A victim of CSA, trafficked 3 times and now a powerful survivor: Amanda Blackwood

Introduction: Stories that shape us

[0:04] Welcome back to Between the Before and After, a podcast about the stories that shape us.

[0:08] I'm your host, Coach Jon McLernon. Each episode, I bring you an inspiring guest with a moving story that shines a light on the power of the human spirit. I'm excited to share this story with you, so let's dive in. Imagine being the victim of human trafficking, not once, not twice, but three times. Once is terrible enough, three times is atrocious, And yet here we are today with Amanda Blackwood to tell her very inspiring but difficult story of overcoming being a victim of human trafficking.
So welcome to the show, Amanda.
Thank you so much, Jon. I'm really happy to be here with you.
Awesome. Before we dive into your story, which is quite a remarkable one, I always like to let people know kind of where you're at right now and what it is that you're doing, and then we're going to explore your journey to how you got here.
These days, I spend my time mainly as a full-time author and podcaster and public speaker.
This has been kind of a new direction in my life, and I don't think any of what I'm doing now would have been possible if I hadn't gone through all of the healing that led me to my husband.
There's already some great questions in and around that. I'm a huge fan of podcasting, being a prolific podcaster myself, and so I'm glad to hear that you are sharing your story through these various mediums.
Or I guess media is the correct term, but we use mediums as well.
And you're a writer as well. How many books have you written?
I have 13 published and I have a whole lot more that are waiting to come out.
All of that just since 2017.
Okay. So this next step, 13 books.

[1:37] 13 books so far. Wow. So there's just an incredible creative spirit and reservoir that lives inside of you. And there's a lot to be expressed and a lot to be told. And so, writing is an outstanding medium to express that. Absolutely. You know.

[1:54] I had already been writing a lot of my books and stuff by the time I started going to therapy.

[1:58] I was using it before therapy to try to process what it was that I was living through and and experiencing and the emotions that were overwhelming me, just journaling, trying to get it out of me, trying to understand it.
And at the end of therapy is when I wrote my full autobiography.
So I already had several books published at that point.
But then my therapist told me just try art and I never painted really anything in my life.
And I told her, I said, I'm no good at that.
Anytime I've ever tried to paint anything, comes out looking like a multicolored snowman laying on his side, you know, and he's melting in the sun.
But since then, I've also become a full-time professional artist on the side.
I actually have one of my works hanging up behind me that currently has a bidding war going on right now.
And it may actually be shipped to Canada next week, a few months.
So I'm gonna see if, for those listening, I'm gonna try and describe what I see and see if what I'm viewing is accurate.
So it looks to me as though there is a plateau, a cliff in the fog on the left-hand side, at least from my perspective, left-hand side of the painting.
So this is sort of a black cliff rising up out of the fog.
It looks as though there's perhaps a figure standing on top of that plateau, walking towards the edge.
And right on the edge of it, leaning out towards the vast expanse of fog, is a tree.

[3:24] And I'm not sure what kind of tree it is. So it looks like kind of a glimmy day and quite a setting.
And I'm left curious what might be underneath the fog.

[3:35] So what's underneath the fog is what we have before all of us.
It's the rest of our lives.
And we're not gonna be able to ever clear out the fog until we approach the edge and really start to explore.
So that tree is constantly reaching for the sunlight, constantly looking and hoping and begging for more.
And the figure that's standing on the middle of that plateau has her arms outstretched and the wind is taking her hair back behind her because she's just enjoying the moment while she's got it.
Love it. That's beautiful. What a fantastic piece of art there. So those listening, I hope you enjoyed that as well. It is a beautiful painting and whoever wins a bidding. I hope it's the Canadian.
Yeah, we'll have that lovely, beautiful work of art come to come to our great country in the north here. So I want to I want to start exploring your story because I think it's just immensely fascinating story. And there's a lot of aspects around this. I think that people don't fully understand.
And I think even the scope and scale of it, people also don't understand.
I'm sure we're going to dive into that as well. But to start with, I'd like to kind of go back to your early years and what you recall of that, where you grew up, what life was like for you.
Life was rough. And I'm not talking about a dog that's complaining about something.
I mean, it was it was rough. It was really hard.

[4:52] When I my when I was born, we were living in Germany. My father was stationed there with the military.
So, I grew up in this household where we didn't really know extended family.
I didn't have grandparents or uncles or aunts or cousins that were ever really a strong presence in our lives.
My immediate family was all I had and that was my mom, my dad, and my older brother and myself.
And the first time I ever remember being molested was when I was four by my older brother.
My father was physically abusive. My mother was mentally and emotionally abusive.
So that was my entire household that was basically, it felt like they were bombarding on me, but in reality, it was everyone for themselves.
And that's a hard lesson to learn when you're four years old.
It continued to happen with all of this abuse and stuff.
I was molested again by a stranger in a swimming pool when I was 12, by an uncle by marriage when I was 13, by a stranger in a parking lot when I was 15, in broad daylight.
By the time I was 17 years old, I had been raped by somebody I thought was my best friend, and I had learned the hard way that people were going to take what I called slices of my soul, whether I wanted them to or not.

[6:12] And I learned to instead use that as a bargaining chip. So I was a teenage runaway, started running away at 15.
And for a long time, I tried to hold what I could intact.
And eventually people just took too much away from me. When I was raped, I was still a virgin.
That's awful to hear. But I thank you for sharing that, because I think for so many people, we would like to shy away from the difficult details, the ugly, the black details about these things happening. And I think back to, like, I've got a two-year-old, you know, and I've got a two-month-old.
And I think of how I would feel, the thought of somebody hurting them. Like, I would be pretty close to committing murder if somebody hurt my children.
But the thought of a child growing up in a household without that level of love, support, safety and protection and what that does for a very young developing brain and sense of self.

[7:10] What was socialization like for you? Like in terms of friendships, how you interacted maybe with other children or if you had friends, what was it like for you?
I, you know, just in recent years, I started doing a little bit more exploration in that and looking back, I have to acknowledge that when I was really little, I was an A type personality and I was absolutely an extrovert.
I wanted to be everybody's friend. I was energetic and I just, the more people I got to talk to, the more people I got to be around, the better life was for me.
And at about five, six years old, this started to change. Yeah, yeah.
Your brother, how much older was your brother, or is your brother, than you?
He's three and a half years older than me.
So the things he was doing he should not have known how to do, which to this day I don't blame him for what he did, because somebody had to teach him first.
Right. Yeah, that's a remarkable and gracious insight as well, just that, to understand that now.
If you can recall, what runs through a four-year-old's brain when something like this happens to them?
Especially from someone who, you know, and maybe we could preface that by what was prior to that your relationship with your brother like?

Childhood Innocence Shattered: Trust Betrayed by Brother

[8:29] He was my best friend. We did everything together. We climbed crab apple trees, we dug up the worms, we grew watermelons and cracked them over the porch, we'd slide down snow embankments and hide in igloos. He was everything to me. I looked up to him and I adored him and I absolutely trusted him completely. When this happened, we were outside, we were hiding behind a juniper tree.
And I remember thinking we're gonna get in trouble for this and my brother said we won't get in trouble. Just don't tell mom and, I trusted my brother to the point where I knew that at that point if I told mom we would both get in trouble and, I didn't want that to happen. And this happened several times when I was four and And she caught us once.
I don't think she knew, I'm not sure if she knew exactly what was happening.
I think she had an idea of what was going on, but she didn't want to acknowledge it.
I think she kind of turned a blind eye. She was very, very mad.
And she was yanking us out of the bushes as I was trying to pull up my pants.
And I knew I was very scared.
I didn't like it happening. I kept on telling my brother, let's not do this.
We're gonna get in trouble. I was using the we're gonna get in trouble as an excuse to try to get out of it.

[9:54] But when my mother found us, she was so mad.

[10:02] I remember her screaming at us, what were you doing in there?
And we both lied through our teeth. We both said nothing. And because of that, anytime anything bad happened from then on, I learned that if something bad happened, then this was probably going to be my fault and I was gonna be the one getting in trouble.
And eventually it did come out. My mother told me, if you constantly have these problems with people, I was getting into fights in school.
Behavioral issues are common after something like that. I was getting into fights and she told me, if you're constantly have these problems, there's gotta be a common denominator.
You're the problem.
You're the one that needs to change.
So I had this thing in me where it was constantly this huge amount of self-blame.
Everything that happened had to be my fault.
Yeah. Wow. That's a difficult one to even process, I think. Again, one of the people that we, many of us just take for granted in our life as like our source of safety and security.
You know, I kind of look at how my children interact with my wife, their mom.
And to me, it's the most beautiful and sacred relationship.
I mean, literally, she grew them and birthed them and nurses them.
And it's just this unbelievable bond. And so.

[11:22] Again, to have that taken from you at an early age and to have this idea imposed on you that when these things happen to you, that it's your fault and you're going to get in trouble, the behavior you learn is how to hide it, how to hide it and then not to be told, yeah, how to lie and it's your fault.
You're the one that's asking for this, like, gosh, I just, I hear that and I cringe, well, too, clearly. Even though I hear stories like this a lot, which that in itself is terrible, but I want to share these stories because I think people need to hear these stories. I still can't help but cringe when I think about that because I have an understanding of how this affects the developing brain. So this was happening, and then I think you mentioned an uncle by marriage was kind of the next one to victimize you after your brother. But this time you're quite a bit older.
How did your kind of your relation with your brother shift as you got older and gained maybe a little more understanding a little more, Independence, I would like to say like something like bodily autonomy. How did that how did that change or did it change?
There was a huge shift for a long time. I blocked out and did not remember the molestation when I was four So that was helpful.

[12:36] When it did come flooding back to me. I was in my mid 20s mid to late 20s That was a very difficult day, but my relationship with him changed in such a profound and vicious way that it was really difficult for me to understand why did I feel this way towards my brother?
Why was I so angry at him? Why did I hate him so much?
I bullied him.
I used to put liquid soap in his toothbrush, and while that does make for a really funny story, it was not a very nice thing to do.
And it was one of those things where we had this silent pact where we weren't going to tell on each other. I put liquid soap in his toothbrush and he tried to do it to me and I rinsed my brush out first.
Then I put it inside the little metal cup and that way if he went to rinse his toothbrush out first, he'd still get a mouth of soap when he went to rinse his mouth out.
And it went back and forth with just this elevating revenge silently.
And it was fun.
And I hated that about myself.

[13:42] Right. Right. Like, was there a point in time where your brother stopped molesting and victimizing you? Like, were you able to sort of stand up to him to some degree? And was this sort of an element of this sort of escalating behavior? Well, it stopped when my mother caught us that day when I was still four. But he did try again later on when I was a teenager. And he told me that this was normal and that if I didn't believe him, I should go talk to my friend.
We'll call her Jodi, because she's the one that told him that it was perfectly normal because she had two older brothers who both did it to her.
Jaden Pickup, MD Oh gosh, yeah. That's again, awful, awful to think about.

[14:20] And so you have this escalating kind of revenge war with your brother as a way of kind of expressing some of the things you experienced.
It's interesting you mentioned, I want to shine a light on this for a second because I think it's important for people to understand how you block these things out from your memory, that these things happen.
And that's a part of us being able to cope and survive and function in the real world because we don't maybe yet at the time have the tools to process what's actually happened to us.
And so you yourself had essentially blocked this out of your mind, but there was this kind of tension between you and your brother where you were just aware that there's something in this relationship that's not working and I don't know why.
Right. And I hated him and I couldn't figure out why. And my mother would ask me all the time, why are you so mean to him now? You guys used to be best friends when you were little.
And to this day, she still won't admit that the abuse happened.

[15:18] Cognitive distance is very, very real. And, you know, and I suppose now you get to look back with the benefit of hindsight and with a degree of, dare I say, compassion or at least understanding, not, not, um, not condoning the behavior, but at least understanding why it might be like that, where it might come from. And because I think compassion sometimes gets misunderstood as well, so not actually saying a behavior is okay, but saying I understand where the behavior comes from, and at least understanding I can process it myself. And so your mom's wondering about that.
And then so an uncle by marriage, this next one to victimize you, but you're 12 years old at this if I have that right.
And was there anyone that you spoke up to about this or did you stand up to him or what took place?

[16:08] I loved my uncle so much. When he and my Aunt Lisa got married, I was really excited and he was like the greatest guy in the world to me.
I used to want to dress like him. I would try to walk like him.
I idolized the guy. He was my new hero instead of my brother.
I had been looking for a hero. Right.
And he molested me in a swimming pool one day with my brother present.
And I knew I couldn't tell my brother because I didn't trust my brother and I didn't know why.
I couldn't stand my brother and I didn't know why. And this uncle and I had always been really close.
And I didn't understand, why is this happening?
Right.
It's confusing. And then I think, very likely, it may have been preempting, but very likely there was a pattern of grooming that had taken place previously that in hindsight, you look back and you see, because I think here's another really important thing. When we typically think of abusers, we have like this, you know, slimy, greasy, ick factor. And in many cases, abusers are not that. They're charming. They're charismatic. They're, they do good things in the community. They're, you know, police officers, pastors, community leaders, you know, music teachers, swimming teachers, like things like that. And this is not to disparage any of these professions, but to say that those who have predatorial tendencies gravitate to these types of positions of trust that put themselves in a place where they can access their victims.

Early Signs of Grooming and Uncle's Influence

[17:32] And so I would be inclined to think there was probably some grooming behavior that had taken place. How long had you known your uncle up to this point? We had visited with him several times.
I think I had been around him for a total of a couple of months out of two years.
Yeah. So, and then probably the acting out at school, the behavior pattern there, when did that really start to escalate?
Right about that same time, actually. 11, 12 years old, I started going just completely off the rails. By the time I was 15, I was skipping school and running away from home. I mean, It escalated so quickly.
I had knives pulled on me in school. I was severely bullied.
I had a cattle taser pulled on me once in junior high in the seventh grade.
Great.

Childhood struggles and constant relocation

[18:25] At this point, had you come back to the US, and you mentioned you'd started over in Germany because your father was in the military, where were you at this point as a teenager when this was taking place?
So that was in Utah.
We had moved back away from Germany when I was two. So when the first molestation happened, we were living in Maryland, and we'd moved around a lot since then.
Okay, yeah.
So, I mean, you throw that into the mix, also being moved around and really struggling to develop a sense of security.
And I almost wonder, I want to hear about your described extroversion, which I see some of it shining through now too, which is wonderful. But this extroversion, that was also maybe a protective pattern of behavior, in a sense, make everybody my friend and then they won't hurt me or something like that. I don't know. Am I connecting some dots here? There was a lot of that. But when we moved, we had been stationed in California for, I think, five years. We left there right before I turned 12. And when we moved, I had the best friends that I'd ever had at that point in time. When I lost them, I remember clearly thinking to myself, Why bother making friends at all? I'm just going to lose them anyway. And that's when it really got bad.

[19:37] Jim Collison Yeah, yeah. Again, I just think all these different patterns building up these layers, kind of like layers of an onion is starting to kind of come together and coalesce into these behavior patterns that emerge that were really, really self-destructive. And I go back to, I want to just call back to what you said, you know, people taking slivers of your soul, just little pieces of you, one after another, and you kind of losing yourself in these experiences. And so you start to run away.
The first time you run away, because I guess I was kind of wondering, what was your relationship with your father like at this point in time? Was there any kind of relationship there?
Lake? He was still pretty physically abusive. There was one particular moment, I think I was about 15 or maybe 16. I had not taken out the trash and he picked me up by my ponytail and threw me into the fireplace and kicked me in the ribs until I got to the back door.

[20:28] This was standard practice in our house for a while. I remember my brother at one point running in when my dad had me by the hair and was making me see north, south, east, and west within a split second. My brother came running into the room and said, stop it, stop it, I'm going to call the cops. And my dad grabbed the phone and yanked the cord out of the wall, breaking it, and threw it at my brother and hit him in the face with it and said, go ahead. And back then we didn't have cell phones. This was about 1995. So even for your brother, that's quite something. Given, of course, the relationship you'd had with him and how it had been kind of destructive, but there was still something in him that recognized that this is not right and there's still some kind of protective instinct here. And he doesn't remember anything. He claims that he doesn't remember anything before before he turned 19.

[21:25] And so the first time that you run away, did you plan, was it an impulsive thing or was it like you carefully plotted this in advance or what would happen there?

Impulsive decision to run away from home

[21:36] It was very impulsive. I was a very impulsive kid. I did whatever I felt like at that moment and damned the consequences. I got grounded a lot. At that point, my parents had started taking stuff away from me.
Me. I had, I used to be a piano player. They took away my keyboard, so I couldn't play the piano anymore. They started taking away my writing notebook, so I couldn't write. I was having all of these things that I loved and wanted to do that were creative outlets that were therapy outlets for me taken away from me. And finally, one day, I just didn't go home. I got off at a different bus stop and went home with a friend of mine. And his mother was a police dispatcher. So she worked all through the night. And we'd get up in the morning, we'd go to school before she got in.
We'd come back and we'd hang out and say that I was gonna go home before she left for work.
And when she left for work, I'd turn around and come back in.
I just stayed there for something like two weeks before the police showed up at school.
I was still going to classes, but they showed up at school and told me that if I didn't go home with my father that night, they were gonna arrest me.

Childhood Abuse and CPS Involvement

[22:46] So I hear that, and I think, They didn't think to ask you, why you didn't want to go home with your father.
CPS had been called on my family several times.

[23:01] And that started very early. There was one instance, I think it was in the fifth grade where I went to school with my eyes all red and bloodshot.
I hadn't been able to find my hairbrush that morning.
And my dad said, if I find it first, I'm gonna beat you with it, and he found it first.
And he spanked me really hard all over the butt and legs, a couple of swats on my back, my lower back, with his hairbrush.
It was a hard plastic thing. And my eyes get all puffy and swollen when I cry, and it's still, they still do that to this day. And they thought that my dad had hit me across the face.
And they kept on asking me, did he hit you across the face? And I kept saying, no. No, he spanked me.
And to me, beating me across the legs the butt and the back was being spanked. That's what I was taught to believe it was. So I kept defending him saying, no, he only spanked me. And they called CPS out anyway. And this started a long history in my family of my father, who had become kind of a higher up in the military, learning how to manipulate the system and convincing people that he wasn't doing what was being accused. Yeah, almost that sounds like pathological behavior.

[24:17] Yeah. My mother accused him more than once of being a pathological liar too.

[24:23] So in this, I mean, I think it sounds like each one of you in your own way, your brother, yourself, your mother were victims. And, you know, I don't know your father's backstory, but, I imagine that somebody behaving in a way like that probably doesn't have a pretty past either, but maybe we didn't have the understanding to sort of put all those pieces together at at that point in time. Yeah. And I know both of my parents were broken. They were both middle children. My dad was the middle child between two girls. My mother was the middle child between two boys. So they both had this middle child syndrome, but they also both grew up in really very abusive homes and bad, horrible situations. And it carried over. My father's parents split when he was quite young, and he was, to hear him say it, he was dumped at his stepfather's house while his mother took off with yet another man and moved out of the state. And this abusive stepfather killed his dog, threatened my mother, beat my father.

Trauma and Abuse: The Cycle Continues

[25:29] And it's not to excuse the behavior, but you put the dots together and you think, okay, I mean, the pattern of behavior, unfortunately, makes sense. And you think about even the lying to get out of trouble, how that would have started in his situation. You think this generational cycle of trauma and abuse, and this isn't to say that everybody who has been abused becomes an abuser. That's not a correct assertion. But when someone has experienced abuse, I would say it increases the likelihood or the risk of them becoming an abuser. And so this friend of yours that you ran away with and you stayed with for a couple of weeks, was there a relationship here, or this was just a friend relationship at this point in time?
He was my best friend. He was the best friend who raped me when I was 17.

[26:14] Yeah, so this is, you know, you found and made a trusted friend, the one that like took you in, the one that cared for you when you were running away.
So you ran away the first time at 15. How frequently, I guess, did you run away?

[26:29] Gosh, I lost count. I kept on getting dragged back and I kept on leaving again.
I remember I would hide from the police if I saw them driving down the streets.
I didn't want them to have to take me home.
I think in the end, I had run away something like seven times and the last, every single time I ran away, I got farther and farther away from home.
So instead of a single bus stop, it'd be two or three stops.
Instead of a couple of miles, eventually it was across town.
And the last time I ran away when I was 17, I left Northern Utah and traveled with four other people down to Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona.
It's 800 miles and it took us four days to travel that far. car was so loaded down. Wow. So each time that you were running away and getting further and further away, were you staying with people? Were you sleeping under bridges? How were you finding accommodation? Who was kind of helping to look after you, if anyone? I was mainly, up until I was 17, I was just mainly staying with friends. When I was 17, after I had been raped, that's that's when I started to say, people are gonna be taking these pieces of me, whether I want them to or not.
So before they get that opportunity, maybe I should use it as a bargaining chip.
And that's what I started doing.

[27:52] So a couple of different times, I was staying with boys that I was dating at the time.
One of them moved me in with his grandparents and had to hide me under his bed.
Wow. I mean, it kind of makes for black humor, I guess, given your story. I know humor plays a part of it. I'm so grateful that it does, because we're hearing a lot of difficult stuff to hear. I think about what happens when someone like you said, your best friend raped you.
Leading up to that, was there any indication that this was going to happen? Was he envisioning that this was more than a friendship, was there any understanding as to what led to that happening?
And then how do you respond to something like that when you're already in the state that you're in?
I had had a crush on him for several years before that, but he was never really interested in me.
My mother had even made the comment at one point about, it's a shame that you're planning on moving away from home as soon as you turn 18, but because I see the two of you getting married someday and it scared him half to death and he's like no that's no that's not who we are.

[29:05] It was about two weeks after that my parents had gone out to some event and I was sitting there home alone my brother had already moved away from from the house.
And he came over to visit and to borrow a couple of VHS tapes.
He had some movies he wanted to watch.
So I told him, I said, come on over, Steve. I'll give you my tapes.
You can borrow them. You can watch them and then bring them back.
And you can't come in the house because my parents aren't home.
That was always the rule. And he came over and he's like, well, what if you have something else that I want to borrow too?
He said, can I just take a quick look? I won't take very long, I promise.
It's like, you know what? He's my best friend. I've known him for years. Of course. I can trust him Come on in come take a look but make it quick because I don't know if my parents are gonna be home any minute, right and After he raped me. He still took the videos, and he borrowed them and.

[30:00] It wasn't It wasn't what we think of in terms of a standard rape. This wasn't some violent horrible force where he suddenly punched me in the face, knocked me to the ground and raped me.
He started by pretending to and acting like he wanted to be my boyfriend.
He started by kissing me and it's like, I'm not, this is weird.
He's like, you know, you'll get used to it. It's not that weird.
You'll like it.
And I hit all at that point already had all of those patterns built up in my life to where it's like, All right, just let him do what he's gonna do, and then he'll leave, he'll leave me alone.
And he didn't stop.
But afterwards, when he took the videos and left, I hugged him because that was so standard for us.
I always hugged him when we said goodbye. He was my best friend. Right, right.

A Pattern of Compliance and Betrayal

[31:00] And I think what this pattern of compliance kind of being built up as a survival mechanism, Basically, if I just comply, the pain will stop sooner than if I try to fight it.
Yeah. And so you said goodbye to him. But in your mind, did you know, like, this is it? Like, this friendship is done? I can't see him again?

[31:25] All I knew was that I couldn't trust him enough to allow him around me in private again. I couldn't go to his house and he couldn't go to mine. But he was still my friend.
That's heartbreaking to hear. And so it wasn't long after this that you ran away again?
Right. That was when I went down to Arizona.

[31:48] Poor people in a car driving 800 miles. Yeah. And it was a two-seater hatchback, so two of us had to lay in the back window.
Oh, man. All the lucky, you know, when I was a kid, I remember we had an Audi Fox. It was like this little orange hatchback car. And yeah, it was like a treat if like, man, like in the 90s and stuff or the 80s, the stuff that we did right to get to like ride in the back and not have to wear a seatbelt.
But it sounds like maybe this wasn't so much of a treat. It was a necessity. Yeah.
A little bit of torture worth it and it got me away from home.
Yeah. And at this point you're with four other people or sorry, three other people, people you trust, people you know, or just like random people.
One of them was the boy that had stuck me into his grandparents' house and hid me into the bed.
So I was dating him at the time, and he and I were pretty close.
One of them was his older friend who was 23, and one of them was his little cousin who was 14.
14-year-old. Wow. Wow.

[32:59] And but every one of you is like, we're running away because there's this great adventure that awaits or we just we just can't stand where we're at. It was more or less there's there's nothing left for us here. We need to get out. And you were leaving from Utah, is that right?
Yes. Northern Utah. So Ogden area north of Salt Lake.
Right. Right. And if I may ask, was there any connection at all to like the Mormon church or anything like that with any of these runaways or just so happens that you were in Utah?
The guy that I was dating and his cousin were both Mormons, but there was really no other connection other than that. And I was one of only five kids in our entire high school that were not Mormon. Okay. Yeah. There's another way to get us to be an outcast in Utah, not to pick on any Mormons or any folks from Utah. I don't mean that, but yeah. So you run away, you get down to Arizona, and you're 17 years old, you get to Phoenix, and what's the plan here?

[34:00] Well, the plan originally was we were going to start our lives and go do something great.
And instead, I got dumped off on the side of the road. We got all the way down there, and the guy that I was dating, his father lived down there. So he was going to drive down to his father's house and go stay with his father for a while. And his father said, well, she can't come, Because that's illegal.
And instead of- Because you were 17. Right.
So instead of offering any help or any services, he said, you need to hit the road.
You can use my phone to make a single phone call, but then you need to get out.
And the people that I called were people that I had known when I was 12.
If you remember, I mentioned something about my father said, or my brother said, go talk to Jody and she'll tell you that it's normal.
Family had moved to Arizona and I looked them up in the phone book back when phone books still existed.
Right, they were still a thing.
And I called them up and they took me in for about a month until they could get some vacation time to drive me up to Utah to take me back home.

The Difficulty of Explaining Why She Left Home

[35:06] Back to that same situation that, the thing I keep not hearing is people asking why don't you want to be at home?
Right, right. It wasn't anybody's business, they thought, why I didn't want to be home.
Right, yeah, we wouldn't want to ask questions about that or anything. And again, I want to be careful applying a 2023 lens of hindsight to a situation that was taking place, you know, a couple of decades ago, but nonetheless, it's still difficult to hear. And so.

[35:40] How did this turn into being trafficked?
Well, when I was down in Arizona, I had met a lot of Jody's friends and one of them and I struck up an interesting kind of conversation relationship.
He was older than I was, so he didn't want to get involved, but he told me the second I turned 18, he would be willing to fly me back down to Arizona so that he and I could be together.
And that's exactly what happened. Two days after I turned 18, I left home and my dad drove me to the airport and said, your mother and I were talking last night.
She said she gives you six months till you come crawling back to us and I said I give you three. Because he told me that, when I ended up in this abusive relationship with this person, I refused to call my parents for help.
I was on my own. And I hopped from one place to another staying in people's couches and basically all those different instances of running away became practice for what was the next year of my life in Arizona. And at one point, one of the people that I was living with had ties to organized crime and was a drug dealer, and I didn't know that at the time. And he was the first person who ever trafficked me.

[36:56] So you met this guy, flies you down to Arizona, and turns out all is not as it seemed.
And so were you running away from that situation as well when you ended up with this drug dealer?
Yeah, I had left him pretty early on. I think I'd only been there for about two months at that point.
I left with whatever I could carry in my pockets and walked out.
I left behind everything, including yearbooks that I'll never see again.

[37:27] I just I just got out. I had met somebody through work that I could stay with and then from them I met somebody else I could stay with and I just started These days we call it couch surfing, but people pay to do that. Um, I was not paying Right, right I was one of the original pioneers of couch surfing in our traveling days, when it was when it became a website, but uh Okay, so yeah, you you start moving around and you eventually end up in the place of this individual who is involved in the crime underworld, and he's the first one who trafficked, you. And so you get there. I mean, I'm picturing an 18-year-old who's pretty broken and pretty shattered after everything that he'd gone through, can't really trust anybody, basically just operating on survival instincts, probably chronic fight or flight. You get to this situation, and.

[38:17] How does this guy greet you, and how does that turn into being trafficked?
I got to know him through the person that I was staying with before him, and he and I really hit it off.
We hung out a lot, got to know each other really well, and he convinced me that he had fallen in love with me.
And because this was something that was missing in my life, this love and acceptance from another human being, I latched on to that and convinced myself that I was falling in love with him also.
Really what I should have been doing is taking out the trash. I had a real issue with that.
But when he found out that I was getting kicked out of that place because I couldn't pay rent, he immediately took me in. And he had a really nice town home. He took me in, gave me a place to live. I was his live-in girlfriend. He was twice my age.
Right. Mid-30s, late 30s. Yeah.

[39:23] And how he ended up trafficking me was he loaned me out to a buddy of his in return, in exchange for payment for something.
Wow. So you just become a transactional currency, essentially, at this point. Yeah.
Yeah. And I actually wanted to highlight something here. I wasn't planning on doing this, but before recording, we talked about this book, Men Fight For Me, and the role of authentic masculinity, ending sexual exploitation and trafficking. The author of that, Alan Smith, who I've interviewed a couple of times on this podcast and another one, why I want to bring this up is he says, when you don't know what the real thing looks like, you're taken in by a counterfeit. Yeah. There's this thing that you're missing in your life and that made you susceptible to buying into a counterfeit. And so you get loaned out to basically be debt payment or something like that. And again, I'm imagining, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's kind of this sort of shutdown response, just get through this, survive this, whatever.

The Danger of Minimizing Trauma

[40:32] Yeah. But then- I did something really dangerous, something that I did later on and it nearly took my life. I told myself, I'll get through this. I've been through worse. Those are some of the worst words we can ever say to ourselves. They're some of the worst words we can ever say to somebody else. Oh, you've been through worse. You can get through this too. That is not helpful in any way. No, not in any situation whatsoever.
Okay. And so that was the first time. And then did this become a pattern of behavior with this individual?
It did not. I didn't allow it to be. As soon as this happened, as soon as I...
So I was taken to Las Vegas for a birthday weekend party, and I was the party favor.
And as soon as we got back to Arizona, I left. I found a place to go.
So it meant another guy. And I packed up what I could carry, which wasn't much, and I left.
And I stayed on this person's couch. This person was kind enough, he was in his 60s.

[41:35] He was kind enough to send me to go visit my grandmother for Thanksgiving, and I met another guy there.
And when I got back to Arizona from that visit, I ended up with a flu, severely, severely sick.
I could barely breathe, I could barely talk, and this man that I just met left Arkansas in a little pickup truck.
He was also twice my age, drove from Arkansas all the way to Arizona and picked me up and drove all the way back to Arkansas in a single day with me curled up in a ball in the seat.
I had such nervous leg syndrome afterward that it took me hours to be able to straighten my legs out completely. I was so miserable.
Yeah.
So this guy comes and drives that whole way. you know, and so what's what's interesting here is I'm just, of course, I'm hearing this pattern of behavior playing out on on repeat. And so somebody who doesn't understand how this works, they would look at this and go, well, didn't it occur to you that you shouldn't do that thing?
If that's the thing that, you know, you end up in one bad situation kind of after another.

[42:46] Did those thoughts ever occur to you? And then maybe you can shed a little bit of light on why behavior patterns like this get repeated.
There was a lot of that, um...
That that whole thing my life should mean more than this It should be better than this. This can't be normal. This isn't what I see in the movies.

[43:07] Every time I ever said this isn't what I see in the movies people would always remind me. Yeah, but those are movies Those are fictional. You can't expect your life to ever be like that. I have a movie movie life right now, I have this incredible life But I had to go through it all to be able to get here.
Breaking those patterns, as much as I wanted to, as much as I recognized this was something that was a necessity, something I desperately needed to do, I also knew that this isn't something that I was going to be able to do on my own.
And I needed to find some sense of stability and a safe place to go if I was ever going to do that.
And that's what I was searching for every single time I was leaving one place and looking for another. Maybe this will be my safe place.
Place. Maybe I'll be safe here. And I just wasn't.
Right, right. I know you mentioned at 19, you were trafficked again. Was it connected to this trip to Arkansas or is that entirely separate?

Connected Trips and Escaping an Abusive Marriage

[44:05] Connected in the fact that I married the man from Arkansas and he turned out to be abusive and I left him. I was on the run trying to get away from him. I had injured myself while at work working at a horse farm and I went to Florida to go stay with my dad's mother so I could get to know her while I got a knee surgery done.
And the horse farm where I'd been working at was going to be paying for the knee surgery.
So all I really needed was a safe place to go where I could recuperate.
And I got down to the Daytona Beach bus station where I called my grandmother, you know, hey, you can come and get me. I'm here.
I'm ready. And her husband, my dad's stepfather, answered the phone instead and said, we're not coming to get you. good luck, and hung up the phone.

Finding Hope and Help from Adam and Jenny

[44:55] Yeah, I thought I had hope. I thought I had a sense of stability sitting in front of me.
And to this day, I never got the knee surgery.
And instead, a young couple, Adam and Jenny, came and found me sitting on the curb crying and offered me a place to stay until I could get on my feet.
What they really meant was they had a place that I could stay until they could find the highest bidder.
And this young couple, he was in his early 20s. He was 22, 23. She was 15, but looked 18.
And they sold me to a man who said his name was Esteban.
Good grief. Right. So they come along and say, hey, we're going to help you.

[45:38] Would it be accurate to assume that they were involved in the criminal underworld to some degree? And was she also like a trapped victim at some point, or was she a facilitator?
I think she was heavily manipulated. I mean, she was still 15, pretty naive.
I know she'd been through some molestations when she was younger.
And I remember looking at her as a 19-year-old and seeing this 15-year-old and going, was I really that naive at 15?
And my answer would be no.
I knew more about the world than she did when she was 15. And I recognized that he was highly, highly controlling her.
Controlling her. He raped me at knife point while she slept before he sold me and when he sold me, he told me nobody's ever going to believe you if you tell them what I did to you. Who are they going to believe some homeless girl off the street or me? I have an established reputation in this town. Turned out he had been to prison for rape. He had served two years in prison.

[46:46] So yeah, he had an established reputation, all right. I didn't know it at the time.
Of course. And you just have to try to survive that. And then you get sold to the highest bidder, someone named Esteban. And I honestly hear that name, and I go, this really is sounding like just this crazy movie storyline. I mean, I think there must be sometimes parts of you that look back. And for those listening, Amanda does bring humor into her a story. And so, she's delightfully warm. And I'm so grateful that we can bring a bit of humor into it to lighten it sometimes. But I think, my goodness, Esteban, of all things.
Yeah, he was an interesting character too. I could have taken him in a fight. I just didn't know what I was getting myself into. Right. So he buys you. Do you happen to know, what he purchased you? What was the bidding price or something?
I do, $90.

Trapped in a nightmare: The horror of human trafficking

[47:48] Now is that to, to, like, was he a pimp? Like. That was what my whole life was worth.
You know. For him to do whatever he placed, whether it was murder me, sell me overseas, pimp me out, didn't matter, $90.
Oh man, it just makes my stomach and heart sink to think about a human being being treated like that.
And they only got 80 for the brunettes, they told me.
They got more because I was a redhead. Because there's a stereotype with redheads about having a, spirit that's more difficult to break. It's more of a challenge. People pay for more of a challenge.

[48:31] That's sickening. Wow. Yeah. So Esteban purchases you and what takes place next? I'm almost afraid to ask, but I think. This is where the good stuff comes in. So I was locked up in a small room for 23 and a half hours with no food, no water, no bathroom facilities. And this small room had a bed, a couch, a small wardrobe, a little table with a lamp on it. It looked like a normal room.

[48:59] And I was just locked up in this room and I could hear down this hall as I was padlocked into the door.
I could hear out there that there were other doors with other people behind them too.
I knew I wasn't alone, but nobody was coming to help any of us.
So I started to think, I grew up a child of the 80s and 90s.
My favorite TV show was, is, and always will be MacGyver.
Right. Right. Right. Richard D. Anderson saved my life. Cultural lexicon.
You're going to MacGyver it.
Oh, man. Oh, the man could fix anything with a paper clip and a rubber band.
So I decided, what would MacGyver do?
And I started digging around, looking for whatever tools I could.
I did see curtains, so I ripped back the curtains and there was plywood up over top, nailed into the wall over this window.
So I took my fingers and dug in, because that was all I really had.
I couldn't find a crowbar or anything, and I used my fingers to try to peel this wood off the window. It took me hours.

[50:03] But I got to work right away. And at the end of hours and hours, when I finally got that wood off, I had splinters in my fingers.

[50:12] And I saw finally that there were, outside of the glass, there were bars on the windows, and then there was bricks on the outside of the bars.

[50:24] And that was not gonna be an exit. So I started digging around again, looking more.
What can I do? What can I find? Is there anything here?
And I found a very dull serrated edge knife, extremely dull with a broken tip.
Probably wouldn't have done much damage to a person, but it's something, it's a tool.
And I started using it to try and hack away at the door.
I was gonna cut a hole in the door and reach my hand down, unlock the door and get out.
And I'm hacking and I'm sawing at this door for literally hours.
My hands are sore, I'm having to take breaks. They're cramping up.
Oh my gosh, it was awful.
I had been a waitress before this. I was not used to heavy lifting anything.
I was not used to sawing stuff. I finally got a hole big enough in the door to be able to reach my left hand out.
And it was barely big enough. I ended up scarring the back of my hand with the wood and I still have a little bit of a scar on the back of my hand.
I'm reaching through the door and reaching down toward the lock.
And as I'm reaching out and grabbing this lock, that's when I find out it's a combination lock.
Dang.

[51:29] So I wasn't gonna get out that way either. Right.
So now I just think about, okay, being locked in a room for 23 and a half hours.
And was this a matter, I guess, I don't wanna spoil the story, but I'm thinking like, did you know you were gonna get locked in this room?
And how do you not go absolutely crazy being locked in a room because we know what solitary confinement does to prisoners.

[51:54] Oh yeah. I lost my mind pretty much immediately because as soon as that door clicked shut, I knew something was wrong. Originally what had happened was I had been looking for work.
And Esteban told me, oh, I've got a car. I went and picked up a bunch of job applications for you.
Come on over and I'll give them to you. And at this point, of course, I didn't trust him.
Right. I told him, I said, well, give me your address and I'll walk over there and I'll meet you there and you can drive over there. And so he agreed to that. We got over there and he opened up the door at the end of this building. It looked like a it looked kind of like a long apartment building and had all these doors on both sides of this hallway. And there was, I think, six doors total. And then all the way down the very end was a bathroom. There was no kitchen. This is all it was. I think it was kind of a halfway house, but it had been a halfway house. It looked condemned.

[53:00] And when we opened up, he opened up that door to get into this long hall. And he told me, And he's like, this is my place right here. And he pointed to the first door on the right.
And he opened up the door on the right.
And he said, go ahead and have a seat. I forgot. I didn't leave them here.
I left them in my roommate's.
And that's just right down there. So I'm going to go right down there and go grab these job applications for you and I'll be right back. Make yourself at home.
And I looked around the room and I sat down on the arm of the couch because it was the closest port to the door.
And it was two steps away from the door. That's all.
Wasn't going to go completely inside. I wasn't going to trust this person because I didn't know this person But those that two feet is all it took, He walked down the hall and I heard him go and before I knew what was happening He turned around grabbed the door and slammed it shut and put the lock on the outside, It happened that fast being two feet inside. His door was all he needed.

Survivor's guilt and the long road to finding stability

[54:02] Wow, And so, you know allison i'm stuck in here now you mentioned 23 and a half hours, What was was a 30 minutes for, when somebody was base had purchased you or No, he had come back to check on me and it was just the convenience of timing at that point, So I don't want to give away all of my macgyver isms because I did write about them. Um, yeah But the MacGyverism I specifically used to be able to get out of there, I waited until he showed up.
When I sprang my trap on him, it didn't work the way I had wanted it to.
And if you remember watching the show, it often didn't work out perfectly for Richard Dean Anderson either.
So I had to improvise.
And I reached around behind me. I am not left-handed, but for some reason in this scenario, I was doing a lot of stuff with my left hand.
I reached around behind me and grabbed the little lamp that was on the round table behind me.
And when I did that, I brought it across his face with my left hand, cracked him across the face with it, and dropped what was left of it, I think, I may have dropped it halfway out the door, I don't know. And I ran.
I took off. And I did not go back for the others down the hall.

[55:20] And because of that, I had this massive, enormous amount of survivor's guilt for so many years.
Wow. Okay. So, but you've escaped, you're 19. And for the, for those listening, we might go a little bit over the normal length because I'm like, Oh my gosh, this story. And you're going to have, uh, let, let also, um, you wrote a memoir and I think we have to mention this because of course we won't be able to cover all of the details in this just incredible story. So people are going to be like, I want to know more because this is custom justice.
Wow.
That is my full autobiography. And the little tagline at the bottom says, Seeking justice for human trafficking survivors never easy.
Fighting internationally is impossible. And we haven't gone international yet. No kidding.
Okay. You've escaped. And I mean, you know, you think, oh my goodness, Amanda's learned her lesson.
Like you just, you already know you can't trust people, but now like you're super extra cautious.
What kind of where do you go with your life over the next 10 years?

[56:24] Well, California was about as far as I could get away from Florida without having a passport. Uh, so that's where I headed. Went straight there. Uh, went to LA.
My goal was to be the assistant to somebody who was important because that's how I saw myself ever being important.
If I could be important to somebody who was important, I could be important vicariously through them. Right.
I still didn't have that sense of who I was.

[56:50] Instead, I became a model and actress. I modeled for Harley Davidson.
I was on Alias. I was on Will and Grace. I was on Extreme Makeover.
I did a bunch of different stuff and I had a lot of fun with it, but I was still looking for my identity, still looking for where am I gonna be happy?
Where am I gonna be stable?

From Hollywood to Mall Cop: A Surprising Career Change

[57:08] Eventually, I got a job in security, low man on the totem pole, brand new mall cop.
Right, right. Okay. Within five months, I busted open a major embezzlement ring, took down the current director of security, got friendly with the regional director, and took over the property myself. Wow. Had a whole new stash of my own.
Because we just totally skipped over, like, you did some stuff in Hollywood. And I mean, we'll have to leave those details. I don't, hopefully they're included in your book, because like, I have no doubt there's something, you know, if nothing else, amusing adventures in that.
So you kind of got a taste of the Hollywood life and recognize that, okay, maybe this isn't for me.
You go from doing some Hollywood modeling, a little bit of acting, that kind of stuff to Mall Cop.

[58:02] I wanted something stable and in the acting industry, I was offered a reoccurring role on the final network TV series of of Woodland Grace.
But I turned it down because I wanted something stable. I was looking for a stable, secure life for myself because this is what I'd always been looking for.
You know, and I figured once I have this stability, once I have medical coverage, maybe I can get the help that I needed. And I recognized that I needed this help.
I just didn't know how to get it. And I got stable and I put myself together and over this span of seven years, I was out there for a total of 14, but in the seven years after I moved there, that's when internet dating really became a big thing.

[58:50] Right, yeah, yeah. So about 2004 is when it really became, you know, like this big thing.
I was 24 years old, I was young, I was thin, I was energetic, and I needed company. I wanted company.
Right, yeah, yeah. So I met this guy who lived overseas.
And he was, it was a great guy. He was funny and smart. He was tall.
He was good looking, he had bright blue eyes and a little girl who looked just like me, red hair and all.
And we decided, you know what? That's a little far. So why don't we just be pen pals?
Cause I can't give up my life to go there. You can't give up your life to come here.
And we'll just keep in touch. And over a period of seven years, we watched each other grow emotionally.

[59:41] We grew together emotionally. We got to know each other really well.
He came to visit me. I went to visit him. And we decided that we were in love.
So he asked me to get a fiance visa and move to Scotland to go and be with him.
And what a gorgeous place that was.
I moved over there in January, 2011. It took him seven years to convince me to go out there.
It took him seven days to start trafficking me.
He was so good at being manipulative and pretending to be somebody else as long as it was 30-minute video intervals at a time.

[1:00:25] Wow. That is quite something because, of course, the question that would be on people's minds is traffic twice, 18, 19, what happened?
How did this end up happening again at 31? now you're in Scotland and you get trafficked over there. And did you end up, was it only in Scotland or did you end up getting shipped around the UK, shipped over to Europe?
We did take a trip over to Ireland. At one point, I thought this was just for us to get away and have a vacation because that's what he said it was, and that's not what it was. I did get to see some of the parts of Dublin that I'd always wanted to see, and I got to go to the Trinity college and see the Book of Kells and see some really cool stuff and have my hands down in the history.
But I had to pay for that. That was hard.
And that was how you paid for it.
And all along the way, so I think to myself, here you are in this terrible situation, yet you're going, you're seeing these things, you're doing a little bit of touristy stuff, And like, like what kind of runs through your mind at that moment when the switch happens?
Like was the little girl real? Was was that really his kid or was this a pretend thing or?
No, that was his kid.
I was trafficked five, six, seven days a week. The only time I ever got a break was when she was visiting every other weekend.

[1:01:55] Right, and so her mom maybe had no idea this was What was happening I, Don't believe her mother did I don't think she had any clue at all This little girl was 12 by the time I got out there and she was she was a wonderful kid I loved her so much, Probably the worst part of leaving there was leaving her behind.

[1:02:20] Because I had no idea what was gonna happen to her next I have been 12 once and I remembered being 12 ones. I remember how much that hurt. Right. So how long do you stay? And is that to say that part of what kept you over there in a situation was this little girl? You know, towards the end, I was fighting myself because of the little girl, but there was never anything that could keep me there, aside from the inability to leave.
And that's as simple as it was.
Within a week of the abuse starting, I had formulated a plan and bought myself an emergency flight out with every penny that I had.
I did pretty much exactly what I did in Arizona though. And I used that very, very dangerous thing that we shouldn't ever tell ourselves.
I've been through worse, I can get through this too. The first flight out that I could afford was five days out from that day.
I had to wait five days and had to allow this abuse to continue through those five days. And during that time, I ended up with a kidney, kidney infection, so severe that I was in the hospital when the flight took off and I missed it.
It was a non-refundable flight and it took everything I had to be able to afford that.

[1:03:42] Oh, that's heartbreaking. And so then I think to myself, You had an awareness of what the situation was, like what was taking place, and you said the situation you didn't want.
You had an escape plan formulated.
I mean, how crushing it is to end up missing this flight.
And now you don't have the money to buy another flight.

[1:04:09] What goes through your mind? This is the end of me.
That was what came. That was all I could think of. And I eventually I did try to take my own life.

The Darkest Hour: Desperate for Help

[1:04:24] It was the absolute darkest hour. I remember walking down the street that day and thinking to myself, somebody's got to see me. Somebody's got to ask me if I'm okay. They got to ask me what's going on. And nobody did. And I kept on thinking, somebody's just got to see me.
Just see me, just look at me, just recognize that I'm a human being and that I'm standing here begging for help and nobody would look at me. And I made my way all the way down to the train. And at the time I was a smoker my plan was to sit down on the platform and have my last cigarette as I waited for the train to come. While I was sitting there smoking my cigarette a man walked out onto the platform and asked me for a light and I gave him my light and told him you can keep it.
I won't need it back and I wanted him to ask me why and he didn't ask me why.
And I knew that of every single person that I had seen or passed that day, I could not make any of these people care about me. They were so wrapped up in their own world.
There was nothing that I could do to change that in that moment when I needed the help so desperately.
I didn't even know how to ask for help. I had been trying for so many years.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say. I had nowhere to turn to.
I couldn't go to the police. He was the police.
I probably forgot to mention that he was a cop and had been for many years.

[1:05:52] So. Yeah, that was because that probably answers the question that might be on people's minds.
Like you go to the hospital.
Would you say something at the hospital? You know, did you say something like, Right. And there's the unspoken threat. Yeah. Yeah. And another side of this, I do go into a little bit in the book, but not as much as people probably have asked me to. I do talk about, I had sleep deprivation of eight and a half days. I was deprived of food. And then I was given food that purposefully made me sick because the thinner I was, the more he could charge.

[1:06:36] And I was waterboarded for sport just to see what would happen.
So with all of this going on, I absolutely believe that my life was in danger and yet I couldn't leave.
And the day that I did leave I tried to kill myself But that guy that asked me for the light, He had a little boy And that little guy was probably about four years old He walked out onto the platform and took his daddy's hand and he turned around and looked at me. You know, how, When we look like we're in a bad mood or like we're gonna cry and a kid looks at us We try to cheer ourselves up so we don't upset the kid, I did that, And the kid looked right through it Yeah, not only did the kids see but the kid understood and he looked at me with the eyes of somebody other than a four-year-old and I knew that I could not do to this four-year-old child what had been done to me so many years before. I could not take his innocence away from him. So I went back to my prison and decided I can come up with another plan.
This cannot be the end of me. Wow. I almost want to like leave at that moment because then people have to get your story.

[1:07:59] I, yeah, there's so much more to explore. What a remarkable story.

Overcoming Trauma: Finding Hope and a New Identity

[1:08:04] But maybe we, we, we close out on a couple of happy notes here and, and there's, there's obviously Like, you got to get the book. Like, there's just, there's no way around this. This is absolutely incredible because here you are today, you know, sharing your story. And, you know, I see someone who is just warm and funny and amazingly artistic. And, you know, there's this entirely different energy to you, you know, and I'm an empath. Like I get everything you're describing, I can feel, you know, those situations, and it's tough to hear that.
But there's hope in this story. It's like, how do you get to this place? And because why we want to share these stories is not just to say, wow, here's all this dark and terrible things, and here's all the terrible things that humans do to other human beings, but to say, even if these things happen to you, there is the possibility that there's another life out there for you.
Absolutely. And it can be such a beautiful life too. I mean, it's not easy to do the work, but if you stop looking for the band-aids and you start getting the shovels out, you can dig yourself out of the hole that somebody else already dug for you.
You know, there's something really fascinating about that statement because I think, you know.

[1:09:23] Of all people if you just wanted to live the rest of your life as a Feeling like a victim a powerless victim in a lifelong pity party. I wouldn't blame you, You know doing that and instead I became a flight attendant.

[1:09:41] For two years three months 28 days not that I was counting Right. Um, well, I'm like was it for Southwest where you could say funny things? No, I wish no it was for a a small regional airline. We were subcontracted by five of the majors. So I did all of my announcements.
I had to do them verbatim. I did them in a thick Scottish accent because I'd lived there long enough. I could do the accent really well. So that was your small, small act of rebellion.
Absolutely. You know it had to be in there somewhere, right?
It did. It did. Had I known that, we could have tried to conduct this entire interview with an Irish accent on my side and a Scottish one on your side.
I don't know if I could have kept it up for the whole time though.
I guarantee I could. I used to have people from Scotland ask me what part of Scotland you're from.

[1:10:32] Well not to forget you've had time in the acting industry as well and you're just a natural artist and so you pick these things up and you know. Then once you start it's kind of hard to let it go. Yes, exactly.
Now I'll probably have some little Scottish hints in my language for the rest of the evening.
And I did spend enough years in Arkansas that now I just call it my Arkenbroke.
I love it. That's amazing. And so, you know, just in a small nutshell, you mentioned like doing the work and you just decided I'm not going to be a victim.
You know what like there's something about that human spirit that goes like wow i have been to the darkest depths of humanity treated like.

[1:11:23] The most useless piece of garbage on planet earth, And yet there's some little spark in there that says I don't accept this as my final destiny, And how did you how do you nurture that and how do you learn to trust again?

[1:11:37] Wow Everything that i'd ever known and throw it out the window I had to start from scratch. I had to completely rebuild the way I lived, not just my life, but how I lived any kind of social life, how I made friends, the kind of people that I would make friends with, where I would go to find friends. I had to leave behind my entire past. And it's the same thing when you're in Alcoholics Anonymous. They tell you that you cannot have this association with these people from your past because they're going to keep dragging you back into this past.
I left California in 2016.
I moved out to Colorado. That was the beginning of really climbing this ladder and finding my way and finding out who I was.
That was huge. I didn't know who I was.
I didn't know what I liked. I didn't know what I didn't like.
I didn't know what I was looking for in a relationship. And before I could find what I needed to find in a relationship, I needed to find what I needed to find in me.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I just think of like, like your psyche being shattered repeatedly.
You know, how did you ever like form any kind of cohesive sense of identity, in all that you went through?
You know, so to go through that work of finding that.
And then.

[1:13:03] To form a relationship or to build trust with another human being, like even just one human being where you think, I think I can trust this person. Is there someone, and maybe if there is someone, who was the first person after all of this that you were like, I can actually trust this person? That would be my best friend, Colette. She is amazing. People think that we genuinely are sisters, we look enough alike. We met at a Redhead event that I actually put together in 2017.
AG Of course you did. CMH It was November 2017. It was right before I'd come out with my first book. It was within two minutes of having a conversation with her. I was like, this is a special person.

[1:13:50] This is a person that I not only can trust, but this is somebody that I want to trust.
And we got to hang out again the month later. We did a photo shoot.
We had a lot of fun. I had been modeling and stuff in the past.
She's a phenomenal photographer. So she asked me to do this photo shoot with her and I was completely ready to do it.
And we had so much fun and just giggled like little girls. And it felt like I had a piece of my childhood back that I never got to experience.

Building Trust: Finding Lifelong Friendship and Love

[1:14:26] That was the real beginning of what is the strongest friendship, aside from my husband, that I've ever had in my life. What a beautiful healing moment.

[1:14:38] So the thing that I think about is, okay, how do you mention to somebody, like, this is my past.
This is what I've been through. and then not be like entirely freaked out and just run away and be like, oh my gosh, no, no, no, no, no. Like I can't handle even hearing this.
How do you do that?
That wasn't easy. No kidding. So that's actually how I met my husband.

[1:15:07] Got on to the dating site that had been used to traffic me when I was in Scotland I was doing this not necessarily to meet the man of my dreams or my happily ever after but rather to face my own fears, Okay, I needed to face my fears so I threw myself up there and what I wrote in my bio, Said it all this is who I am. This is what I do. And if you have a problem with that We're not gonna mesh. Well now let's go have fun My husband, the man that's now my husband, read this at the time and he's like, well, that's intriguing.
This is really interesting.
I want to know a little bit more, but I also don't want to push.
So we started a dialogue. Within days, we'd had our first date.
By our second date, we both knew that this was it. This was the one.
Before he ever proposed, he purchased, we met one month after my autobiography was published, and he purchased a copy of my book without telling me, because he wanted to support me as an author, and he read the whole thing.
And after reading the whole book, he came to the conclusion, if you can go through everything that you've been through and still be not only willing, but capable of love, I need a lot more of that in my life.

[1:16:29] Wow, what an incredible sentiment to express and shout out to your, I actually don't know his name. Kyle. Kyle.
Shout out to Kyle and shout out to Collette too. Two just incredible human beings.
And you know, it's in one sense sounds like the happily ever after, but I kind of still imagine that there, like, there's still hurdles to go through. Like, it wasn't as correct if I'm wrong, but I think maybe it wasn't actually just like entirely just fireworks and smooth sailing. Like, there's still some things you kind of got to work through. Um, but you kind of do it together with somebody you trust.
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, going through all of this stuff and developing complex PTSD, this isn't something that you can just wave a magic wand over and say, look, I'm cured. there is no cure.
This is something that I will live with for the rest of my life, but through my learning, through education, I have taught myself how to rewire and how to retrain my brain away from these trauma reactions.
First of all, how to recognize what they are, and then learning what the long-term consequences are of not fighting back against them, and now how to retrain my brain so that I don't do those things automatically and I recognize that I'm in a safe place.
Do not have to have that trauma reaction. This is the healthier reaction to have.

[1:17:55] Wow, yeah, you have to have this incredible presence of mind.
To be able to do that. I went through one massive traumatic experience, and that was hard enough.
To go through repeated cycles of it over decades is another beast altogether, in a sense. And so.

[1:18:20] It's a brilliant story, it really is. And I think there's this incredible future waiting for you because of your courage and your refusal to give up on this.

The Fight Against Human Trafficking: Raising Awareness

[1:18:33] I kind of want to ask, if you don't mind, do you engage at all in, and I wouldn't expect you to, but I'm curious. I mean, obviously you're raising awareness, but more directly in this kind of like fight against human trafficking, if so, is there something you could share about it here in 2023?
We might think that because of the age of the internet and stories like this and so on, there must be so much awareness. But I, you know, as far as I know, there's still something like 500,000 people in the US alone being trafficked and 45 million people, I think worldwide, still caught in some form of human slavery.

[1:19:06] Probably the biggest thing that we can do is to stop feeding into the myth.
Human trafficking is not what we've been made to believe it is, just like forgiveness isn't what we've been made to believe it is. Human trafficking, if you Google it, if you look it up on Wikipedia. These are fallible resources. You have to go to a really reputable source.
I tell people all the time, go to the Department of Homeland Security, go to their website and look up what it means. According to their definition, human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain commercial sex acts or labor from another person. There's no mention of money. There's no mention of transportation. And there's no mention of age. So human smuggling and human trafficking are two separate issues that both need to to be addressed, but are very real problems.
One does not equal the other. Human trafficking and prostitution are not the same thing.
Most people that are being prostituted are victims of human trafficking, but very few victims of human trafficking are prostitutes.

[1:20:06] And there's no mention of age, because regardless of force, fraud, or coercion, anybody under the age of 18, in commercial sex acts or labor is considered.

[1:20:16] Human trafficking. They only make up one quarter of all victims. Three quarters of all victims of human trafficking are over the age of 18. Every time we see one of those hashtags saying save the children, this is another person who doesn't fully understand what human trafficking is or what it looks like. I get really passionate about this because I've had people tell me, well, you were 31 years old, you weren't trafficked, it was just your bad choices.
No. I was absolutely trafficked. Here's the definition. Let me know if I can explain it to you any clearer.
I hear that. I want to punch somebody in the face. Just I wouldn't actually do that. But like the galling ignorance of that, my first response would be to want to. And I wonder like if it requires some degree of self-restraint to not do that.
That or because it one of the challenging things is to have compassion in the face of like stunning ignorance.

[1:21:14] Oh my gosh, yes. And I run into this so often, you know, a lot of people have this automatic preconceived notion that just because human trafficking has the word trafficking, and it means that you're stuck in traffic, you're being transported from one place to another. And that the only reason that I was trafficked was because I went to Scotland. I went to Scotland of my own free will. That had nothing to do with the trafficking. There was no smuggling involved. And asking somebody why don't just leave? I've had that one a lot.

[1:21:50] Yeah, yeah That's that's that's another one of those ones where it's like, oh boy deep breath. Okay center myself, Yeah, exactly. So the first time I was ever asked to do a podcast interview, Somebody had attacked me on Twitter and asked me why I didn't just leave and I had this Volley of tweets more than just a series. It was an absolute attacking volley of tweets uh, talking about why people don't leave and explaining how the domestic violence, uh, uh, death rate, murder rate is super high in the instances where somebody has left or has attempted to leave.
Yeah.

Sharing Stories to Combat Ignorance

[1:22:33] Yeah. There's some pretty incredible, um, ignorance out there.
And so stand on your soap box and shout, you know, get the biggest the biggest microphone you can possibly have and shout it from the rooftops and do not stand for ignorance and share your story, share the inspiration.
Amanda, it's an absolute delight. And it seems funny to say that given everything we've just talked about, but you are a remarkable human being and it has truly been my honor and pleasure to share your story and hopefully raise greater awareness.
And so just to close out, Someone's listened to this today and they might actually just be like, holy crap, that was just a lot to take in.
How do we take it? Like I've stood in Auschwitz, I lived in Poland and I stand there and I go, like, how do I take that in?
Like the magnitude and the sheer number of that, it makes it almost impossible to comprehend as a human being.
On the other hand, they hear an individual story like this.
And it's all of a sudden now we can connect to this and relate to it.
And now it's like, oh my gosh, how do I take that in? because I can actually relate to elements of that story.
And so I think, well, if you could have somebody take something away from this conversation, words of wisdom, words of encouragement to listen to this, what would you like to share with them?

[1:23:55] Probably the biggest one is that if you don't know what resources are available to you, it's the same as not having those resources. We live in the age of the internet. Go look it up, find the resources that you need. This stuff didn't exist when I was going through what I that I went through.
We didn't really have the internet very much when I was 18, 19 years old, and it certainly wasn't in the palm of our hands.
They are out there, and there's people who are building these organizations specifically to help you because they've been there and they've seen it and they've done it and they've gone through it.
And recognize that the phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, is absolutely a lie that was made up by Frederick Nietzsche in the 1800s, and he later died in an insane asylum.
We can let go of that one now.
The truth is, the strength does not come from the abusers or the abuse or the traumas.
The strength was always in you. Stop giving credit to the past and take a hold of your future.

[1:24:55] What a great note to finish on. Amanda, thank you again for such an amazing story.
It's truly been a pleasure.
Thank you so much, Jon. Thank you so much for tuning into Between the Before and After.
If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review because that helps this, podcast to reach and inspire more people.
I love exploring the stories that take place between the before and after, the powerful experiences that shape who we become, and I love human potential.
I love the possibilities that lie within us. So whatever you may be up against, I hope these stories inspire you because if you're, still here, your story's not done yet, so keep moving forward.