Effect on Victims, from Franciscan Board of Inquiry, Affects Me 20 Years Later

By Kay Ebeling
City of Angels
May 15, 2014

http://cityofangels15.blogspot.com/2014/05/effect-on-victims-from-franciscan-board.html

When I found “Effect on Victims” in the Franciscans of Santa Barbara Board of Inquiry Report from 1993, it had a big effect on me. I came across it while I was lost in Appalachia in 2011 reading back over files from years of doing CofA Blog. Rereading it contributed to the total process of me finally calming down.

The quote below regards victims who went in front of the Board to describe the impact rapes by Franciscans had on their lives:

“It is important to keep in mind that children develop a sense and understanding of sexuality from authority figures, and that boys came to the seminary at age 13 or 14 years, when they were uniformly young and impressionable.”

For some the sexual abuse “was immediate profound trauma, indelibly imprinted in their consciousness. For others, it was not until later in life that memories returned, sparked by an upsetting occurrence that triggered traumatic flashbacks. Although these episodes were painful, they often provided relief through a new found understanding of the difficulties and struggles in their lives.”

Yep, that about describes it.

For some reason reading those words empower me a bit, because it stands to reason that sex abuse has an even more profound effect when it happens at age five or so, as it did to me, so I have to stop hating myself for what it made of me.

I hope some of the people who knew me in the seventies and eighties and grew to hate me for having sex with their husbands, brothers, bosses, etcetera, will read the quote, and maybe understand.

I went through life thinking I’d been touched by an Angel in a very private place, so to speak, and since it happened at such an early age, the effect was indeed at a DNA level. I felt I had a purpose in life, to share that early sexual experience with everyone I encountered.

So please, all those flight controllers at NASA in Houston in the eighties who probably wrote about me on the men’s room walls, like they did in the Daily Texan newsroom in Austin in the seventies, and to all the women who gunned for me after what I did with their husbands, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I had impulses I could not control. Hopefully this journalism that I am doing about pedophile priests and how their sex crimes affected their victims will reach some of my own victims and help them think less bad of me.

Because I left a trail of victims behind.

I was a sexual predator from age six on, it's just after age six, I didn't know how to do it, so instead got very fat, obese, size 16 at age eight. As soon as I reached 13 or so - puberty - I slimmed down, and the sexual compulsion kicked in. Soon I was bouncing on men’s laps just like when I was six years old. I have 40 years of My Life as a Slut left in my head to live with as a result. I think of it as a punishment.

( Me in 2014: I felt like it was a punishment back in 2011 when I wrote this. Now I think of it as a hell of a story to write. )

For me it was like the gonging of a huge church tower bell had been ringing and ringing in the background all my life.

(Wow, I keep finding that reference to a gong in a bell tower in these journals.)

When I realized Father Horne had set the whole mania in motion with his diddling fingers, it stopped, the gonging of the bell stopped.

And I became a completely different person. Today I'm more like Jane Wyatt than Jane Mansfield, if only I could have been that person for my whole life.

But I couldn't. And since my sex life caused me to lose every job I had and end every possibility of a marriage, I have nothing to my name in old age but my story.