Impact Statement to My Father, a Pedophile.

It's been a week since my father was sentenced to prison. The days feel like years right now. The week before he was sentenced I finally forced myself to face the overwhelming emotion waiting for me and to write this impact statement. At the time I wrote it, I wasn't sure if I would be able to read it in court or not. It ended up that I was not able to, and I was both relieved and disappointed at the same time. I would encourage anyone who wrote an impact statement to share it on the Stand For Survivors Facebook page that has been created. And in the spirit of encouraging that, I will share mine also. It is written as a letter directly to my father, and with the possibility in mind that I would be reading it aloud to him last week in court. Here it goes:


As I sat down to write this letter, and imagined looking into your face in the courtroom, so many questions come to mind that I want to ask you.
What have you done? Why? Why did you choose this? Why would you betray my mother, and our family like this? Do you realize all that you have destroyed?
From the moment I found out the first of the many allegations, I was faced with a choice that no daughter should ever have to make. I had to choose. Would I protect them, or would I protect you? Would I choose the family I adored, who was the center of my world, or would I do what was right? Though it has cost me more than I could ever say, I chose them. I chose to do what was right.
I have suffered panic attacks when the walls felt like they were closing in and I could hardly breathe. I have woken from nightmares to my own screams, or tears, or racing heart, remembering times you were alone with my own children, and times you were alone with me. I have broken out in stress hives. I've been diagnosed with stress induced reflux and experienced chest pain almost daily. I've lost time. So much precious time. Time with my children, time doing the things I love, dealing with the repercussions of your actions, the questions, the answers, the responses, the implications. I've had to ask myself questions that no daughter should ever have to ask. Did you abuse me? What do some of the memories that have resurfaced for me truly mean? Those have been some of the darkest moments I've ever known. We have spent money for counseling and therapy and babysitting, We lost a business that we spent over a decade building, but that was completely dependent on you. Our reputations have been drug through the mud by your portrayal of us as liars, or unforgiving, or having wild imaginations, or having some unexplained vendetta, or all the other myriad of explanations you handed out to people to explain away why your own daughters wouldn't see you anymore. You have taken my own mother, my best friend, from me with your continued lies and denial of what you did to these victims. You've even taken my grandmother by tainting her view of me with your lies, and you've tried to sew your deception into every family relationship I ever held dear. You are a toxic poison to every family, community, church or group you have ever been a part of. You divide, you fracture, you splinter people apart with your lies and your manipulation. You implode everything you are a part of from the inside out.

And even with all of that, and even in the face of you not receiving nearly the justice you deserve, and your continued denials all the way to the end, there is more. I see what people say about you now. I see them call you a piece of shit, or say you should rot in jail, or they hope you get beat up. And you deserve all of it. But I cannot help my heart from breaking when I read these words. Because at the end of the day, I truly loved you. You were my hero, and I spent my whole life adoring you. As badly as I want you to go away, and to never be able to hurt us again, I cannot bring myself to picture you getting beat up, or wasting away. It is the most heart wrenching pain I have ever known. I cannot even type these words without the avalanche of grief welling up inside me and tears streaming down my face. I feel embarrassed by something that no child should ever have to be embarrassed for. I feel embarrassed for loving you. I feel embarrassed for ever having believed you. I feel embarrassed for the ways you used my adoration of you as part of your disguise. I feel embarrassed that I thought you were my protector, that you loved our family, and that you were a godly man. I feel embarrassed for looking up to you, or for the many posts and photos I shared on social media declaring what a wonderful father you were. I feel embarrassed that the little girl me ever called you my daddy. Most see you as a monster now. Including me. I have no idea who truly lives behind those eyes that are so familiar to me. And yet, even if you are a monster as I suspect, and I have no idea who is really inside of you, there is still a piece of me that is capable of loving you. And I wonder what is wrong with me, that I could possibly love someone as sick as you. It feels as though my own heart is betraying me. These are the thoughts and emotions that will never stop plaguing me. I feel scared to even admit this to you now. You have used my love for you against me for my whole life. But I hope that now I'm finally strong enough that you won't be able to do it again.

I knew that you lied for a long time. Ever since the first time I confronted you back in 2012 for your lies and you kept on lying to me, I knew that something was very, very wrong. That was when the denial started breaking for me, and I felt sick for days. But I never imagined that it was this. It took me years to tell anyone that I even knew you lied. I felt so guilty, like I was stabbing you in the back. I felt crazy. I felt isolated. I wanted to protect you. I used to pray that whatever was going on, that it would come out in the least damaging way possible. I prayed that God would be merciful in his judgement toward you. Even now, I pray that you will one day admit what it is that you have done to every one of these girls, and every one of the victims that is not represented in this courtroom today. I pray that you would repent. That you would confess FULLY, to every single horrific detail. That you would stop using spirituality for your own manipulative gain, and finally surrender your life to Jesus. I pray that you would be the man you could've been all along.

But sadly, even if that day should come, you will have to do it without me. Because after all these years of fighting for you and protecting you, you have so severely shattered my ability to ever trust you again that you have left me no choice but to close this door and move on with my life. And that is the final straw. That is the piece that absolutely breaks the dam inside my heart, where the grief knows no end. That is the place where your ever hopeful, ever trusting, ever loving daughter feels the final betrayal. You have left me with no choice, and have forced me to finally, after all these years, choose myself over you, and to acknowledge that there is no going back to the life or the father I thought I had.

I can not control your choices, I cannot change who I was born to. I cannot re-write my story. I cannot run from your sin or escape it no matter how I try. It has forever impacted and marked my life. But what I can control is my response. And though I will never understand how you are capable of the evil you have committed, I will spend the rest of my life doing everything in my power to protect people from predators like you.



link to the article on his sentencing here.