Personal Struggle — Part 9

This personal narrative is meant to be read in chronological order starting with Part One.

I took a bit of a break after publishing my last blog post. It takes me a lot of time, energy, and emotional bandwidth to be able to write my story. Also, a lot has happened in the past couple of weeks.

I want to thank everyone once again for reaching out. I’ve talked to many people who are also abuse survivors and our conversations were incredibly insightful and profound. It made me realize many things about myself and my child. I started to see common behavioral and emotional patterns and I began to recognize a lot of these patterns in my son.

I was particularly struck by several adult individuals who endured years of rape and sexual abuse as children. I watched a very disturbing documentary about sexual abuse in the Ultra Orthodox community featuring someone I personally know. The saddest part about this film is the fact that these children who are now adults are ostracized and have left the community while the perpetrators are still very much integrated and thriving there.

All these people have not been able to heal and move on with their lives. They are still living in the past and they are still traumatized. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been through years of therapy and support groups. Nothing seems to help. They can’t let go of the trauma that had become the biggest part of their identity.

Towards the end of that documentary, there was a scene where a girl who was continuously raped by her uncle from age 9 to 14 is given a chance to call and confront her abuser on camera. She freaks out, she gets very scared, you can see it in her eyes. She asks her cousin to do it for her. And her cousin calls the guy. And it’s not the same. It doesn’t do anything. Nothing is accomplished. That rapist is still in control. In control of her life. She is still enslaved by her childhood fears of him. She can’t move on. She can function, but she can’t live.

My son in 2015.

Part 9:

My son came to visit me for a week after NYE and I showed him that documentary. He was very moved by it. We talked about it and we discussed it with our friend Lisa who also saw it. We concluded that the only way for those people featured in that film to overcome their trauma would be to publicly confront their abusers. That girl should have gathered all her strength and called the guy herself. She should have said: “I know what you did to me. You can’t lie to me.” The result would have been very different. She would have felt empowered.

Similarly, her cousin who was also raped as a boy should have tracked down his abuser and he should have beat him up. Or gotten someone else to do it. Otherwise, these kids cannot recover when they know that their abusers are not getting ANY punishment for the atrocious things that they did.

Another sad fact is how similar the Ultra Orthodox community is to the Russian & Russian Jewish community. After all, they both stem from the same shtetls in Ukraine or Belarus. It doesn’t matter that one is ultra religious and the other is completely secular. Both of them will cover up the crimes within its community because it’s too embarrassing to admit to the outside world that there could be such a thing. Both communities consider themselves to be superior on all levels and thus will choose to close their eyes and refuse to believe that their respected members are capable of committing such crimes. How could they let such embarrassment happen? They would rather cover the whole thing up. They can’t let such embarrassment happen.

I’m guessing that about 80% of the Russian community that knows my ex does not believe anything I say. “But he’s in my torah class. He must be a good person” or “But he makes donations every month. He must be a good person.”

My son was very moved by that documentary. He got an uber and he went to my ex’s house. Alone. He showed up at his door unexpected and unannounced. His youngest half-brother opened the door. My ex was not there, but my son waited for him to come home. He waited for a while. He finally came and for the first time in his life, my son confronted my ex. He finally felt liberated. He finally felt stronger than my ex. He finally felt that my ex had no control over him.

When he finally came back (which was a major relief for me for I was starting to worry a little that my ex killed him or something since I couldn’t reach him for hours), he told me: “Mom, I couldn’t believe it. There was absolutely nothing redeeming about him.” My son was not expecting an apology. It would have been too much to ask for. But he saw that he didn’t even have a drop of remorse for anything. He couldn’t even pretend to care about anything that my son told him about his feelings.

And he told blatant lies to my son’s face. He argued with him that there was no way that my son could remember anything because he was too young to remember. He even had the nerve to try to convince my son that he was already wealthy and successful when he met me. Apparently, he already had 3 offices when he married me. As if I haven’t been with him during his residency at UCSF and haven’t worked for him before he could even afford to hire anyone.

My ex seems to have amnesia. He can’t remember how he tricked my mom into signing “refinancing” documents to get a better interest rate for our mortgage loan that was in her name. BTW, she also put down the downpayment with my dad for that house on Lyon Street when I got pregnant. My ex can’t recall that those “refinancing” documents actually increased the loan by $1 million. $1 million in cash was wired to his account and then it magically disappeared by the time we got to divorce. Oh, but then he had 3 offices that magically appeared because he “worked so hard.” When my mom found out that he stole $1m from her (which according to legal papers she now had to repay), she wanted to file a lawsuit. However, she was barely in SF and there was a lot of other drama going on, and she didn’t do it in time. Big mistake. It still triggers her big time.

My ex told more blatant lies. Like how he was against special ed programs for my son. Except his lies didn’t work on him anymore. He could no longer fool him. Not after my son read his educational files, his social security files, his IEPs. My ex thinks my son was too little to remember anything. There are deep traumas that are hard to forget no matter how young you are when they happen.

It was terrifying when my ex would volunteer my son to be brought on stage at different medical conferences to be experimented on in front of the whole audience. My son was that autistic medical case, that guinea pig for everyone to see. One time, he had needles put in his head on stage in front of hundreds of people.

And then my son confronted him about the elephant in the room. The herpes simplex type 2. When my son was 6, my ex managed to get the special master we had at the time to sign off on doing chelation, which was “scientifically justified” by the mercury in vaccines provoking autism theory. My ex found an MD who was more than willing to make $$$ by injecting my son with off-label chelation drugs.

Needless to say, my son had an adverse reaction and I was terrified. I remember grabbing him and getting on the plane to Moscow. I was able to fly overseas because my ex was slightly distracted by his new wife at that time. In Moscow, my son spent a week at a hospital getting treated for kidney and liver damage. The Russian doctors were baffled. They had never seen anything like it.

He had very odd symptoms and they couldn’t figure out what was going on with him. They did all kinds of blood tests and tested him for every possible autoimmune disease. To everyone’s utter shock, the blood tests came back positive for herpes simplex type 2. How could a 6 year old test positive for genital herpes?

When I got back to San Francisco, I filed a motion in court. It resulted in having to go through custody evaluation. I will spare you all the details of that ordeal in this blog post, but I will say this: I submitted my negative blood test for herpes and I was demanding the same from my ex. He did not provide his blood test. I never saw it. It’s not in the court file. Supposedly, the custody evaluator had seen it at some point or thought she saw something, but she couldn’t find it, it was magically displaced…blah, blah, blah. I was stabbed in the back by my lawyer who didn’t press this matter enough. My ex was able to manipulate his way out of it. I would still like to see his blood test.

I regret not going to the police. I thought that it would be too much for my son. I was afraid to subject him to more trauma and humiliation. I couldn’t handle it. It was too much for me. I thought that this would have been the biggest embarrassment for the rest of his life. For the rest of my life. I was wrong. Very wrong. I realize only now that the right thing to do was to fight till the very end. It would have been much better for my son. He would have been a much happier person today.

After my ex realized that his lies had no effect on my son, he didn’t even bother to say anything decent. He half-assed said something along the lines of: “You are always welcome here. You’re still family. You are still my son,” to which my son answered: “Not anymore,” as he walked out of his house.

To be continued …