Of course I don’t nor can I read all comments on videos - but I’ve seen enough to know that there are many are heartfelt sympathizers, often with kind understanding to boot. When I started doing the healing work 30 years ago, I couldn’t find sympathy anywhere. At that time, from what I gathered after the Dutroux case went public in Belgium, those that present as intellectuals who represented the media treated survivors as whiners or liars.
The much-anticipated attacks that I prepared for before going public 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 small minority, and I have to say, times have changed so much that now the deniers' intellects are not impressive. Those who puff themselves up like authoritarians to attack me are hopelessly irrelevant in their role of internet troll. They might mention I am not specific or don't mention details, while I actually give great detail - but don't name perpetrators. It is lazy thinking to assume that naming names would bring justice, and to use that argument to claim I'm lying implies a degree of narcissism of the commentator at the abuser level. Those who say I'm crazy, sound crazy.
"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 in this blog post 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 performed by two young men in white lab coats. I described the men and the situation and wrote that "things" were taken from my body.
An anonymous detractor took this to mean that I had written that organs were removed from my body and wrote lengthy posts on Reddit in 2018 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, but that Wayback machine showed the original sentence. 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 written that organs were taken from my body and that this was proven by Wayback machine still circulates to this day and comes up in 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, former student or not, let alone an apparent English native speaker, could ever get hold of any records at all, let alone my personal attendance records from 1969 to 1974. And yet many did clearly begin 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 exactly dramatic, and it's easy to guess that if I had wanted attention, there are far less controversial ways to get it. Those who suspect foul because I waited so long to speak out must not have heard my story, which in itself offers so many reasons to remain silent, apart from the death threats. Those who believe it's not possible because they've never heard of this before are saying they only accept what appears on the nightly news. 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 where people say I'm an actress (one said a bad actress) but the message is important, so it's okay. Couch activists who can't let themselves feel what I say?
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 part of my role is to bring understanding so we can move beyond it - because revenge would only perpetuate the cycle of violence which we are trying to break to create peace through global bother and sisterhood. 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.