When I started doing the healing work 30 years ago, it seemed unlikely I was going to receive any sympathy from anywhere. Nearly ten years later the Dutroux case went public in Belgium and beyond, and I traveled back to my country of origin to meet some people of the “underground,” hoping to find some reflection. Those I encountered were mostly wounded souls who had attached to this dark topic to run away from their own trauma and were too dysfunctional to meet me where I was at.
One of the researchers who had started a volunteer group and had uncovered the Zandvoort child porn scandal in Holland, showed me an image of a naked, brown haired, ten-year old girl being abused by an adult man. Before our meeting, which at his insistence was in his basement where he visioned child porn materials all day long for his research, my only demand had been that he would not expose me to any of these materials, because as a survivor, I would be too triggered. The girl in the blown up photo looked like me as a child. I completely dissociated. This man was later charged with child abuse and jailed. The underground believed that he was innocent, that he was a hero who he had been set up by the network.
In this space exist wolves in sheep’s clothing and lost souls searching for their own heart of darkness through their savior complex and trauma porn. I understood that I would have to be emotionally ready for anything if I were to ever speak out. Mostly, I felt that I could never come forward as long as I needed reflection, as long as I was looking for love and validation from the strangers who would come across my story. On the flip side await the inevitable attacks, which, had I needed the love, would have thrown me off balance. I might have tried to isolate the “love” by gaining power, which is the way the network can get to us, to ultimately compromise us along with the entire cause. Humility is the only quality to avoid this trap, in that it means that you have nothing left to prove because you are fully secure within yourself. That does not come easily to people whose self-esteem has been robbed in horrific ways as was ours. Those survivors who want power end up needing flattery to inflate their fragile ego and are easily manipulated. While they may be platformed, it will only be on one or another side of the network-enforced division. Ultimately, because of the platform itself or their own megalomania, they will lose credibility, and so will SRA on the whole. After I was first pressured to go public in Belgium in 1998, I waited fifteen more years before I felt ready.
I don’t generally read many comments on my videos but I’ve seen enough to know that a lot of them come from heartfelt sympathizers, often with kind understanding. The much-anticipated attacks that I prepared for were not nearly as present as I had expected. In the comments on one video that went viral, those who doubt or attack me are a minority of irrelevant trolls.
While much is expected of me from many of these critics, nothing is given. A common attack is that I don’t name names. It is lazy thinking to assume that naming names would bring justice. Personally, I would like to know exactly what each person demanding names from me will do with that information that would lead to justice. What is their plan to further the cause? How will they prove to be helpful? Have they listened to the testimonies of those who came before me, like Cathy O’Brien and Brice Taylor, who named all their prominent perpetrators, which yet appears to have made no difference whatsoever? What have these trolls done to obtain justice in any real way, based on those testimonies, that include names of politicians who are still active today?
Claims that I must be lying if I don’t name names imply a degree of narcissism of these commentators at the abuser level. How could anyone not have any inkling that surviving abuse as extreme as this - in the highest echelons of society, involving extensive torture to ensure that surviving victims will never speak out, when the biggest cases were completely covered up to protect the abusers - makes it complex and dangerous for survivors to name perpetrators?
There are those engaging intensely with online commentators to convince them that I am lying, mixing truths with their lies. Some of these same instigators have also busied themselves by contacting everyone with whom I have had any connection, from newspaper editors to podcasters to collaborators to book publishers, writing lengthy emails with the purpose to discredit me, always mixing truths with outrageous falsehoods. They are professional and aggressive in their attacks and spend so much of their time attempting to discredit me that they are either insane, or more likely, operating for the network.
There are long and winding Reddit posts that put my credibility in question. The following sentence from one of my blog post is the subject of one of these posts:
"He drove me straight to a lab-like place nearby where I was forced down on a table while two young men in white lab coats did some type of gynecological exam. They performed a kind of painful scrape and put whatever they culled from my internal organs in vials."
This sentence used to be more vague in the initial version. I had been too shy to reveal that at nine years old, I had been through a forced gynecological scrape. I described the men and the situation and wrote that "things" were taken from my body.
The anonymous detractor took this to mean that organs were removed from my body and wrote endless posts on Reddit to try to discredit my entire past based on his faulty interpretation of that sentence, claiming that I had somehow later edited my content to hide what I had originally written, and that the Wayback machine showed the original sentence. The one with the organs. Of course he never included any link to any previous version of my blog post, because he nor anyone else would never be able to find what does not exist.
The rumor as that I had claimed that organs were taken from my body and that this was proven by Wayback machine still circulates to this day and comes up in random comments, while none of these people ever try to find that link to verify this lie about me. It is just one of many examples of defamatory lies that continue doing the rounds and are regurgitated each time something of mine gets noticed.
When attackers demand proof, please tell them that witness testimony is proof.
And when they claim that they have proof, such as the Wayback machine for the example above, or in another example, one who claimed he had found in my elementary school records that I was not often absent as I had supposedly stated (I was sometimes absent, but not very often). He engaged people in a long comment chain, yet no one thought to ask him for proof! The school where I went has been closed for decades. I doubt that anyone, even former students, let alone an apparent English native speaker, could ever get hold of my personal attendance records from 1969 to 1974 from the long-closed Flemish school in the sleepy village where I grew up. And yet many people he was obsessively engaging with clearly began to doubt.
I hope that the time of the bullies is over, that we can bring people to account who have gotten so far with their lies only because their viciousness and aggressiveness frightens people into submission.
Those who suspect attention seeking don't do well for themselves either; I'm not dramatic. If I had wanted attention, there are far less controversial ways to get it. I don’t need the power; instead I developed the Unconditional Model and teach it so that others can more easily read power dynamics and projections, all related to the issues of those who do seek power in order to receive attention. Those who suspect foul because I waited so long to speak out must not have listened to my story, which in itself offers so many reasons to remain silent, apart from the death threats. I speak with so many survivors who cannot even begin to imagine speaking out, because of all the fear one needs to overcome before speaking out even to one trusted provider.
Then there are those who suspect I'm doing this to sell something, or to promote my non-profit. And that just makes me laugh, because that is where their mind is at. Then there are these weird ones who say I'm an actress (one said a bad actress) but the message is important, so it's okay. Just baffling.
Each person reacts from their own level of emotional maturity. The blanket denial of 30 years ago has matured into sorrow and indignant outrage. There are still many who want revenge, and that is why I want to bring deeper understanding - because revenge would only perpetuate the cycle of violence which we are trying to break.
Once we reclaim our own power, we don't need revenge, because we will be out of the hunter-prey survival world of the psychopaths, and in the empathic world of humans.