Something Was Wrong - S21 E1: (1/2) [Gwenevere] Innate Dignity

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

*Content Warning: Military Sexual Assault, death, drug use, substance use disorder, suicidal ideation, emotional and physical violence, sexual violence. *Sources:This season, our theme Song U Think U, by Glad Rags. PTSD Coach (by US Dept for Veterans Affairs) https://mobile.va.gov/app/ptsd-coach Beyond MST https://mobile.va.gov/app/beyond-mst *Sources from MST narration: An Overview of Sexual Trauma in the US Military: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6519533/ Veterans’ Benefits: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title38/html/USCODE-2011-title38partII-chap17-subchapII-sec1720D.htm State of the Knowledge of VA Military Sexual Trauma Research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9481813/ Military Sexual Trauma in Men https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21534094/ Military sexual trauma research: a proposed agenda https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21534099/US Naval Institute on the Latest Military Sexual Assault Report https://news.usni.org/2022/09/01/latest-military-sexual-assault-report-shows-tragic-rise-in-cases-pentagon-officials-say#:~:text=Across%20all%20the%20services%2C%208.4,t o%20use%20than%20older%20versions. Protect Our Defenders https://www.protectourdefenders.com/*Resources:Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources Follow Something Was Wrong:Website: somethingwaswrong.com IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcastTikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast Follow Tiffany Reese:Website: tiffanyreese.me IG: instagram.com/lookieboo See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Dan Tuberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. What's the answer? And what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head? Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences, as it discusses topics that can be upsetting,

such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder. Content warnings for each episode and confidential resources for survivors can be found in the episode notes. Some survivor names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Pseudonyms are given to minors in these stories for their privacy and protection.

Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not necessarily reflect the views of myself, broken-cycle media, or Wondery. The podcast and any linked materials should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. Thank you so much for listening.

Military Sexual Trauma, or MST, is the term used by Veterans Affairs to refer to experiences of sexual assault or sexual harassment experienced during military service. More concretely, MST includes any sexual activity that you're involved with against your will. Some examples of MST include being pressured into sexual activities such as with threats of negative treatment if you refuse to cooperate or promises of better treatment in exchange for sex, sexual contact or activities without your consent, including when you were asleep or intoxicated,

being overpowered or physically forced to have sex, being touched or grabbed in a sexual way that made you uncomfortable, including during hazing experiences, comments about your body or sexual activities that you found threatening, or unwanted sexual advances that you found threatening. Exact statistics that pinpoint the prevalence of military sexual trauma, otherwise known as MST,

are relatively unknown, often due to delayed or denied reporting. The military attempts to measure the prevalence of sexual assault using two metrics, estimates that extrapolate from anonymous surveys and formal reports. Formal reports reached an all-time high of 7,378 service members in 2022, according to the Department of Defense annual report on sexual assault in the military, fiscal year 2022.

While it's estimated women in the military face a higher risk of sexual assault than men, the risk for men is not insignificant. In 2021, 8.4% of active duty women, about 19,300, and 1.5% of active duty men, about 16,600 men, nearly 36,000 combined service members, reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact at least once in the year prior reported by the 2021 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Military Members. MST is an experience, not a diagnosis or a mental

health condition, and as with other forms of trauma, there are a variety of reactions that someone can have in response to MST. Although the reactions men and women have to MST are similar in some ways, they may also struggle with different issues. Race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other cultural variables also affect the impact of MST. Some of the difficulties people may have after MST includes feeling depressed, having intense, sudden emotional reactions to things, feeling angry or irritable all the time, feelings of numbness, feeling emotionally flat, difficulty experiencing emotions like love or happiness,

trouble sleeping, trouble falling or staying asleep, disturbing nightmares, difficulties with attention, concentration, and memory, trouble staying focused, frequently finding their mind wandering, having a hard time remembering things, problems with alcohol or other drugs, drinking to excess or using drugs daily, getting intoxicated or high to cope with memories or emotional reactions, drinking to fall asleep, difficulties in relationships such as feeling

isolated or disconnected from others, trouble with employers or authority figures, and difficulty in trusting others. Some physical health problems may include sexual difficulties, chronic pain, disordered eating, and gastrointestinal problems. Although post-traumatic stress disorder is commonly associated with MST, it is not the only diagnosis that can result from MST. For example, Veterans Affairs medical record data indicates that in addition to PTSD, the diagnosis most frequently associated with MST among users of VA healthcare are depression, other mood disorders, and substance use disorders.

I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is Something Was Wrong. You don't know anybody until you talk to someone. I am Guinevere, 24. I'm a student right now, but I'm a newly minted veteran. Did about three years in the Navy from Southern California, living on the East Coast right now. I, looking back, really miss living in Southern California. It was always perfect weather. All my family's there. Definitely shaped a lot of my personality

who I am now. I did grow up in a really strict conservative family, but the environment that I was raised in at the time helped me develop a lot of my own moral and ethical beliefs that don't necessarily adhere anymore to strict conservative values, but I think it's definitely served me in my life journey so far. My mother, she was raised Catholic by her mother who grew up on the East Coast in Massachusetts, and her father was, I believe, first generation, born in the States from Mexico. Unfortunately, he was not a great husband or father, so he ended up leaving when she was really, really young.

So she grew up only child, her and her mom against the world. She's always been, for the struggles that she's had, an incredible role model of like, this is how you get stuff done, feel your feelings later, which sometimes is necessary, but we've done a lot of therapy on that together about like, well, we can do two things at once.

We can feel our feelings and get stuff done. She ended up meeting my father when they were in high school together. What I know of my parents when they met was they were state champions, star athletes, first freshmen at the school, both of them to make the varsity team in their sport. They still have at our homeschool in town, newspaper clippings of their games and their CIF championship trophies. Very all-American in the 90s.

Meet your high school sweetheart, graduate, get married. About a year or two after they got married, I was born. Early October, Libra baby. They had a good relationship for the first couple of years of marriage. I was born with some health problems that were stressful. And then two and a half years later, my little brother was born. I'm the only girl and the oldest child. It's been interesting being in that position and understanding that more as I got older. There is kind of a reason why I feel a little responsible for everything going on all the time.

Just that oldest sister syndrome. My parents have told me this, that I've always had this really innate sense of justice. If I saw someone getting bullied, I would end up in a fight defending them and it did not make childhood easy on myself. I would just see something that I didn't think was cool and I would be up in the fight defending them and it did not make childhood easy on myself. I would just see something that I didn't think was cool and I would be like, hey, this is really not cool guys. Big Libra energy. What was your relationship like with your dad? Going from little girl to adolescent, I was daddy's little girl 100%. If he was playing

video games, I was watching him. He taught me how to use all the cheats in Mortal Kombat 2 when I was like 6. That didn't go over awesome with my mom. He pushed me really hard athletically and I fell into swimming when I was 7 years old and I just loved it. It was such a free feeling. When you race in your heats, you hit that wall a millisecond before someone else does, you're like, I am marginally the best. That's incredible. I did that for about 10 or 11 years.

The last high school I went to, I was a varsity swim team girlie. I do credit him for my competitive spirit to just not do better than other people, but to do better than I did last time. And that's translated a lot into my real life outside of sports. But once I turned 10 and I started to hit puberty, all of a sudden, I wasn't allowed to play football anymore because I believe the quote is, well, now you have boobs. What's to stop someone from reaching under your pads to grab them?

And I don't think that that's what football is about. So it kind of started to deteriorate from there when I realized that I wasn't just his kid anymore. I was a girl before I was his daughter. That started a really big breakdown in our relationship. At that point, he and my mother had been having problems. He had some really bad anger issues, alcohol abuse, drug abuse. Looking back on it now, I am able to have a lot more grace for him.

Knowing what I know about his upbringing and his childhood, he and my grandmother on his side have told me that his last memory of his father is spitting in his mother's face and walking out. So he didn't have, until he was about a teenager and my grandmother remarried, an example of a healthy, family-oriented, loving man in the house. And he, for whatever reason, uses his Christian beliefs. Not that every Christian is like this, but some of them are. That psychiatry and medication and therapy are of the devil and everything can be solved through prayer.

If I acted out in a way that was not considered in line with Christian and conservative morals and standards, it wasn't necessarily ever a conversation. It was shame and threats and violence and angry outbursts until it blew over. I had my legs kicked out from under me, slapped around. And I remember one time I was like 13 and I had a boyfriend and I did some stuff with him that shouldn't have been doing but but you know, I was growing, learning, and he found out about it. And he punched a hole through my bedroom door and said that I was lucky the door was there because it would have been my face if it

wasn't. One time, I had to be maybe 14 at the time, so my brother was between 10 and 12. And he sat, made me sit on the living room floor, pointed at me and told my little brother, your sister's a whore, that is what a slut looks like. That then damaged mine and my brother's relationship, trying to talk to my brother about it. At the time, he vehemently believed that I was the cause of all of our family's problems. It was just another thing

that was subconsciously imposed on him. Because my little brother is one of the sweetest, most secretly soft-hearted people ever. And I still have a lot of fixing up to do with that relationship, because I did contribute to the breakdown of his and mine's relationship. We just didn't grow up in a very accepting home.

There was a lot of love, but as much as there was love, there was judgment. And, you know, you're not supposed to do certain things just because you're supposed to do them or not do them because there's consequences and there's retaliation and there's that makes you bad if you do this or that. I was really confused about my sexuality when I was about 12 or 13 because no one tells you that bi is a thing. They're like, well, if you like girls, you're a lesbian and if you don't, then you're straight. So I went home one day and I said, I think I might be a lesbian. My parents told me to put together a bag and that they were going to drop me off at a police station, like safe haven laws, but for a teenager. That didn't end up happening.

It was more of like a rage-filled empty threat. It was just tension building and very bitter resentments on all sides. And I just left. I couldn't deal with it anymore. For a time before I officially like left home, after my parents split up, I would bounce back and forth from usually my mother's house and then my grandparents

house and my friends houses. I wasn't an easy kid. My side of the street was not exactly clean either. I would cut class and I smoked weed and I have never passed a math class in my life. I dated guys I didn't like and when they would come at me, I would take it up five notches and just unleash the most teenage girl insanity upon them. So no one was happy, but no one was like furious that I left. They wanted to know that I was housed, fed, clean, safe. And my mother did, she was like, you know, you can come home. No one's going to be mad at you. And I was like, I don like, you know, you can come home, no one's gonna be mad at you. And I was like, I don't believe you.

I was 16, I was dating my high school sweetheart and God bless him, love his family. I would be there for so long that one day his mom was like, she can pay rent if she wants to live here. And then I did. I didn't really go home again from ages 16 to 20 because I needed to be in an environment where I felt safe to exist the way that I was. That was, at the time, the best relationship I had with a man in my life. We had known each other since we were like 14

and I had had the biggest crush on him, but we were both dating other people that were horrible for us. It was a really bad time. And then we got back in contact and fell in love. We thought that we were grown and we knew everything. We were going to be together forever. We didn't know how to execute the life we were trying to live because we didn't have super stable examples of it. We weren't grownups with grownup brains and access to all the information that we needed.

And so our relationship kind of started breaking down. He cheated on me. I was unmedicated, undiagnosed. So I wasn't treating him with the love and respect that everyone deserves in a relationship either. Eventually he ended up breaking up with me and telling me that he needed me to leave. We've reconciled since and we've both apologized

for how just god awful we were to each other back then. And there was a lot of healing in that, but in between me getting broken up with by my high school sweetheart boyfriend, before I really started bouncing around, I went back to live with my grandfather, my papa, and he was so good to me. He had married my nana, who was the love of my life, my actual soulmate. She ended up passing when I was 14, and he never dated again, never remarried, none of that. He was just like, well, that was the

love of my life, and now I'm just hanging out. My nana and papa were, they were foster parents for over seven years. My nana was in 2007 diagnosed with one form of cancer and she fought it, beat it, cycle repeats itself for seven years. Cancer treatment can sometimes exacerbate and exhaust the body in a way that you just continue to develop different cancers. It doesn't happen often, but when it does happen, it's very, very difficult to get on top of. But through all of that bone marrow transplants, chemo, radiation therapy, they fostered from babies up through teenagers. If someone needed a bed and they had one, it was open to them. To this day, I think about that when I think that I have too much that I have going on that I can't deal with and still have a soft heart for others. I think about that. They will forever be the most

giving and incredible, good-hearted people. They never had a harsh word to say about anyone. They didn't judge anybody for any reason. Growing up in a really conservative Christian family, when I think of what a good Christian should be, it's them. I remember coming out to them when I was a teenager and they were like, that's so great. I'm so glad you're trying to figure out who you are. I love you. God loves you. Have a nice day. So they were, and still are to this day, the biggest influences I've had and the good that comes out of me in this world. I was the light of his life in those years. After my Nana passed, it was really peaceful.

We would talk. We would watch his old TV. He would watch my new TV. One weekend, I decided to go out with some friends over to someone's house for what was intended to be one night of teenage drinking and dumbassery turned into three days. When I came home finally, I walked in the house and I just didn't feel right. All the doors in the house were closed and the dogs were going crazy. I went around looking for my grandfather and when I found him, he was on the ground in his bedroom. I could tell he had been there for over 24 hours. He had soiled himself. He was not coherent whatsoever. He couldn't really speak and I just remember running out of the room after telling him, it's okay, I'm

here and calling 911 to get help. After that, I called my family and they came and they took him to the hospital. The whole family rushed to the hospital then and we were just trying to be with him. And the last thing he ever said was my name before going into a coma. What we found out from the doctors was that he had actually suffered multiple strokes. The doctors were trying to like console my family, like there was nothing you could have done. All the things that good doctors say

to their patients' families when things like this happen. But what I struggled with at the time and have been struggling with for the last few years is knowing that there is nothing I could have done to prevent his death. However, if I had come home when I said I would have, he wouldn't have suffered in the way that he did. He wouldn't have been lying there on that floor for what was likely two or three days wondering when someone would come to help him. That really triggered this darkness inside of me where I didn't care what happened to me. I didn't care what I put other people through. That's when I really decided to split from my family.

It was easier for me to go be homeless and bounce around from exes' houses to friends' houses than to go home and face what at the time I thought was this horrible thing I had done. I'm so sorry, my God, how traumatic. It really sucked, but it has deeply influenced how I've chosen to live my life since. I did end up couch surfing, staying with friends, walking 10 or so miles a day to get from one place to the other. I just wasn't ready to go home and face the aftermath of that yet. I was only 18.

I still had no clue what I was doing, but I was just determined that anything was better than going home, which looking back, totally not the case. So then after that is when you met Lin, you're even in a more vulnerable place probably due to that grief and the trauma and the guilt that you felt. That is when I met Lin, who was 32 at the time. I know I met him in August of 2018, because I turned 19 that October. He was my Uber driver, actually. I had asked one of my friends to call me an Uber from one place to another,

because I just couldn't take another bus, I couldn't walk another mile. We struck up a conversation, and he told me where he was from, and I'm trying to just listen to my headphones, but he was kind of cute, so when he dropped me off, he was like, look'm trying to just listen to my headphones. But he was kind of cute. So when he dropped me off, he was like, look, I never do this. But can I have your number? And an 18 year old me was like, Oh my God, I'm so special. And I was like, yes, you can.

I'm Dan Tuberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back.

Well you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the witches of Salem,

or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical. Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpen. And in our series Legacy, we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series, we look at J. Edgar Hoover. He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure,

he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks tactics have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today.

Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. I had bounced back to my ex's house and we got in a big fight and I called Lynn. I was like, I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. And he told me to just come to his house. I started walking the eight or 10 miles to his apartment from where I was. And I'm like this teenage girl like sobbing on the side of the road, walking looking all dejected. Some guy with staples in his head clearly closing like a wound that was very serious, pulled over and was like, hey, not to be creepy, do you need a ride somewhere? And I was so fed up with the universe at this point, I was like, yeah, I do need a ride actually.

And he ended up actually just taking me where I needed to go, just to Good Samaritan, doing the right thing. Thank God he was a Good Samaritan. Yeah, I'll never forget him either. Shout out to Chalky if you're out there listening. I don't know your real name, but that was his alias. I ended up staying there and being with Lynn, which did lead me to the darkest time of my life, but I learned a lot there for sure. I was staying at his house for a while

and I woke up and he was getting ready to leave and I was like, hey, where you going? And he told me he was going to an AA meeting. At the time, I was drinking my sorrows away. I said, hey, I think I might have a problem. Is it okay if I come with you? And he was like, yeah, absolutely. The irony in that was he told me that he was in recovery, but the truth was he was still tending to a daily meth habit that for about a month and a half, two months, he hid from me very well. I would be very curious about where he would go and come back looking like sweaty and crazy from but at the time I didn't have the life experience to know like that guy's on meth right now.

I am not safe. I was definitely still a child. Like 18, you're not grown. Your brain is still developing. My favorite fact, under 25. I cannot state that enough. I think we all can agree that an 18-year-old dating a 30-year-old is a lot different than a 30-year-old dating a 42-year-old, for example, because of development, because of brain, physical, emotional, all of the reasons. Yeah. I used to give him so many breaks when people would say stuff to me about me, like, I've lived kind of a hard life. I know what's out there. I was very precocious for 18. I did know a lot about

the world and I could have very intelligent conversations, but any half-decent grown person in their 20s, 30s, 40s would still look at an extremely intelligent and precocious 18-year-old and go, that's a child. I think outside of very rare circumstances, if it even exists, men that are that much older and are going after girls that are 18, 19, 20 year olds, grown women won't take their shit. And they intentionally go looking for someone more vulnerable and impressionable and naive. To his credit, I did get to go to some cool places,

meet some really cool people. I was like, oh, what a nice thing to do for me or what a great opportunity to give me. He did make me feel like I was different and special and unique. Everything he did for me, it was another way to control me. It was very, looking back now, manipulative and targeted. When I wasn't able to tell that he was high on meth all the damn time, I was playing his little sidekick. I wanted to go everywhere with him.

I wanted people to know that I existed. I wanted him to talk about me. I wanted anything he was willing to give me. Finally, someone was like, you're this fucked up person and I still want you. Which now I know is just like basic human dignity and respect, but at the time it felt so novel to me that I got very lost in it.

And about two-ish months into being with him, I remember it was my 19th birthday and I was on acid and he walks up to me and he goes, do you wanna try a drug with me? I said, of course I do and That was the very first time that I ever smoked meth myself. It Terrified me and excited me Right before I made the decision to do it

I had this moment where I was like I'm making a decision right now and I don't care if it's the wrong one or the right one. What I've learned being in recovery and like meeting so many different kinds of people is not everyone has the same physiological reaction to meth. He would lose a bunch of weight and his face would look gaunt. For me, it was, I dropped like a hundred pounds in three months, my face was gone. I was covered in sores. My hair started falling out and I was like, what is this?

From that point on, the relationship went from predatory and manipulative to really violent and hateful and controlling. He would violently physically abuse me. I am not gonna get too much into the specifics of the abuse just because it would be gratuitous and unnecessary, but I often did fear for my life. He would call the police on himself sometimes. In between him hanging up the phone with them and the police arriving, would decide

that he actually didn't want to go to jail. He didn't actually want to, air quote, protect me from himself. And then he would threaten me to not say anything to the police. He would cheat on me constantly with women, men, literally anyone, which go inclusivity, but also not really one for safe sex, Lynn was. And he would come home and lie to me about where he'd been and give me all kinds of sicknesses. I was at Planned Parenthood and the LGBTQ center being treated probably every other month. I was sick and emaciated.

Looking back on it now, it's terrifying that other than, you know, the paper where they ask you, do you feel safe? No one's took a beat to ask me like if I was okay at home because I wasn't. Not that I would have said so, but if you're seeing on my chart that like I'm coming in here all the time and this is how I'm presenting knowing what I know now about health care and what the ethics of it really are, that's terrifying because how many other people walked in there and went home and didn't make it out of the house again. He also sexually abused me. I really thought, would anyone believe me because I'm not leaving? I was in such a bad place and I felt like I couldn't go home at that point. I felt so worthless and unlovable and like I did deserve what was happening to me. What ended up busting up everything

was that he had taken me to AA that one time. When I decided that I didn't want to use anymore and that I wanted to go home and that I wanted to be okay, not just surviving but get my life back. I went back to AA. I built the most incredible community around myself, people who just wanted to see me thrive. Their whole intention of the relationship that they had with me was to serve their community and to be part of the solution and To be a part of that same community when they needed support themselves Even though I had made the decision to get clean on my own I don't think I would have survived the mental and emotional fallout of

everything that happens after you get clean and try to take your life back, because you do have to take accountability for what you did. I did make the decision to start using. I did the bad things that I did while I was in active addiction. I don't think without that community, I would have been able to internalize that and process it. I love that it's been helpful for you. Yeah, there's so many different kinds of community and social support that people can go find that aren't AA.

For anyone that might be struggling with anything, get on the Google and figure out what you might need or might want to try. One-on-one talk therapy might be your thing, but if you feel like you're missing out on the community support that's really going to get you through, there's so many different kinds. It'll change your life just to have one person who understands you to talk to. Community is important and it sounds like you were looking for that for yourself and I think that happens a lot when we live through childhood trauma. Community is important to us and we're seeking that, that sort of like soft space to land. People look for that all different ways. It's human connection and

everybody needs it. We all need it in different doses of course depending on our personalities but at the core of all of us is longing to be seen and heard and connected. and heard and connected. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived. We know the six wives of Henry VIII as pawns in his hunt for a son, but their lives were so much more than just being the king's wives.

I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams. And I'm Brooke Ziffrin. And we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, Even the Royals. In each episode, we'll pull back the curtain on royal families, past and present, from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. We rarely see Henry VIII's wives in their own light, as women who used the tools available to them to hold on to power.

Some women won the game, others lost. But they were all unexpected agents in their own stories. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing. Some women won the game, others lost. But they were all unexpected agents in their own stories. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything else. Like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Go deeper and get more of the story with Wondery's top history podcasts,

including American Scandal, Legacy, and Black History for Real. From Wondery, I'm Indra Varma, and this is The Spy Who. This season, we open the file on Oleg Penkovsky, the spy who defused the missile crisis. It's 1960, and the world's on the brink of nuclear war. However, one man in Moscow is about to emerge from the shadows It's 1960, and the world's on the brink of nuclear war. However, one man in Moscow is about to emerge from the shadows with an offer for the CIA.

His name is Oleg Penkovsky. As a Cold War double agent, Penkovsky wants to supply the US with the Soviet Union's greatest nuclear secrets. But is this man putting his life on the line to save the world? Or is he part of an elaborate trap? Follow the Spy Who on the Wondry app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Or you can binge the full season of the Spy Who defuse the missile crisis early and app free with Wondry Plus. I stayed in that relationship for two years. Looking back on that, where I am in life now, I want to go back and tell late teen, early adult me that none of that is my fault. He knows what he's doing. He wouldn't be doing this to someone who he didn't think he could get away with it. It was his fault. Everything he did to me had nothing to do with me other than that I was the one he was doing it to. I was getting too close to like figuring out I don't have to take this. I am worthy of love and I do have innate dignity

being just a human person. I had gotten clean and he was going back and forth about what he's doing with his life and was still a horrible person. I would start going to visit my mom and I would stay longer and longer and longer until I felt like I had the safety and support of my family and broke it off from there.

It was not as clean of a break as I would have liked. I still definitely cared about if this person was going to live or die, was going to be okay. So I still let him contact me via email and eventually I did have to cut that off because he would get high and send me voice messages and emails and stuff. Just these long rants about crazy, crazy shit. The most mind-boggling insanity. And I remember there was one time he was like, well, if you don't understand me, I'll just have to come to your house.

And I had to tell him, my mom will absolutely tear you to shreds. He got the hint and started to leave me alone. What was really lucky for me was that that was in January of 2020, right before COVID shut LA down hard. I cannot imagine what would have happened to me if we ended up stuck in quarantine together. I really don't think I would have survived that. That was just the grace of the universe that was like, okay girl something's gonna happen you need to like get it together and get out of this situation right now. Then I had a very peaceful couple of years. You ultimately ended up moving in with your mom, correct?

Yes. What was that like? It could not have been more different than when I was a teenager and when I was a kid. The turnaround I saw in both herself and myself, it's beyond words to me. About a year into that horrible relationship with Lynn, she was going to therapy. She was trying to get right so that she could figure out how to help me. That wasn't something I was able to see until I was out of it. I just appreciate that so much. I can't say enough good things about her now. She lives in her house with her new husband. They're married now for almost four years, but they've been together for about ten years I think. He's such a good man and he just loves her so well and has given her the

opportunity to like step back and take care of herself in a way that made her be able to be a better mother for me specifically. She was able to love me and be there for me the way that I needed her to be at the moment. What I had experienced and come to understand her better, I was able to give her more grace and space, and we have a beautiful relationship today. She is my best friend. I call her five times a day.

She's so sick of hearing from me. It's just beautiful and incredible, and she supports me in every way now. I have unending respect for her. The way that she was able to cope with honestly what I was putting her through because she only has one of me and she spent a lot of time wondering if I was dead or alive in a ditch somewhere. She just welcomed me with open arms. She was just so happy that I was home. It did make me feel like I had this here the whole time. That's amazing.

I love that you both are cycle breakers in that together. How did the military come into play for you? Was this something that you had considered growing up? I had considered it previously. I remember when I was 16, I was thinking about it. We had a family friend who did 20 years in the Navy. And he said something that was, in hindsight, so foreshadowing. He not so tactfully said to me and my parents, quote, if she was like, I don't know, a dog,

I would say go for it, but she's beautiful and it will be bad. Problematic statement in and of itself, we could spend all day breaking that down. That's not a contributing factor to what happened, but that did kind of scare me off of it for a couple of years. Fun fact, you can sign your name on the dotted line with parental consent at 17 years old. They will send army, marine, navy into high schools and be like, well, if you can do this many pull-ups, you should enlist in the Marines. I understand that it is an entirely volunteer force and they need people to want to volunteer. But knowing what I know now, having been in the military

and having been a 17 or 18 year old at one time, it's kind of predatory. It's like selling someone who doesn't know about money a car at 24% interest. But, you know, it was COVID, it was locked down. I had nothing better to do but to get my GED. And then I ended up going camping in the Arizona desert with

some friends. One of them was an Army vet. And he didn't have the best time, you know, he had his personal struggles with it. But he told me that it really helped set him up for a good life afterwards when he was done. And if I think that I can take it, I should go for it. I drove back to LA and the second I got in my house, I called a recruiting station and set up a time for me to come in. And that started the ball rolling of me enlisting into the United States Navy. The recruitment process was way different than I thought it would be. Basically, you sit down with your guy or your gal who is trying to fill their quota with your enlistment. They say, have you ever been convicted

of anything? Have you ever done this or that? I was very honest with my recruiters. I was like, look, I don't have a criminal record, but I've had some issues. I don't have them now. Can we work with that? They were just thrilled that I didn't have a criminal record. They were like, we're signing you up right now. So I went, I got in the best shape of my life. And in February of 2021, I arrived in Chicago, Illinois for bootcamp. It was not what I thought it was going to be at all. I thought it was going to be like the nightmare fuel you see on the movies and stuff. And it wasn't easy. There were days where I was like, I don't want to do this. This is stupid. I'm tired. I'm hungry. Everyone is farting. There's 80 girls in this room. In the bathrooms, in the compartments where you stay, there are no doors. There are curtains

that hang in front of the toilets. And the food there is like really high protein, really low quality. So no one's pooping. Everyone's constipated. You would coordinate with your little friend group and you would be like, all right, we have to go to the bathroom now as a group for safety and numbers because I don't want someone that I don't like to hear me going through it. It was like summer camp for me. I'm 21. I've lived the life that I have. Another adult yelling in my face about this, that, or the other, or telling me to do push-ups, it's not really that scary. It is motivating. It is very scary for some people and that's totally understandable.

Not everyone is able to internalize that for what it is supposed to be, which is breaking you down and building you up. It's truly just not for everyone. Pre-COVID, when you're doing evolutions of training, which is like, we're going to go do firefighting today, or we're going to do live fire training today, or we're going to go do firefighting today, or we're going to do live fire training today, or we're going to do book learning today. Before COVID, it was integrated male divisions as well as female divisions. During COVID, I believe they kept all divisions separated at all times as much as possible to limit the spread of COVID. We were masked during my time there, which was tough because they only let you take them off if you were doing physical training or if you were getting beat.

What that means is you're getting worked out hard because you did something wrong. They would have you do eight count pushups, planks, Russian twists. I think now they're going back to integrated divisions for training. But when you're in your compartment where the beds and stuff are, it's only males or only females in those areas except for your instructors. If you just put 80 girls in a room together and you're like, you're just going to be together nonstop for three months, it's like no one can deal with that all the time. But my mom told me, she was like, every letter you wrote me was like you were having a blast. I'm like, well, because it kind of was. What do you think was the most surprising part about going to boot camp that you would

have never thought before? Honestly, it was the amount of fun that we had. So in the Navy, they're not called drill sergeants. They're called RDCs, which stands for Recruit Division Commander. We had really good ones. There's an attitude or a saying in the military that's like, you're in the suck together. I just wasn't expecting that. I was expecting it to be horrible. I want to go home crying all the time. But like, it was just the girlies. We're in the Navy now. I didn't expect to feel so high on life when they issued us our uniforms either, because I'm not a very gung-ho military, like, who-yah person. It was more a decision that I made to advance my own life, but I did not at all expect to

feel that pride of, I'm a sailor. I'm going to get through this boot camp. I'm going to do this. I'm going to go to my school. I'm going to do my job. I'm going sailor, I'm gonna get through this boot camp, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna go to my school, I'm gonna do my job, I'm gonna do it so good. I didn't expect it to trigger that in me, but it did. Do you go home after boot camp and then you get assigned? Do you get a break at all in between? Technically, yes, but literally no. While you're there, you cannot take leave during your education training unless it's

a Red Cross message or like someone at home is having a life-threatening medical emergency and then the Red Cross gets notified, they notify your command and then they coordinate for you to go home. But when you're done with school, you can take R duty RAP And what that basically is is it's free leave that you get credited back to you because while you're there You're gonna go help out at your recruiting station. My recruiters were super cool So they basically had me come in once on the whole trip to like shred some papers and they were like now go have fun So that was pretty cool. That was in between my basic school and my specialty school. When you graduate bootcamp, the military then shifts you off to whatever base

you have to go to where your job's school is. So for me, I'm a hospital corpsman, which is a basically trained medic. You can pick up a specialty off of there. The specialty I was given was dental, which is the chillest job in the Navy. If anyone's thinking about it, be a dental tech. You will never have a hard day. You'll have irritating days, but that's it. So for me, I kind of ended up with like an office job, but while I was in school, they sent me to Fort Sam Houston, which is a Army Air Force base in Texas. It just happens to be where our school is and has been for a little while now.

For those of us lay people, what is your title in the Navy? I know your job, but are you an are you an officer? I'm an enlisted. So if you go in to be an officer, you're commissioned. If you come in as just one of the little people, you're enlisted. It's a really, really eclectic group of people in the military. No matter what you do, you will leave your military service changed personality wise just by like the different cultures and ideologies that you're exposed to. Are you dating anyone during this time?

Back when I was in Texas, I was not in any kind of relationship. I was living it up. I was being single, having a great time. It was the first time I've been away from where I grew up, my hometown. People are different. I'm in San Antonio, which is a great place to party. I had flings. I had people that I would hang out with. All but one were incredible people. There's one of them that I'm still really good friends with today. The friends you make in the military, like, you really are going through the suck together.

I still have a lot of friends that I knew before the military, but there's pieces of life that we just don't fully understand from each other, which is understandable. It makes sense. The relationships, romantic and platonic, that I've made in the military have that deeper, like, I know what you're going through kind of element to them. But there was in Texas one person who I was kind of friends with and a lot of my friends had left the area already to go to their first commands duty stations or their next school. Both of my schools were still in Texas so I had hung out with him once or twice. One night he invited me to come meet him and some friends of his at like

a bar and restaurant. I was thinking of it as being super normal. We're just gonna go out and like drink and have a good time. I ended up getting a lot more drunk than I intended to. His friends had driven him, so his friends went home in their car. He drove me and himself back to base in my car. I was not well at all. He walks me to my floor. He asks some random girl there to

like help me get to my room okay, which is very common at least where I was in school. If you came back trashed, someone who lived on your floor would be like, I'll help you. Someone helps me get to my room. I get there. I start getting ready to turn in for the night. And one of my other friends texts me. They're like, hey, the lights are on in your car outside. I was like, describe the car, because I didn't believe them. And they described my car to me and I'm like, oh, shit, fine. And I like, stumble my way out of the building. And that is the last thing I remember. My next memory is becoming conscious again and the guy who had driven

me home in my car was on top of me in bed. He was raping me and he had his hands around my throat and then I blacked out again. I'm not totally clear on if that was just like my brain trying to protect me from what was happening or if I was struck in the head. I did have some bruising, bumps, and injuries the next day when I looked myself over, but I can't be positive about that exactly. And then the next thing I remember after that is I woke up sitting down in the shower.

I don't remember if I even tried to wash myself or anything. I was just sitting under the hot water and I got up and made myself some food, ate, went back to bed. I didn't really know how to feel about what had happened or fully process it. I did end up a day or two later getting on a group FaceTime call with some of my friends who had left already. And they already didn't like this guy because we had had encounters with each other before where we had both been drunk, but it was consensual. Like, I vividly remember consenting to everything that was going on. I know enough about myself and consent to know that if I wasn't sober enough to

drive myself home and I wasn't sober enough to remember what was going on, there's absolutely no mistaking anything that I could have said or done for consent. I felt very much like it was my fault. Like I went through my phone and everything the next day looking if I had texted him or called him, something that would imply that like I asked him to come to my room and there was none of that. I ended up making a report about what had happened. There's two different versions of reporting you can do when you are sexually assaulted in the military. You can make a restricted report, which is simply you reporting to the military like I was assaulted, here's what happened, I don't

want anyone investigating, I don't want to go through any of that, I just need this documented and that was a reporting option that I went with. Mostly because I was still in school, I did not want an investigation to launch and for everyone to know what was going on. I don't regret that because it did allow me to, for the time being, suppress that and move forward. My goal at the time was just to get through my school and get out and go somewhere else. The bar for terrible behavior was really low.

From the ages of 18 to 20, when I was in that relationship with Lynn, the things that I experienced were so heinous that when less terrible things happened to me, I was much slower to identify something that would later have a severe traumatic impact on me. But it was kind of lucky that person ended up getting orders to go very far away within two or three weeks of that incident. So I did not have to see them. I've never seen them again. They did try to message me on Facebook a little while ago. The message was

like nothing had happened. They were not somehow aware of what they did to me. I was offered subpar at the time access to mental health services. They were just not enough people with too big of a workload to be effective at their jobs. There were thousands and thousands of students and staff there to one building with, I think, three therapists at the jobs. There were thousands and thousands of students and staff there to one building with I think three therapists at the time. I went once, did not get anything out of it, and did not go again while I was there. The way I thought about it was like this is something that happens in the real world

of all the people that I am friends with and know and have gone out with before. This has happened one time since I've been in the military and I'm sure that it's just a super random, definitely not systemic thing that is going to be part of the narrative of so many people's stories in the military. I tried to just let it go and like move on with my life because in my mind at the time I was like this is so inconsequential to like the rest of my life. Why would I make this an issue for myself? So I did my basic corpsman school which is we learned how to be an EMT, like a nurse's aide, a medical assistant, all of those things. Graduated my second school, which was to learn how to work within a dental office as well. And then at the end of that, we get our first orders,

which are instructions from the military on where we're going installation-wise, what unit or division we will be attached to while we're there. And then once you get that information, typically you're at some point assigned a sponsor to help you get oriented at the new command or gaining command.

The command is gaining you, so that's the gaining command. My orders came in and they were to go to Quantico, Virginia. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends. Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production created and hosted by me, Tiffany Rees. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones,

leave a positive review, or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram. At Something Was Wrong Podcast. Our theme song was composed by Gladrags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much. If you like Something Was Wrong, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.