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With an uncle on holidays in the Ardennes
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Have you noticed the incredible division lately in the ranks of survivors and survivor advocates? I sense a strong push behind this wave of internal accusations from the network, with the purpose to create chaos within the ranks, so that the public will be so confused about who to believe and who not to believe that the entire issue of organized abuse will be thrown to the side.
I met Regina Louf, survivor of the Belgian network and main witness in the Dutroux case, once. It was somewhere around the year 2000 at a debate held in a packed Belgian café between two journalists; one defending her testimony that pointed to the extended VIP network, and the other voicing his suspicions.
Observing the familiarity and disrespect with which the doubting journalist directly addressed Regina Louf, who was in the audience, how he used his platform to casually yet relentlessly attack and discredit her, made me realize that I was far from ready to come out with my story. I had shared basic facts with the other journalist in the debate, who that evening introduced me to Regina without specifying that I was also a survivor of the network. And that was that.
Back in the US, some weeks later, I called her. I can’t remember the reason; I was trying indirectly to advance the cause, but I do remember that I shared that I had also been abused in the Belgian network. She was quick, kind and forthcoming, and I appreciated her sense of humor. At some point, I was describing a perpetrator whose image had been coming through in memories; tall, blond, young, who wore jeans and often white or jean shirts or sailor stripes. She wondered if it might be the gangster Patrick Haemers.
Though this phone call changed my life, Regina Louf and I never spoke again. Memories with Patrick Haemers were flooding my system and would dominate my therapy sessions for years to come.
A few years ago, I was made aware that a Belgian therapist and criminologist, who had played some role in the Dutroux affair and continued to speak out publicly, was discrediting me. Reddit posts contained screenshots of conversations in which she labeled me as controlled opposition. “She is lying about her story. She hijacked it from Regina Louf (X1).” (See below). This therapist/criminologist also dubbed herself a survivor advocate and often alluded to her close bond with Regina Louf.
I had actually met this woman once, in the year 2000, after being introduced through the same journalist that was defending Regina Louf’s testimony in the debate in the cafe. This meeting and the debate may well have happened around the same time, on the same trip to Belgium - as I had been living in the US for many years. This therapist/criminologist and I went for a walk in a Belgian town. I thought she would be a terrible therapist. Knowing I was a victim of the same network that she was supposedly trying to help dismantle, she did not ask a single question, but rather talked on and on about her own heroics as a whistleblower, and about an attempt on her life that she had survived. Considering how often I had barely escaped death as a child inside the network, I found it rather incredible that she would put herself center stage in a narrative that made her the savior, the expert and the victim, while I had apparently gotten the role of her audience. When we parted, she put both her hands on my shoulders, emoted, and stressed that she would always be there to support me.
When I confronted her more than 20 years after that initial meeting about her online statements meant to discredit me, she claimed that her social media accounts had been hacked, that it wasn’t her. She repeated that she supports survivors and added that she would never say anything of the sort. She did not remember our walk - not a great surprise since I had barely uttered a word. During our zoom conversation I did speak up, sometimes firmly, because she forcefully tried to impose her opinions under the cloak of her supposed psychological authority, while it seemed obvious to me that she wanted me to placate her so she could dominate.
As I was planning to visit Belgium again to be filmed for a documentary about network abuse, we made an appointment in the quaint medieval village where she lived, and we met again in 2022, in the garden of a local restaurant, film crew in tow.
Previous to the trip, I was asked in an interview how I had remembered the gangster Patrick Haemers’ name. He was one of my main Belgian abusers who ended up rescuing me from the network. I had simply answered the question - it had been told me back in 2000 by Belgian network survivor Regina Louf during the one phone conversation we’d had.
Since 2020 I’d had a few interactions with Regina Louf’s husband - as she was in poor health - so before the visit to Belgium, I checked with the husband if he would ask Regina for permission to talk about some of the content of that conversation we’d had more than 20 years earlier. She had shared something that I had always remembered, that was relevant to my story and certainly interesting in general, but I wasn’t sure if she had publicly shared this information or not. Would it be alright with her if I spoke of it and quoted her as my source? Not having received an answer from the husband, I had asked the therapist if she would check again with the couple, since she was so vocal about her connection with them. When we met in the restaurant garden, she showed me her phone screen with the reply from the husband, that Regina did not remember talking to me back in 2000, that she didn’t remember me from back then. This was not surprising, though, said the therapist, since Regina had been speaking to so many survivors during those years when the Dutroux case and the X-testimonies were big news in Belgium and beyond.
The day after meeting the therapist I did an interview in Bruges. Obviously I don’t need permission to share that Regina Louf put a name to someone pretty much anyone in Belgium at that time could have guessed, based on my description, because the gangster Patrick Haemers became infamous in our little country. Living abroad, I was totally unaware of well-known people in Belgium, but as soon as I had seen his photo after she’d mentioned his name, I had recognized him. During the same interview, I also clarified that Regina Louf and I had only spoken once to each other and added that she did not remember our conversation, so as not to misrepresent our relationship and make it appear that we were close when we weren’t. I left out the more sensitive content that she had shared in our conversation, which I had asked about and not received the okay to share from her or her husband.
The entire time that I have been speaking out, I have received almost no public support from anyone connected to the Belgian Dutroux affair, while my story is directly connected to this case. I did not testify in 1996, since I already lived abroad, and by the time I found out about the case from an article in the New York Times, the magistrate in charge, who had promised the public to “get to the bottom of this,” had already been fired; the network’s machinery to sabotage the case had already been put in motion. However, several of the X-witnesses pointed to the same perpetrators that I had privately identified, and while our stories were different, it was clear we were abused in the same network. There was exactly one person who publicly endorsed me (see below) in a Facebook comment, one of the original police investigators on the case, Michel Clippe, with whom I had several private interviews.
Even though I had hope that Regina Louf might wish to connect with me and show her support (I had asked to interview her for my podcast), it would not have been fair to expect anything considering her condition and the fact she has not appeared in public for years. But I was hopeful that the therapist, who never stopped giving interviews, might at least publicly set the record straight, that she might want to quell the rumors that she was dissing me online, or affirm her support in some way.
When she recently publicly criticized me over a banal issue of word usage, I confronted her and got a reply that sent me in an instant trauma cramp.
“Let’s face it: I have been four times at Regina and [her husband] and asked them if they ever heard about you. 4 times over several years. Face to face. And the day before you came to Belgium you called me again to ask Regina to confirm that she told you it was Patrick Haemers who saved you…”
I was already so triggered that I didn’t even take note of the enormous distortion, from Regina having told me something about Patrick Haemers, to having her personally witness my dramatic rescue from the network. Is this where she got the idea she was spreading online that I supposedly went around saying that I knew Regina from the networks, (See below), something that is not true and of course I never said? Could she really have misunderstood my innocent question to verify something and twisted it to this point?
In her email the therapist wrote that she doesn’t understand why I continue to lie about this. This accusation in this decidedly Belgian context threw my body in a panic. I could barely read what came next, something about 18 people in different countries who don’t know each other who contacted her, all confirming that I was abused in a network, yes, but differently from what I was sharing. Her message ended on another note about the purported lies. “You just cannot do this.”
She may have missed the irony that she was admitting that she had been lying to my face about her accounts being hacked, about it not being her who put out those rumors about me online as that I would be co-intel-pro and what not. I certainly didn’t pick up on that twist the first time I saw her email, since I was in shock. Eighteen people! The astounding number of what would be survivors or network insiders who all had confided in her - whatever it was - because she didn’t share what they all had told her about me. My supposed true reality, hidden from me behind a veil of secrecy in a confusing, accusing email.
It felt as though I was having a heart attack, and I was having difficulty breathing. I found myself back in childhood, after horrendous abuse, recoiling from the force of the charge that I am a liar, staggering, falling down, curling into a ball, once again completely overcome with the tremendous confusion that everything I knew might be false.
My skin must be grey. Every muscle is tight and stiff. I try to picture my Parental Self coming to comfort that little girl, pick her up and take her away, and find that she can’t receive comfort; she needs to stay in this cramp, needs to panic, because… A slightly smaller copy of this inner child forms, and then another, again a little smaller than the previous one, and another, and another. There are so many little parts that have been called a liar, that have been gaslit. There are too many. Each one stuck in the most horrific terror of fearing that the abusers are right and that her entire reality is wrong, false, non-existent. She has been screamed at during or after sexual abuse too many times, each time forming another little part.
This unbearable heaviness, this weight on my chest, the incredible grayness. This dissolution of what I am so as to absorb the filth, the slime, the grossness which becomes what I must be. No! No! My heart races in the fear that I am a filthy liar.
“Did I get things wrong?” “Am I missing huge pieces of my story?” “Am I going to be called out on mistakes I made, memories that may not have been fully accurate?”
I couldn’t calmly and rationally think about the possibilities, too overwhelmed, the body in a state of terror, the shame and the shaming of such a scenario fully descending on me. While parts work seemed impossible, it did immediately occur to me that this circumstance and this person represent the next step in my unfoldment. This affirmation, words by my teacher Yogananda, never left me throughout the ordeal.
Without sleep, the only way to calm the body and mind was to do the pranayama technique that is part of my meditation practice. Long breath in. Long breath out. Focusing the mind on the breath alone. In the stillness after the practice, insights would emerge.
It dawned on me that this is simply impossible. Why would eighteen direct witnesses to my being trafficked as a child all contact this therapist, and not me? Anyone who had not been there with me would not be not in any position to know, so I had to assume that all18 people had lived through these horrors with me. I couldn’t imagine that eighteen first-hand witnesses of my childhood victimization would wish to portray me as deceptive rather than mistaken, that they would have no compassion. I know the great privilege of having encountered exactly one survivor with whom I had also interacted in childhood in the network context. Finding each other again and exchanging precious details about our shared experiences as children was sacred.
When I recently visited Belgium and saw the same journalist who had been part of the debate in 2000, who back then had introduced me to Regina Louf and to this therapist, I asked him where the therapist could possibly have gotten her ideas from. He suggested the name of an Israeli man who has done as much damage as one man possibly could, to discredit me.
After that man had produced a video in 2016 in which I briefly shared my story, he and I had been in regular contact. In fact, he insisted on Skyping at what would have been any time of the night in his time zone, sharing information and connecting me with several people which really got my story out there in a far bigger way than ever before. Because of his intensity and obsession, I had gently distanced myself from him, but over a year later he reappeared with a proposal to produce a documentary about my story. He wanted to focus on my experiences in the Belgian network, not in the global network. Early in the process, in 2017 or early 2018, I ended our collaboration. Not one to take rejection, he then began a relentless campaign, writing to all newspapers that had featured my story, to perpetrator families, claiming that I was lying. He wrote long, anonymous Reddit posts that disclosed private information he had obtained from me mixed with vicious lies that are still being circulated to discredit me to this day. He contacted anyone I had ever mentioned or to whom he guessed I might somehow be connected, interrogated them with weirdly personal, embarrassing, twisted facts which exacted only one possible answer, one he could use for his narrative.
The journalist himself had also been subject to one of these insane phone calls. The Israeli had asked the journalist if he had felt attracted to me, because, he claimed, that is what I had told him. This was not so, but of course the journalist could only utter a confused no. The Israeli next put this conversation plus several other conversations with others, in feverish, voluminous emails titled: “Proofs that Anneke Lucas is lying.” This one conversation with the journalist was to prove that I had an inflated sense of my female prowess, when in our earlier private conversations I had probably spoken about a part inside me that had been created in the network to draw men in. This is just one small example of how he pulled my words far out of context to construct his wild and long messages, that he sent to everyone he could think of.
This Israeli man, whom I never met in person, had a way of being able to contact anyone, anytime, no matter how rich or famous. He told me he could do this through a friend and obviously made plenty use of his friend’s data base when he was busy writing his crazy emails. His campaign against me was incessant. His obsessiveness was boundless, he slept very little. All his insane, manic energy went to his vendettas against woman who dared to set a boundary with him. I got overwhelmed with new evidence of his destruction almost every day. Having some of his mails forwarded to me that gave a hint at how much volume he was putting out and how many people he copied on these emails, including perpetrator families and famous people, what is truly amazing is how few of the recipients informed me. It is highly likely that the therapist did indeed receive one or more of his emails.
The particular traits of this Israeli producer with his insane, rabid energy, I later realized, was likely used by the network. His talent was not only to get the rich and famous on the phone, but to get them to give him an answer and often, get them to do what he wanted. He must have been very useful. It feels like he was an unwitting attack dog for the network.
All those who received these defamatory emails, written in the his peculiar mix of real, private information he had gathered over the years and lies, to twist everything into vicious slander, had the opportunity to reach out to me. Those who did, said that they didn’t read the contents based on the subject matter alone. Others said they did not believe that his intentions were sincere. Others simply forwarded his emails. When I read his messages, his manic, vengeful energy was all over them and they were full of contradictions and nonsensical arguments. To read such slander and to then also believe it, only indicates someone’s lack of awareness and sensitivity. Hiding underneath those lies and gossip are unresolved issues and deep blind spots which are being weaponized by the network to create chaos and division.
I don’t believe most of these people are themselves in the network, but I do believe they have been influenced, as I believe this Israeli producer was and he in turn probably influenced the Belgian therapist. Her need to be the psychology expert is the perfect entry point to pit her against me, a survivor who won’t cave to her authority. This is how she could find domination over me. And that is how you stir division. The network doesn’t have to do much, just push the right button at the right moment. I think that Israeli producer, with his black and white thinking and manic revenge energy, was or is a fantastic asset to the network. Meanwhile both the therapist and the Israeli both staunchly believe that they are supporting survivors.
Ultimately, these people, whether they are agents or tools for the network or not, create a necessary triage. All those who do not align with the truth of my words will end up somewhere else, attacking or gossiping or spreading lies. Their own energy betrays where they are at; and in the end it doesn’t concern me.
We all have an inner compass that guides us towards what is true. If confusion can lead us inward to heal, to gain greater awareness of ourselves so we can come out with greater clarity, then we can overcome this great push towards chaos.
Below: Comment on Facebook by Michel Clippe, police investigator on original team checking the X-testimonies in the Dutroux Case.
“I am also in contact with Anneke, by video conference, for some time now… Most of the people she names have also been named by X3 and in part also by X1. Astonishing!!!… More so because she names people that were not pointed to by X1 but people whom I suspected could be part of the network because of their closeness to the milieu that was described by Regina… For me there is no doubt: Anneke confirms and more importantly, reinforces that which the X-witnesses have made clear to us!!!!”
Below: Reddit posts with screenshots of conversations with criminologist.
