The story that we’re going to talk about today is about my personal abuse and overcoming those different teachers and abuse that I’ve experienced.
When I turned seven, my father was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He was given just a few months to live, and I started living with my aunt, who also was on the same property as us but in a different house. My aunt lived like my second mother; she took me everywhere, everything was great, everything was fine, um, until I turned seven and my aunt married my uncle. Just the way he made me feel—he would look at me in certain ways that I felt were inappropriate, but I couldn’t put words to it. I couldn’t put an understanding to it at that moment.
One day, my mother—she would go to see my dad at the hospital all the time. She didn’t want to bring me to the hospital, so I would spend time more and more when I got off school, when I had to do homework, or when I was going to spend the night. I would stay at my aunt’s, and that ultimately meant I was staying with my uncle as well.
It was just the middle of the day when he walked in. And the moment he walked in, um, I could smell it on his breath. He walked in and he began to rub my leg. I scooted back, and he kind of followed me, put his hand on my genitals, and he started telling me that he wanted me to do that to him to make him feel good, the way he was going to make me feel good. I cried. I cried the whole time. I couldn’t understand where my aunt was. I thought maybe if I cried louder, she would hear me. I uh, found out later that she’d gone to the grocery store. She didn’t know that he was a monster. And uh, so he made me do things to him, and he did things to me.
When he was done—it was almost like immediately when he was done, my aunt walked through the door. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t lose—I was already losing my dad, I was already losing my mom, and I didn’t want to lose my aunt and my grandma. I kept it in. Because I didn’t want to become a burden, I kept it in for a very long time.
Then, over the next couple of months, when I would spend the night, he would wait till 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, and he would come in and lay beside me. I would just pretend to be asleep. I closed my eyes so tight, and I would just ball up, just like in the fetal position, just worried that he thought I was awake. But he never—he would wake me up. There was no saying no, and I would just quietly cry. So that happened a few times where he was just touching me, where he was just fondling me and putting my hand on it.
And you know, until I believe I was eight, when one night he came in and he did the worst thing he could do to me: he took my virginity. It was so painful, it hurt so much. I was devastated.
So I went to get on the bus, and I’m a wreck. I’m a complete wreck. So, I did have a friend. I got on the bus and I went to sit down, and she saw me and she was like, “Sam, what happened? Sam, what’s going on? You can tell me, talk to me, blah blah.” She could see it all over my face, and I decided I’m going to—I’m going to release myself, I’m going to tell her everything. So I did. I told her everything: “I’m bleeding down there, he hurt me, he’s been hurting me. Last night it was the worst it’s ever been.”
As I’m bawling my face off during this, she stands up on the bus and she yells to everybody what I just said. I was eight, but it still hurts like it was yesterday, really. And although I was a child a long time ago, the whole bus heard it. Everybody was laughing, everybody was talking about it, and nobody did anything. Everybody thought it was a joke. So from that day forward, at my particular school, I was known as a liar (or target) because what 8-year-old talks about being raped?
The bus driver did nothing about it. I didn’t even realize until like a week ago that bus drivers are actually mandated reporters. This was back in the ’90s; I guess he just took it as a joke. Nobody said anything about it. And this was a small school, everybody knew us in this small town, so people would keep their children from hanging out with me. That was my sign that, hey, nobody gives a damn, you have to learn how to deal with this on your own. And if you tell your family, it might go down the same way. So I didn’t.
My father—he got put on Coreg. He was one of the very first guinea pigs of Coreg, of a heart medication, and it saved his life for like 15 years. But he had like a bad medication mix that he had to take. When he finally came out of this like pill fog, he became the angriest person I’d ever known in my life. And I had to make straight A’s; there was no even making a B on homework. I think now it’s because he knew he was dying, and he was desperate to push every bit of information into me as fast as he could. He had to make sure I was going to do what I had to do when he died so he wouldn’t have to worry about it. But it came off very—it was very brutal. Rage became all-encompassing, and the walls were just closing in from every direction.
I met one of my friends when I was about eight or nine that stuck with me for many, many years; we grew up together. I loved my dad with all my heart, but if he even found a piece of homework in my backpack that had anything below an A, he would get in my face for an hour and scream—spitting, red, complete, almost purple from screaming, spitting, yelling. Every vein in his neck, every vein in his head. I would sit on the couch and just hear how horrible of a human being I was, how disappointing I was as a daughter and a person. So I felt very much like a prisoner at that time, and he lost his mind.
But I was crying so much, I remember that I couldn’t even blot the tears away. All I remember is him getting really upset, slamming the door, and I heard his car go. And I saw this pill bottle—one of the pill bottles there—and it said “take one for pain.” Nobody was in more pain than me. So I took it, and I laid in the bed. I remember this warmth—this extreme warmth just rushed over my body. It was like a calm I’d never felt in my life; it was the most amazing feeling. So I began to make them out of this pill box day by day. I’d take one, and then another, and then another, and eventually, my tolerance built up to where I was an addict.
So I ended up going to another school because I couldn’t handle the school I was at anymore. I couldn’t handle the bullying anymore. As soon as I walked down the hallways on the first day—I was a freshman at this point—people were smoking, and I’m like, “What the hell are y’all doing?” Like anybody could have walked up at any moment. And they were just laughing and having a great time. I’m like, “What the hell are y’all doing?” and they’re like, “Come on, come with us, come hang with us.” I was desperate for friends. I was desperate for a friend. And that became, “Oh my gosh, people like me!”
I saw my old friend from high school, but she started coming around. Those people that I met were my friends. My other friend that I’d grown up with—my childhood friend—I had a history with her. I had somebody that I could confide in, that knew exactly what I was going through—well, to a certain extent, to what I let her know. She started coming around, of course, because why wouldn’t I include her in our friend circle? So we all started hanging out, and it moved on to a little bit of alcohol. I could count maybe two times in my life, but mainly it was drugs, and then it turned into hard drugs. And the moment it turned into that, that’s when everything went on self-destruct mode so quickly, so disturbingly fast.
So one night, I went to a party without her. She wasn’t around, and there was this guy who started hitting on me. But the way he was hitting on me was like I was a hooker. Like he was like, “Oh, how much would you charge?” or “Look at you.” I was like, “You know what, screw you.” A few days later—I’m totally disgusted with that guy and that exchange and everything—I’m hanging out with her, and she tells me, “Sam, I need you to take me to this guy’s house because I left my ID there.” I am like, “Is this the same person? He looks like this, he acts like…” “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s him.” “Well no, dude, we’re not going over there, absolutely not.” She’s like, “Sam, listen, listen, this is my ID, okay? It’s important, I have to get it. I need my driver’s license. Sam, please, please, please, please, so…” I’m like, “Okay.”
So we get there, and first of all, there’s a whole bunch of cars in front. We go in—I’ve never seen so many guys in an apartment, and there are no women. It’s just me and her. I was 17 years old at this point, and I felt like a piece of meat being hung above a pit bull pen. As soon as I walked in, the focus was on me; they were just staring at me. Minutes go by, and I’m like, “Where are you? I start yelling for her, “What is going on?” She turns around like, “Dude, we got to go. If you can’t find it, you can’t find it.” And she’s like, “Sam, I’m here.” She comes out with a drink, a Wild Turkey, and she’s like, “Just drink this, please. You’re like my best friend, like don’t do this to me, like you know how important this is. He swore that it’s in one of these rooms, he just saw it earlier, he doesn’t remember where he put it down. Please take this and take a drink.” And I didn’t explain to her why, but she knew that I didn’t like drinking because of my uncle. “Two seconds, like five more minutes and we’re out.” I’m like, “Fine, okay, fine.”
So I take two sips, and that’s the last thing I remember.
I woke up—I’m in a pitch-black room, and I feel myself almost being hit over and over, but my body is numb, and I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what’s going on. And all of a sudden, in this pitch-black room, I see this little beam of light crack open. It’s the door cracking open just a little bit, and this beam of light comes in, and I hear a man say, “Hey dude, I’m next this time,” and shuts the door.
The next day, the morning comes, and I’m 17—I still have to go to school. I see the windows—all of a sudden the room is not pitch black anymore. It’s obviously morning because light is in the room. And I look around me, and I’m completely naked. And lying around me are a pile of men. And I look over to the side, and I see the guy that I didn’t want to see—the one that I was so leery of coming over because of. As soon as I see him, I’m like, “What the hell happened to me last night? What’s going on?” With this disgusting little smirk, he says, “Don’t worry, baby girl, I took care of you last night.” And I’m like, “Okay, this is bad.”
Soon as he says that, almost immediately after he says that, I hear, “Sam, are you in there? Where’s Sam? Is she in there?” It’s my friend. I’m like, “Hold on, I got to get out of this house. I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know what’s going on, but I got to go.” So I go to grab—I see my pants over to the side, and all of a sudden the pain just hits—boom, hits me. And my legs, my areas are hurting so bad, and I can’t understand why. But I slowly wiggle—I wiggle my pants on very slowly, and I just hear her, “Sam, come on, we got to go to school, we gotta—we got to get to school.” So she comes in and she helps me up. And I—I slowly walk out. I got my shirt on too, I forgot about that part, but she helps me.
I walk out, I get in my car, and I have to kind of sit sideways on my hip because I can’t—I can’t sit all the way down, it hurts so bad. And I’m like, but I’m also in shock. And she is laughing on the way to school. She’s like, “I tried, I tried to get you out of there, man, but they said no. They said that, yeah, you were just going to sleep it off. So I said screw it, so I left you there. And I knew I’d come back in the morning for you. They said they’d take care of you, you would be fine.” But I was in such shock that I—I couldn’t even be mad.
So I get to school. And at this point, I should also say that I had moved back to my previous school. I left—I was getting into too much trouble at the other high school. I’m an addict at this point. I decided, you know, I had problems at that point, so I was missing school from time to time. I was very, very close to being truant. But I knew that something was very wrong with my body.
I kind of hobble my way into the nurse’s office, and she immediately is like, “Why are you in here, Miss Owens? Why are you in here?” And I’m like, “Something happened to me last night.” She said, “Well, you’re not going home. You’re not going home, so don’t even go there, all right? You’ve missed too much school, not happening.” And I said, “No, you don’t—you don’t understand, something happened to me.” And I started crying, really bawling my face off again. And I’m sitting kind of on a chair—I decided to like drop down on a chair, but again, I have to sit literally on my hip. And she’s like, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” And I said, “I—I don’t know what I’m saying. I just need to go to the restroom, please.”
And I get up, I start like getting myself up, start walking, and all of a sudden I hear her go, “Oh my gosh, what happened?” And I feel the back of my legs—they’re just filled with blood. And she said, “I have to call the police.” And I was like, “Wait, but I don’t even understand what happened. Like, I don’t even know what happened to me last night. I’m—I’m so groggy. I—I don’t even know what I would tell the police.” And she said, “I have to. I’m a mandated reporter, and you’ve been raped.”
She called the police, and all of a sudden, this small event—I’m at this small school again, so everybody knows me—so the police get there and they completely fill the office. All of a sudden, all these teachers I’ve known my whole life, all these staff officials were all in there. And in walks this detective, and he wants me to tell him right then and there exactly what happened to me. He tells me that he wants to know exactly what happened to me—I need to tell him in front of all these people. And I’m like, “Listen, I don’t exactly know what happened. I’m not 100% sure. But maybe you can call my friend—call my friend out of school,” because now I’m back at this old school and she’s in school with me again.
So they called her in, and as soon as she walks in, she starts crying and freaking out like, “I don’t want to go to jail, I don’t… I couldn’t—I can’t believe this got so serious.” But I was just in shock, so I just needed her help. I was like, “Dude, we didn’t do anything wrong. We just—we need to know what happened to me because look, dude, like I’m bleeding. Something happened to me. Did you see anything?” And she was like, “No, I don’t know, I have no idea. I—I have nothing to do with this.”
So the detective said, “All right, okay, well, you need to go have a rape kit done.” Oh, and I had to have—that was the rule—I had to have seven stitches in my—in my rectum. He told me that I had close to three inputs of DNA on me. I’d obviously been—and this was her word—I’d obviously been brutally assaulted.
The worst is confirmed, right? The worst is completely confirmed for me. I get a phone call from the detective later, and he tells me, “I need you to come in, and we need to have a little discussion.” As soon as I walk in, he says, “Well, apparently I talked to some of your friends, and I got to say, uh, apparently you’re a bit promiscuous, right?” I said, “I don’t know who you heard that from, but that’s not accurate, that’s not true.” “They told me that behind closed doors that you tend to like the fellas, and you’re 17.” And I’m like, “Sir, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I’m not promiscuous. I mean, I might have that reputation, but it’s not true. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t even know what happened exactly. All I know is that I was raped.” “Well, I hear, uh, as much as you get around, uh, sometimes people that get around like that like to get a little kinky sometimes, don’t they?”
I was like blown—completely blown away. And I said, “Oh—” and I forgot, I said, “Listen, I was told that I had drugs in my system. If I have drugs in my system, how is that consensual? I have stitches, I can’t even sit down right, I’m sitting on my hip. How does this look consensual?” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: uh, we got the toxicology back and you have meth in your system, and I know that, uh, some people that use like to use it to come down.” And I said, “So you think I’m partying on it or trying to go to sleep on it?”
Like, people, I’m completely shocked. I say, “Okay, all right, fine.” Because these men were grown men, and I’m 17, okay? “You want to say it was like that, whatever. Is this not statutory rape? I’m a minor, I mean I’m still under 18.” “Not in the state of Texas,” the detective said. “In Texas, at the age of 17, you wear big girl panties.” I said, “Okay, I’m—I’m done.” And as I’m about to walk out, he goes, “Oh, and by the way, the statute of limitations is going to come up pretty quick, so if you want me to even push this through for you, uh, you’re going to need to decide pretty quick. But I do have to tell you that you didn’t tell me when I asked you for a statement at school, and really, I can get you for a false report for that.”
I said—I thought to myself: He is more ready to put me in jail than a house full of rapists.
Well, and I did actually find out—my—my childhood friend, when I came back very quickly, when I came back to the apartment from that meeting, my friend was there. And I said to her, “How could you say that about me? How could you do that to me? You told this man I was promiscuous.” She said, “Because you are,” and she walked away.
And a few months went by, and I was devastated, and I had to call her. I called her—and this was back when they had payphones—I put a quarter in, and she tells me what happened. She says to me that her and this guy were much better friends than I realized, and he told her that if she brought me, that he would trade her drugs. And she said that she did bring me, in exchange for herself. So my childhood friend traded me.
I decided from that moment that I was done. I was done with this evil, evil world. I had to get my life straight. And a lot of that was through animals. I love animals. I’m a groomer by trade. It’s like they absorb the pain, almost. And it really—it also helped me to share my story and finally decide that what I went through isn’t something to be like completely ashamed of. But there are also so many people out there that need to hear it, that need to hear that somebody out there has gone through it too, and they’re alive, and they made it, and they’re here.
I have my own home, I have my own car, I have my three kids, I have a wonderful marriage to my husband. I just have my—my life. You can make it, and you can change your life even after extreme childhood trauma and PTSD. I still have PTSD. I still have to navigate PTSD every single day.
You know, my mother now knows the abuse I’ve gone through. I just told her last year. Last year was the first time I told her what I’ve been through, and she felt like she failed me. She said she was so sorry she failed me. But she didn’t fail me. I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell my family. They loved me very, very much, and I kept it as a very closely guarded secret that I thought I had to be ashamed of.
And now I realize that as much pain that comes with those experiences, there’s also power that can come with those experiences, where you realize that you can make it through extremely difficult situations and you are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for. Quit telling yourself you’re weak. Quit telling yourself that you don’t matter. Quit telling yourself that—that these stories mean nothing, when they do. They mean something. They mean that you have made it through. You have climbed Mount Everest by yourself, and you’re coming down the mountain safely. And when you make it down, that is something to be so proud of.
You’d be amazed at how—how weak those experiences can make you at first, but then how strong they can make you when you conquer them and when you really start living life.
