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From Silence to Strength: One Time Is Too Many · Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)

• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music Podcast.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Aaron, I'm your host, and thank you guys so much for sticking around for another week.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: On tonight's show, I'm gonna keep this short, and here's why.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I got sick last Friday.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you guys have caught this flu thing that's going around, but man, avoid it like the plague, right?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not one for flu shots and all this nonsense.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't, I just don't get into that, right?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's not my jam.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm telling you, this flu that's going around right now is absolutely butt-kicking.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I picked up some sickness last week, started to feel some tickle on Wednesday.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: By Friday afternoon, I was a little bit of cough.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: I took the afternoon off.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I intended to go wine tasting, but I got sick.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: By the time that night came, I had a terrible fever, laid up in bed, was laid up all weekend, had fever for about four or five days straight, uh, absolutely sucked.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Congestion, all the grossness with it, and just absolutely exhausted.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: As I sit here and record this right now, I am absolutely tuckered out.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't missed an episode since I started this podcast in June of 2024, and I'm not about to miss this week either.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna come into you guys today.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna bring you guys something, kind of keep it short and sweet.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason I'm bringing this to you today, the inspiration for today's episode was actually from a listener, and a listener who has written me a couple of very long emails and told me a lot about their life, which I love hearing from you guys.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: I love hearing your stories and how what I'm doing here relates to what you've got going on in your world.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely find just the joy in that, you know.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't get to get out and and actually uh help people every single day the way that I used to, but what I do is I get to do this podcast and I get to hear from you guys and your feedback and how what I'm doing is influencing your world today, and that is pretty spectacular.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this young lady reached out to me and she said, Hey, you know, I was listening to one of your episodes.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was episode number 19, and it's called Surviving the Unthinkable, and I knew that right away.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that is Ashley.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Ashley is the person that I interviewed on that episode, and Ashley was one of my victims.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you guys haven't heard that episode, she was a sex abuse victim.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Her father raped her thousands of times between the time of about two years old and about twenty years old.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: During that time, he got her pregnant, ultimately took her to abort the baby, found her as his girlfriend, would take her on vacations as his girlfriend.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Ashley tells the whole story.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Ashley delayed her report until she was in her mid-20s.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: She came to me, she found me a complete stranger.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: She told her entire story, was very vulnerable, and at the end of the day, we sent her father to prison for many, many years.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we found out that, you know, Ashley wasn't the only victim in this case at her father's hands.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that really hit this new listener hard.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, you know, Aaron, can you please do an episode?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because I know that Ashley is not the only sex abuse victim out there.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: The listener says, I'm a victim of this, and I'm not the only victim.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Can you please do an episode that one time is too many?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what this episode is going to be about.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I encourage you guys, if you listen to this episode and it rings any kind of bell with you or somebody you know, or a friend, or a relative, or a loved one that maybe experienced this, listen to the song at the end of this episode and listen to the entirety of it.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: What would happen if we could change the way that people perceive this?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, as victims of this, we we think about things.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we think maybe it's our fault, and we don't want to, we don't want to upset the apple cart.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to tell, or we don't want to mess up the family dynamics, so we delay these reports.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Can you please do an episode on sex abuse and reporting and validating the victims?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought to myself, man, that's right up my alley.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: What I did for life was validate victims.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: I could totally do that.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I want to do today.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to take a couple minutes.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna take a lot of your time today, but I'll take a few minutes just to touch on this a little bit.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I think I can come to this with some expertise from a couple of different angles.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: One, I was a detective that investigated child sex abuse crimes, adult sex abuse crimes.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got lots of experience talking to lots of victims, but more so than that, I myself am a victim of child abuse, child sexual abuse.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Between the ages of about nine, ten, eleven years old, I would go to Louisiana and spend time with my family in Louisiana.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And when I did, there was a neighbor who was half a dozen, ten years older than me, and he molested me for many years.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we're talking full molestation.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you can imagine it, it was happening.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I held on to that for so many years.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: I did not disclose that just like Ashley.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't disclose that until after I came out of law enforcement.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I realized that there was no need to be ashamed, that it wasn't my fault, and that for me, that was the drive behind the intensity that I put into my work, the reason that I validated victims so well, the reason that I wouldn't stop fighting for the victims or the child abuse victims or the dead victims, and I would be their voice throughout the court process and defend them.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I was doing that was because nobody did that for me, and that's not necessarily their fault.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't let them know.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how I can come to you and talk about this with some kind of credibility, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just something I read in a book somewhere, it's something that I survived.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I personally know, and I think other victims out there will tell you the same thing, that it is very hard to come forward and talk about being sexually abused.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a very intimate thing.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we don't talk about our we don't talk about our good sex lives.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: We don't get together with our friends and be like, hey, guess what happened last night?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't do that.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: We don't that that is an intimate part of our lives.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's an intimate part of our body.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's the parts of our bodies that only doctors and our parents get to touch when we're young.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, to talk about those things and to talk about those intimate things in general is difficult.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: But now take that as a victim and say somebody else took away your ability to say no, your ability to have control of your body and what you wanted to happen to it when you want it to happen.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: They touched you in ways that you can never undo.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: You can't unring that bell.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: That is why this is hard to talk about.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: It makes you feel like you did something wrong.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: The way you dressed, the way you acted, the conversation.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe as a juvenile, you have some hormonal thoughts.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: You you are getting turned on when the wind changes directions, and then all of a sudden somebody else is there and feeling the same way, and all of a sudden they start touching you.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, Well, I guess I kind of brought this on myself because I was already kind of turned on.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever the case may be, whatever those reasons are, victims often tend to blame themselves for what happens to them.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: The truth is this that one inappropriate touch, one touch is one touch too many.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: That is what is the truth.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: The the absolute core fact to take away from all of this is that if you have been put into that position where somebody has taken away your innocence, somebody has touched you or violated you or done something to you that you are not okay with as a child or an adult, one time is too many.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is going to be a safe place to listen, to hear, to express.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you guys want to reach out to me, feel free.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, you're not gonna be the first person to reach out to me and said, Man, Aaron, after talking to you about this and hearing what you had to say, this happened to me also.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it it's okay.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is a safe place.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've sat down and had thousands of these interviews.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Abuse often goes unreported because of fear, shame, confusion, maybe power dynamics, maybe family dynamics.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: The things that I said a moment ago, we don't want to upset that apple cart.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to upset the family.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: What would happen if they knew that dad was touching me?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Mom and dad would get divorced, and the entire family would be destroyed.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Christmases would never be the same.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Silence is a very common thing, but it doesn't mean you consented to anything, and it doesn't mean that you're weak.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: I personally would love for every victim the moment it happened to pick up the phone and call and report, and we can go out there and jump on it and investigate this, and all the leads will be fresh.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I know but I know for a fact that doesn't occur and it's okay because sometimes victims need that time to process.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: They need those time, that time to allow this to marinate and figure out how they want to handle and how they want to move forward.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: At some point, their ability to say no and their ability to be in control was taken away from them.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, our job is to give them the time and the control to take that power back.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: The power they have in their hand is when they want to report, when they want to disclose, at the pace, at the tempo, at the rhythm that they want to tell the story.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: That is up to them.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: If they get halfway through that story, if you get halfway through that story and you decide, okay, I'm done talking, this is too much, it's okay to stop.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: We can always revisit this later.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: That is something that people often don't understand.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: They think that if I come forward, I have to tell the whole story, I gotta jump right in, we're going right into the court process, and it's gonna be nasty and messy, not necessarily the case.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: So people just need to understand the truth.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: The truth is you are the victim.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is at your tempo, your pace, your disclosure.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody else is there to support and listen to you.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that I think people often don't understand is that if the abuse is happening to you, it's happening to somebody else.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: You are not alone in this.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: The victims are not alone.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: I have never met an abuser that only abused one victim.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I can say that I have met hundreds and hundreds of sex abuse suspects, none of them have only ever abused one person.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it would not be uncommon for me to go into a sex abuse suspect interview knowing there was one victim and come out with ten more by the time we were done.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: People I had no idea about, but just asking the questions and uncovering more and more victims.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that happens all the time.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: So know that just because you were touched once or there was one violation in your friend's world or your wife's world or your boyfriend's world or your cousin's world, that only because there was one incident there and it's not that much, maybe I don't need to report it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's happened to more people than just you or just them.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes, survivors of these crimes will discover later that there were others involved, their other friends, their other cousins, the suspect sisters, whatever it was, other people were involved and there's other victims out there.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it just takes that one person with the strength to come forward and say it happened to me, and that starts unpeeling this onion, and all of a sudden, before you know it, things have imploded and the person's world might implode, but it's not your fault.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: The person made those decisions.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: But what is is awesome is you have been the catalyst to all of those people feeling validated and all of those people getting some kind of resolution and being heard.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the sometimes it's not the crime that hurts or the act that hurts so much.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's the lack of validation or nobody believing or nobody listening to that victim.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: That is what compounds the pain and the stress in their world.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: So just for you to be the catalyst to get somebody else to be heard, all we want to do as human beings is to be heard, especially when something has happened to us and we feel like we have a story to tell, but sometimes it falls on deaf ears.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many times parents have come or kids have come to me and been disclosed that, well, I told my mom and dad, but my mom says that I we couldn't do anything because the, you know, Bobby, Uncle Bobby was paying the bills.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And if we told the police and Uncle Bobby wouldn't be able to pay the bills and he'd have to go to jail, and then we wouldn't have anywhere to live.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I just continued to lay there on the couch and take it.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: That is completely unacceptable, but it happens all the time.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: So to give somebody that voice and that validation is so important.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And for one person to come forward, even only being touched one time, you may open the door in the pathway for so many other people to heal.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: As you report these things, you can protect other people.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're not just protecting yourself, but you're protecting the future generations.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're protecting a cyclic behavior of abuse that is going to come and continue to come and continue to come.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: These people don't stop.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a reason why sex abuse offenders are required to register on a national registry.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's because this is something in the brain.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: This does not stop.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: They continue to offend or they continue to have that propensity to offend, and therefore they need to be monitored and watched.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you will continue to protect other people by stepping forward.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I say you because I've had several people in this podcast reach out, and I believe through their comments that they are sex abuse victims or they know sex abuse victims, and they've asked about this.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Ashley told her story back in episode 19 and then a follow-up on episode 20.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And both of those have got so much attention, and she told those, man, a year and a half ago.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And those have got so much attention and been some of the most listened to episodes that we have.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I can see people go back and keep re-listening to them.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not a topic of conversation that I would think somebody would want to hear multiple times.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: But when these same listeners are coming back and hearing it multiple times over and over again, I've got to believe there's more to the core than just wanting to hear Ashley's story.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are people out there who are trained, just like I was.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: There are people out there who are trained to listen and understand and hear what you're saying and sometimes hear what you're not saying.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, I encourage everybody to come out, find a safe resource, find somebody that's supportive, and go to them and talk.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is not so uncommon, guys.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right around your neighborhood, within if you go to the National Registry and search, there's a sex offender living within a mile of you.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would almost guarantee it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there are people in your own family who have been sexually abused.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: If there's four people in the room, at least two of them have been sexually abused at some point in their life.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: As if you're looking at adults and they have a whole life to live by.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, these numbers are staggering and it's right here in our backyards.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, you guys, I just want to reiterate that one time is too many.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Reporting an act of sexual abuse in yourself or helping somebody or bringing somebody else to the table to do it, that is an act of courage, not an act of obligation.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: You are not obligated to report anything to anybody.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: But knowing that if you do, if you do have the courage to come forward and say this happened to me, chances are you are gonna help other people, you are gonna uncover other people who have been victimized, you are gonna help to give that voice to the silenced, you are gonna help bring people to the surface that need help, and you're gonna help people at the surface that need some justice to find that place of justice.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Know this that you are believed, you are not alone.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Come to the table, talk about it, share your thoughts and experience.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you or somebody you know have been sexually abused, please, please, please make a report, talk about it, share it with somebody, a therapist, a counselor, a cop, it doesn't matter who, but get that off your chest.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Holding that weight on your chest can cause so much more stress, damage, and death.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need that.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Help bring the people that are responsible to justice, help bring the people who took away the innocence, who touched people, who took away somebody's right to say no, and the power and the strength that person once had went away with one single touch.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: They might have well used a gun.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they used their hands, and all of a sudden the innocence is gone.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Help bring that innocence back, help bring that power back to that person.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to thank you guys for listening and for the listener, you know who you are.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for bringing this to the surface and making this a topic that we can talk about today.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, I'm feeling better by next week, and I can get you guys a full episode.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Love you guys so much.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: That is a Murders to Music Podcast.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: She feels dirty.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: She feels the colour.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: She's forever.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just use the gun.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: God was watching and he knows your name because of you, she's forever chimney.