I had heard of a man who had been closely connected to the network, who in his young adult life, when he had been purely ambitious, had been both invited into and warned about this next career move. He didn’t heed the warning and thrived in the power system where his unique skills were particularly useful for some of the most powerful people in the world. When his eyes were finally opened and he was confronted with the child abuse that had been occurring right around him the entire time, he was unprepared for this reality. Unwilling and unable to stomach the abuse and murder of children, he started to back out from his position. In doing so, he lost everything and survived several attempts on his life.
A Dutch woman who was going to interview me knew him and was going to introduce us. I had high hopes, having never met anyone who came back from this world, who refused to be compromised and paid a high price for his freedom. In the network I was raped by many men, all indoctrinated into the fellowship of silence that exists at the top levels of the power structure. These men came from different backgrounds, from different countries, but they all had this in common: they were all white and they would all do anything to attain or remain at the top. Many were introduced to me as newcomers, as though this was their first time with a child. I can’t say if that was true, but what was definitely true is that they were unaware that we were being filmed or photographed so they could be blackmailed. They expressed discomfort when first alone with me and every time I expected that this man, who acted shy and as though he knew this was wrong, would refuse to go any further, that he would refuse to rape a child, no matter how drunk or high or how much he might have wanted to climb the social ladder. Not a single one of the droves of men ever stopped himself. Not only that, once they left their feigned scruples behind, it became clear that they were perfectly comfortable raping a young child.
Hearing about this rare man who would have been the one who would have stopped himself, the one who did stop, filled me with anticipation. Someone who knew that world but like me, was strong enough not go along with their insanity. Someone who had not lost his heart completely, who along the way had found it back, even though he was already in a position in which he was receiving all the material benefits of belonging to that society. Someone whose integrity had him know that it did not matter if he lost all he had gained, that it did not matter if he would be killed - more important was that he would not participate in this organized madness of pedophile serial killers.
The journalist interviewed me in a Dutch mill where I had rented a room for the night. The owner had allowed us to film the interview in the mill’s kitchen. The man who had escaped the network was supposed to arrive sometime later. During our interview, the journalist got extremely triggered. Her tears and pain took center stage and ripped away my defenses. The child part in me who had experienced the horrors emerged, opened up completely and quietly suffered while every one of the journalist’s dramatic reactions made me more invisible.
Just as we took a break, the man arrived. The journalist ran up to him on the lawn and threw herself into his arms, heaving with sobs. I stood by, shaking and freezing while she told him how awful it all was. The two-man crew seemed to think she was overcome with empathy for how awful the events of my past had been, while I felt none of that. In the past I would have felt guilty, as though I had overshared and hurt her with these difficult truths. I would have felt that I had not gauged her properly, that I had been too graphic and was responsible for her overwhelm. Even though I was completely emotionally open, I did not take on the guilt as I would have in the past. That guilt was yet another overlay over the vulnerability I was experiencing.
He told the journalist he wanted to say hello to me, walked up, smiled, and said I must have expended a lot of energy during the interview. He took off his wool coat and put it over my shoulders. His caring gesture was every bit as healing as if the potential rapists of the past would have not wanted to touch me and covered me up instead. He was wearing a suit jacket and mentioned that he realized it might be triggering for me to see him in a business suit. I assured him it was not.
As we walked back to the mill, with a few minutes left of our break in this interview, he suddenly launched into a monologue. He told graphic stories about other survivors he had met and all the things he was doing to help them. I realized that while I was in the vulnerable space of expecting him to save me, he seemed to be attached to his role as the savior. He also shared about his own childhood sexual abuse. There was a familiar glint in his eye, perhaps from his own expectations of meeting another survivor who saw him as a hero. The child part in me sunk deeper into oblivion as my adult self observed a deeply wounded man who seemed to need his savior role more than I needed a savior.
When he started sharing information about the elite system, he treated me as a woman in need of an education, not a survivor of the same system. To remind him, I told him who my main perpetrator was, an American billionaire from one of the most prominent families in the world.
“He was just a messenger boy,” he responded. “The ones with real power walk around in jeans and no one ever knows who they are.”
My girl part who would have loved to learn more looked for the hero who had gotten out of the network, who put his coat over my shoulders. My adult self was aware of his power move, his pathetic need to know more than me and use that to lift himself up above me. I wondered if having seen me tremble like a leaf upon our encounter had emboldened him to treat me as a damsel-in-distress.
Then he made an off-color sexual joke. I dissociated. My adult self gone, we sat down at the kitchen table to continue the interview. I was not even capable to simply end the interview right there. He sat out of the camera’s view, across from me at the table, so stuck in his superior role that I was constantly aware of his silent judgments and opinions. His thoughts were made so obvious through his facial expressions he might as well have spoken them out loud. The interview was never aired; the journalist retired and when I received the footage I decided not to post it.
While I was still in a state of dissociation and extreme vulnerability, we all went out for dinner. The journalist acted like an excited girl, reveling in his hero/victim stories, which seemed to entertain her to no end, while the camera man who sat near me sensitively, privately, asked me how I was doing. I felt abandoned by the others, and not entirely able to bring my adult self back online.
Then the man I had wanted to believe a hero turned to address me and asked what I had learned from him. I stared in disbelief, but next heard myself murmuring something he would want to hear. Minutes later, he again turned to me and said: "I'm not sure why I'm saying this, but it seems to me that you could try to think more universally when you speak."
I thought up an excuse, said my good-byes and left. Disappointed at our meeting, emotionally torn open with young vulnerable parts up, I hopped on a tram to Amsterdam and took a long walk. Returning late that night, the miller offered tea and home-baked bread. We talked for hours. The conversation could have turned into an adventure; my young parts certainly were activated and ready to once again find something akin to comfort in the arms of a man. Skin on skin, replicating the nurturing warmth of motherly love, it was tempting to find that love-substitute once again. However, it has been many years since I’ve lost my adult self to a degree that would eradicate my boundaries completely. I went to my own bed.
The next day I flew back home to the US and then got sick: nauseous, vomiting, I hurt everywhere. Some parts that had never left the gruesome past, who were so in need of being rescued, in such desperate need of kindness from the very men that were abusing me, felt the terror and pain of a reality without any knights in shining armor, without child rapists that would save me from themselves. I had looked for the savior in them and those parts, awakened by the promise of a would-be perpetrator who had heroically abstained from harming children, were faced with the reality that they would not be saved. The American billionaire also had that savior part in him; he believed he was rescuing me, that I was lucky to have met him.
If the man I had just met had little in common with the billionaire, they did share the fact that their savior complex came from a little boy part that saw their own weakness and frailty and vulnerability in victims or survivors, and that they needed at all cost to see this vulnerability outside of themselves, so that, in their pretense of coming to the rescue, they could feel in control. Such fantasies can sometimes fly - some relationships are built on both partners remaining in their respective roles of victim and savior - only in my case the fantasy was shattered again and again. The pressure of the lie was too great in childhood, having to believe that the torture I suffered was for my own good, feeling that I should be grateful to belong to an extremely dysfunctional club.
Even the gangster who ultimately saved me from the network was anything but a knight in shining armor; he had been ready to see me being tortured to death before he had a change of heart. His sadistic laughter as he observed a burning cigarette being put out on my arm roused my defiance. The strength he noticed in me in that crucial moment, when I made it clear to him that I did not need him to survive, that I would rather die than depend on him, is what touched him, not my weakness. He went to negotiate to save me, but not because he was a savior.
None of these men can be expected to be saviors. Most men in savior roles are protecting their own vulnerability. Most women in girl or victim roles waiting for their saviors are afraid of their own power.
After the sickness I felt more whole, more empowered, cured from the sickly hope of the little ones inside who had needed to hold on to hope as a lifeline. The hope is within myself, from the strength that comes from the divine which animates everything and saves everyone.