boundaries and empowering them to say no, and listening to them when they say no. If we’re going to teach women to practice personal safety to avoid being raped, we should teach our children about personal safety to avoid being sexually abused.
But that’s obviously not enough. We need more than defence to win this game. The Pedophile Next Door documentary suggests we provide support for people with pedophilia, the way we support people with alcohol and sex addictions, as they actively work at controlling their desires. I would totally be down for some of my tax dollars to be allocated to that. A pedophile and a child sex offender are not the same thing. It’s a bit radical, I know, but I don’t think pushing these people underground is the answer. Rejection simply fosters more anger and resentment making them more likely to offend. I think it’s worth trying a different approach.
The power of storytelling is two-fold: if you can relate, you feel less alone; if not, you can at least learn something. I went into this deep dive to better understand Sylvia as a character I was meant to play, now I feel like I understand her life experience on a much deeper level, the benefits of which far surpass “getting into character."
The purpose of this whole timeline was to help put you in the mindset of what was happening culturally at the time that Sylvia’s book was released. Friends and colleagues had urged her not to share her story, warning that it would almost certainly be professional suicide. I am forever grateful that she took the risk, as I’m sure sexual assault survivors all over the world are grateful to her.
Timing is to book publication what location location location is to real estate. My Father’s House rode the crest of what became a tidal wave of personal exposés that brought to public awareness an appalling truth: Sexual abuse is endemic to North American society, cutting across barriers of wealth, education, religion and social prominence.
- Sylvia Fraser, Saturday Night Magazine 1994
7 years after publishing “My Father’s House,” Sylvia writes this sensational article for Saturday Night Magazine in response to the backlash she received against her book. And by “backlash” I mean the emergence of a foundation dedicated to proving her - and any other person who claimed to have recovered repressed memories - to be false.
Enter: The False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
[ I intend to quote her article heavily in the following section because it gives you an excellent snapshot of what she was up against at the time. It is a magnificent piece of writing, but I can’t provide a link because it’s actually not available online, as far as I know. If you find it somewhere please reach out and let me know! Thankfully Sylvia was gracious enough to email me a PDF so… here we go. ]
Founded in March of 1992, this Philadelphia-based group was the brainchild of Pamela Freyd, a doctor of education whose daughter had alleged incest by her father. Composed mostly of other parents whose children had accused them of sexual abuse, members of this group based their public claim of innocence on an invented malady they named “false memory syndrome” (FMS).
I call this “syndrome” invented because no impartial committee of psychiatrists ever had, or ever would, approve it for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Ill-R, or any other professional therapeutic manual.
- Sylvia Fraser, Saturday Night Magazine 1994
They claimed that recovering repressed memories was impossible; that these “memories” of sexual assault were implanted into their minds by self-serving therapists, or simply that they were lying. People latched onto the idea because they couldn’t possibly believe that anyone could “forget” something as traumatic as sexual assault. That’s like saying that racism doesn’t exist because you haven’t personally experienced it.
Yes there are some vindictive cunts out there - hell, I’ve had my moments - but to say that it’s impossible is entirely ignorant. Not to mention the fact that the concept of “blocking out memories” has been studied as “traumatic amnesia” relating not only to sexual assault survivors but to survivors of non-sexual violence like the holocaust and World War II.
Take that in for a second. War veterans, and holocaust survivors - unimaginable, incomprehensible violence - and victims of child sexual assault. This is the level of life altering effects we’re dealing with here.
Traumatic amnesia is a memory disorder, a psychiatric symptom that characteristically occurs after a victim’s exposure to traumatic events and it is part of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as defined in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2015).
- Dr. Muriel Salmona, Psychiatrist, 2018
Would you tell a war vet that his repressed memories were false?
I didn’t think so.
To further discredit the FMS foundation, I would like to share this piece of information…
Though publicly revered by the leadership of the FMS Foundation as the scientific expert most responsible for the group’s success, Underwager was forced to resign from its forty-one-member advisory board after an interview with him appeared in a Dutch magazine, devoted to promoting pedophilia as an appropriate expression of adult sexuality. As Underwager urged in this interview, men attracted to young children should "make the claim that pedophilia is an acceptable expression of God's will for love and unity."
- Sylvia Fraser, Saturday Night Magazine 1994
The man who was the essence of the movement was out there openly normalizing child sexual abuse. Yes, he was forced to resign, but that doesn’t change the fact that his motives were clearly malicious and self-serving as a member of the FMS foundation. Who’s to say some of his fellow board members didn’t share that perspective? Then again, who am I to suggest that they did?
Sometimes at the heart of an abuser's own denial is not just the desire to escape punishment, but the need to repress an even more shameful secret: That he himself was sexually abused as a child. It seems that incest, like a computer virus, is timeset to compulsively repeat itself. One Minnesota therapist, whom I met during a TV interview, told me that even after ten years of research her clinic had been unable to find a case of incest in which this pattern had not been inherited. In every situation, the abuse could be traced back one or more generations. Abused males, through anger, modeling and opportunity, often became abusers, while abused female, through guilt, more usually self-punished as prostitutes, addicts, self-mutilators, suicidal depressives and as the enabling wives of abusers.
- Sylvia Fraser, Saturday Night Magazine 1994
Much like the cyclical nature of child sexual abuse itself, it’s resurgence into public awareness also comes in waves; washed away, time and time again, by those who protect the status quo, eager to continue the cycle of abuse by discrediting survivors and bullying them into submission.
Corwin of the Washington University School of Medicine noted in their 1993 paper on cycles of awareness of sexual abuse: "It can be argued that the very forces that prevented awareness of this issue in the past still obscure it today, for the sexual abuse of children has repeatedly surfaced into public and professional awareness in the past century and a half, only to be resuppressed by the negative reaction it elicits."
- Sylvia Fraser, Saturday Night Magazine 1994
Most recently I would say that Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland have brought it back into light. Since getting involved with this play 12 weeks ago, I’d be surprised if anyone I’ve had a conversation with has escaped without discussing it. I wake up reciting my lines as if having practiced them in my dreams; it has consumed me entirely. A perspective I’ve often come across is something along the lines of “that sounds pretty disturbing, why would I want to sit through any of those documentaries?” Reading between the lines I understand their hesitation in wanting to spend their time and money to come see this play. For some it would be triggering, for others, it would be cathartic; for most, it will be uncomfortable.
[ Wow Keegs! You’re really selling it! ]
I do want you to come see the play. Not because I’m in it, not because I’ve asked, not because you have nothing better to do that day… but because it is an incredible story of self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-acceptance, and I think we could all use a little more of that in our lives.