Episode 5

Transcript

And I'm just frozen in total shock and horror. Like besides the awful headache, I'm completely numb and disconnected from my body because my entire life and my entire perception of who I am is being shattered into a million pieces.

This is the Wall of Silence podcast, the ACNAtoo story. An account of church abuse and cover-up in the Anglican Church in North America. Of things done and left undone and why we should care about it. This is Episode Five: Joanna's Story, Part One. 

A disclaimer: this episode contains accounts and references to rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.

We now come to the personal account of Joanna Rudenborg's grooming, rape, and continual harassment by Mark Rivera, a now convicted sex offender. Joanna's story parallels Cherin and her daughter's story, which was told in the previous episodes. Her accounts in these episodes offer a reminder of the scope of the Wall of Silence podcast. As we progress through Rivera's abuse, we will eventually hear how the Anglican Church in North America handled it as a province in relation to the Upper Midwest Diocese. 

But this episode and the next are almost completely focused on how an abuser can manipulate their way into people's lives and how they incrementally maintain their control on those people by spending a narrative of deception, even as they seek out more people to abuse. All stories at their core are personal, but in relation to the national, the regional, the local, and the personal ways that abuses responded to, the next few episodes are highly personal in nature. As I've prepared these episodes, something I've continued to ponder is what it means for us to seriously look at ugly stories, dark stories that reveal the most disturbing tendencies of human nature. Some of us naturally look away from them or perhaps have been conditioned to do so, being advised not to dwell on them for fear that we will ourselves succumb to the same evils. Others of us revel in tales of the depraved, both realistic and fantastical, as evidenced by the popularity of true crime documentaries in films or television shows like The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and even dark comedies like Succession. The list grows long in our modern age. As much as we crave the catharsis of a feel-good story found in something like a Hallmark Christmas movie or a lighthearted comedy, it also seems like we can't quite look away from the stories that document our destruction and depravity. Perhaps it's helpful to consider that Shakespeare wrote basically an equal amount of histories, comedies, and tragedies. And maybe there is something of an inverse catharsis in looking at how horribly things can go wrong. 

I used to think people who told sad, tragic, and disturbing tales were themselves reveling in people's sins, giving us some kind of mass cultural license to do whatever we wanted. The storyteller who most comes to mind in this regard is filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who has continually depicted the extremes of violence, greed, and mass-scale corruption in a multitude of films, such as the recent Killers of the Flower Moon, and classics like Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Oscar-winning film The Departed. 

“I don't wanna be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me… When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you in the church. When I was your age, they would say we could become cops or criminals. Today, what I'm saying is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference? 

Honestly, I used to think Scorsese must have had some kind of violence fetish that, like the character Francis in The Departed, he must be truly messed up in the head to portray violence in such a seemingly pleasurable way. Eventually, though, something clicked, and a counter-story within his films began to emerge. I began to see he was instead offering us an opportunity for cultural lament by portraying all these damaged, terrible people. That his narratives were instead meditative warnings about the loss that inevitably occurs when we choose selfishness one step at a time. Eventually, even those we love become dehumanized collateral damage, easily expendable as a means to get what we want. I realized his films were realistic parables about everything we should strive to not become. 

And so, I now invite you to listen to Joanna's story. There's nothing easy about it. She is very much inviting us into her own darkness, what she endured, the decisions she made, how she finally found a path up out of that darkness, in fact, clawing her way out. She never wanted to be an example, to be turned into an object lesson of how to have your life destroyed by a sexual predator and abuser. But here she is. She has a story to tell, and the responsibility now resides with us to consider everything she has to say, listen to it carefully and respond accordingly. 

I'm going to tell a relatively short account of my abuse story, and I want to preface this story by saying, it's basically impossible to really explain intimate manipulative abuse briefly to a general audience. It's pretty easy to tell my story to other survivors, but it's still hard to tell it to everyone else. I feel like I've become a statistic and like no one really understands what's behind the statistics, except those of us who are a part of them. I also feel like anyone who hasn't experienced some version of highly manipulative abuse doesn't really totally believe my story, mainly the brainwashing and control part, because it's just so unbelievable if you haven't been through it. So if you've ever been abused the way I was, you will immediately recognize the dynamics. And meanwhile, a lot of other people are just going to say, well, why didn't you just do such and such? Why didn't you realize it was rape? Why didn't you come forward sooner? Why didn't you realize he was abusing other people when it was right in front of your face? And to those people, all I can say is I hear you. I didn't get how this works either until it happened to me and until it was too late and I was 39 years old. So please, please go learn about how abuse actually works so you don't become a victim or an enabler like I was. 

The first time Mark Rivera raped me was the night of February 16th, 2018. We'd been next door neighbors for four or five months at this point. And I was at his house for my first ever game of Dungeons and Dragons. Mark was the party host and he was the dungeon master, which for people who don't know Dungeons and Dragons is essentially the god figure who creates the story and pulls all the strings in the little D&D universe and ultimately controls the fates of all the players, which in retrospect is a pretty good analogy for how Mark operated in real life. But at the time all I knew was that my new friend Mark was really, really excited about this game. He'd spent all this time preparing for it and preparing me for it by getting me alone and talking me through my character for hours and showing me this movie and this TV show episode about Dungeons and Dragons and generally hyping it up to be this big event. So the players are me and my brother and two of Mark's friends, and I think both of his older kids and we're all plotting together and moving our little characters around on this elaborate game board and fighting monsters and laughing and joking and the adults are drinking alcohol and it goes on for hours. I think it ends around 11 or midnight. And the last thing I remember is talking to Mark's friend Chris after the game, after most people have left, and then I black out and stop forming memories. 

The next morning I wake up at home in my bed and the first thing I realized is that I have a pounding headache. And the second thing I realized is that I'm totally naked. So I immediately know something is very, very wrong because I don't sleep naked and I have this terrible hangover and this giant memory gap. And before I can even form any idea of what might be going on, there's a knock at my door and I'm all blurry and confused and I scrambled to get dressed and I opened the door and it's Mark. I have no idea to this day how he showed up at my door, essentially right after I gained consciousness that morning, but he did. And he hands me some pills, like obviously you have a bag hangover now, here, take some ibuprofen or whatever. And he comes in and sits down and starts asking me what I remember from the night before. And I say basically nothing after this specific conversation with Chris. And he looks me dead in the eye and starts to tell me this very elaborate story of what supposedly happened after that. He tells me I was very drunk and he and Chris decided they should walk me home, which for context is a 30 second walk to my house next door. And I'm wandering off and talking drunkenly and they finally get me home and into bed and go back to his house. And he finds my phone there and decides to bring it back to me a little bit later. And he comes back to my house and sits down on my bed to check on me and we're talking. And supposedly I'm suddenly quite lucid and I lean over and kiss him. This is Mark's story. I kiss him and he's shocked, but helpless to resist. And then supposedly we make love, as he calls it, nonstop for three hours. And it's this earth-shattering once-in-a-lifetime experience for him. 

So to back up for just a second, I've just moved to this small town where everyone I know is a part of this fairly conservative Christian social circle. It's a place I lived as a kid. I have a lot of history there, but I've been away for a long time. And at this point in my life, I no longer identify as a Christian, but I am automatically included in the local church community socially because these are my friends and neighbors. And my godfather is the priest. Half the church lives within five minutes of me. And over the past months, I've been settling in and making new friends and it's going well. And now out of nowhere, I'm sitting in my kitchen and the church catechist is telling me that he and I had this life-changing sexual encounter that I don't remember at all. And he's essentially drooling over me, like a lovesick teenager, having his first real crush and going on and on. And I'm just frozen in total shock and horror. Like besides the awful headache, I'm completely numb and disconnected from my body because my entire life and my entire perception of who I am is being shattered into a million pieces. 

So when I can finally put words together, I ask him, how are we going to tell his wife? And he gets really solemn and deliberate and tells me he's not going to tell his wife. That it would destroy her and destroy his family and destroy the community. And he needs time to process and figure out what to do next because he's having all these revelations and everything is changing for him. Like he immediately starts acting as if we're in love. And if I could just remember all the things I said and did that night, I would know exactly what he means, that we gave ourselves to each other that night and all this revolting, sappy stuff. And from that moment on, my life becomes this sort of zombie nightmare where I'm technically alive, like walking around going through the motions, but everything inside is just hollowed out and numb. 

And of course now it's five years later and Mark has pled guilty to raping me and he's in prison. And it's easy to see in retrospect that his story made no sense. I asked my brother years later how I was acting when he left the party that night and the word he used to describe me was incoherent. And Mark himself described me as too drunk to walk myself home, yet he also told me, not only did I consent to sex, but I initiated it and enthusiastically participated for three hours. And I remember none of this and he seems to remember it all in explicit detail. 

So it's a textbook rape case, like a Bill Cosby or Brock Turner-style rape case. But in that moment in my apartment that morning, I have two theoretical options. Either I believe this disgusting, incomprehensible story he's telling me, or I realize that my neighbor who's been in this community for more than 20 years and is a married church leader with four kids is also actually a rapist and a cold-blooded liar. And I just can't make that mental leap from inside my traumatized brain. Like it did not even occur to me that he could be lying. I just believed his story. 

And from there over the next months, it's this endless bombardment of emotional manipulation and just relentless sexual energy being thrust in my direction every time we're alone together. And we're already working on garden projects as neighbors. Specifically, we're renovating this old greenhouse in his yard so we can start seeds indoor for spring planting. So he has this setup where he can keep getting me alone and feeding me these ideas and working on keeping me quiet. And then on top of that, he's trying to convince me that we should have an affair because we're so supposedly perfect for each other. And since I keep refusing to have anything to do with him sexually, he settles for processing with me as friends, which means him setting up a secret email address and pouring out his heart to me, supposedly, about all his past trauma and his difficult marriage and all his supposed shame and confusion and generally making himself out to be a victim and telling me he's going through a crisis of faith and where is God in all of this and on and on and on. 

It's worth pausing here to offer some details about the flurry of emails Mark began sending Joanna to accompany their real life interactions. On some levels, they could be read as him bearing his soul to Joanna, confiding in her about struggles in his faith and personal life. But nearly every one of these emails mentions something sexual, often referring to their quote, life-changing night together and his subsequent claim of having some kind of deep soul connection with her. But he also describes his general desire to have sex with other women, especially women in their community or repeated attempts to have sex with Joanna using his invented memory of their night of passion, that is her rape or using what might be called half-pathetically apologetic, half-passive-aggressive flirtations as a means of stirring up Joanna's pity or affection. Here are two brief examples of his correspondence with her. 

Joanna, I am thoroughly amazed at the beauty of your thoughts and language. I wish I could give you a synopsis of my life's journey and the variables that brought me to the love I have for you. Unfortunately, I am not as articulate, intelligent, or as a competent writer or communicator as you are. It is clear to me that we are not on the same track as far as the potential of our sexual relationship is concerned, but I am happy to love you in whatever capacity you are able to receive from me. As for me and my process, all I can say is what I suggested earlier in a talk, that I was trapped in a cage and got out, but now am on the wing with nowhere to land. That is nobody's fault but my own, I guess. It is not your problem. I wish I could say more, but it is midnight and I am totally out of words, except for these. If I could change anything about our moment together, that one thing would be that you would remember it. 

In a later email he says, 

I want to be a good husband, but I know that if I could have a night like ours again, I would love you again without hesitation, except if you were blacked out. Doesn't that by definition make me an adulterer and bad husband? What good is keeping a broken vow anyway? It breaks my heart to portray her trust, but I would do it again and again. 

So pretty soon after the first rape, as I'm trying to figure out what to do, I beg him to talk to anyone besides me about it. So he comes back and he tells me he's talked to his friend Chris, who helped walk me home that night. And Chris is a fellow church leader and kind of a solid pillar of the community type guy. So I feel really relieved for a minute. And I asked Mark if Chris thinks we should tell Mark's wife. And he again looks me dead in the eye and says, Chris would never tell me I had to do that. So at this point, I'm basically destroyed. I'm terrified of myself that I could have done this horrible thing. I'm disgusted, I'm ashamed. I feel like I don't know myself at all. And at the same time, I feel this deep resentment because I know I didn't choose this. Like I want nothing to do sexually with my married neighbor, but this completely contradicts his story of what I did. So I feel like I must be lying to myself and I really did want it. And I also know if I tell anyone this story, my time in the community is over.

I'll be thought of as a home wrecker because I'm already the only non-Christian. And now I'm essentially Potiphar's wife and Mark is the Joseph who didn't quite get away. At this point, my job and my housing are dependent on my community connections. I've known some of these people since childhood and I already feel totally isolated and trapped. And now the one person who knows Chris is apparently saying it's fine to keep all this a secret. I won't find out until more than three years later that Chris himself is a sexual predator. As I knew him then, he was just a nerdy, bookish, soft-spoken Wheaton College professor, a church leader, a family man, someone people respected and went to for advice. I also feel like I'm not allowed to talk to Chris about any of it, that he's Mark's friend, not mine. So now it's like the three of us share this incredibly dark secret, but Chris never indicates that he knows anything. He acts totally normal around me as if nothing had ever happened, which just further confirms this feeling of being trapped and that I'm overreacting to the idea of hiding this thing. At the same time, Mark drops one or two very vague illusions to Chris having secrets of his own, but with no details. And in a way where it's clear I'm not supposed to ask for details. 

So in a certain part of my mind, I start down all these dark paths, wondering what I don't know. Maybe Chris has had an affair. Maybe this is totally common in these circles and I'm just naive. Maybe most of the men I know have cheated on their wives or are leading double lives of some kind. Maybe most marriages are a mess and I'm just this idealistic single person who's overly fixated on facing things honestly, while realistically speaking, deception at various levels is just how the world works. And most people just don't wanna know the truth. I tell myself this is crazy, but I also start imagining that every married man I know is one bad decision away from what Mark has done or maybe already several bad decisions in. If Mark can hide this so easily, what is everyone else hiding? At this point, I already know some of dark community secrets. I know there are ugly things lurking below the surface that people don't talk about openly, things Mark has told me and things other people have told me. So it's not hard to imagine there's much more. I've always been that person. People tell things to the person who knows more than I maybe should know. And in a way this situation was no different other than that I had been involved in the thing that was being kept secret. So in a way it starts to feel like just one dark secret in a social circle full of dark secrets. And the thing is that it actually was. I wasn't wrong about this. And I would find out even more of those secrets much later when I finally told mine. 

In any case, Mark doesn't have to lie to me too much during this time to manipulate me. All he has to do is play up all the actual dysfunction around us to make me feel more disconnected from everyone else and more suspicious of them and more convinced that he's the only person I can be honest with and vice versa. It would take hours to describe everything Mark did to trap me and manipulate me over the few months following the first rape. And I don't think I've gotten to the bottom of it myself but it included things like him telling me he was having suicidal ideations and was so depressed the other day that he stuck the barrel of a gun in his mouth to see what it would be like to be about to die. And then decided at the last minute that he wanted to live, stuff like that. He constantly centers himself as a person needing support to get through this and drags me along on this rollercoaster of all his little dramas, which he frames as him being in an acute existential crisis not knowing how he's going to survive from hour to hour and day to day. Meanwhile, I feel like he's the only person I can talk to to try to process all this for myself. And everything I tell him in this vulnerable space is one more thing he can use against me to isolate me, to feed me little drops of poison, to build this idea that our unlikely friendship is the only anchor he has in this vast sea of depression that the community around us can't possibly understand him or me. He's really careful to talk about how much he loves all of them and what well-meaning people they are while also painting himself as a victim, as this guy who's been striving and striving for the last two decades to be a good dad and be a good husband and be a good Christian who's poured everything he has into his family and his church, but who at the end of the day is starved for affection and not able to be himself or ask for what he needs, which are all things I can relate to in my own way. 

So it's very effective, even though our personal situations are so different. He's also relentlessly sappy throughout all of this, which isn't how he is in the rest of his life. So it reinforces this idea that he's only being his true self with me. He writes me these emails with all this metaphorical and poetic imagery, super dramatic and over the top, but I'm taking them at face value and cringing at how bad they are while also chastising myself for that reaction because I believe he's being vulnerable and who am I to judge his form of expression? I feel embarrassed for him. And on top of that, it's triggering for me because it's not the first time a male friend has poured out confessions of love to me that I don't wanna hear. And then of course, I've been infatuated with people myself. So I tell myself I have to have compassion for him while he works his way through this. So I'm suppressing all my annoyance and overwhelm and just forever landing in this state of conflicted pity for him. And within this, there is just no room for my own emotions about the situation. They're completely sidelined. And I'm swept into his narrative that whatever I'm going through, it's 10 times worse for him. 

To illustrate how messed up I was at this point, pretty soon after the rape, I start seriously worrying I might be pregnant, but I'm so out of it. And I feel so powerless that I remember feeling like, well, if I'm pregnant, then at least everyone will know what happened for better or worse. It'll have to come out. And at least I won't be keeping this secret for Mark anymore. So I'm potentially facing being 40 years old and giving birth to my first child whose father would be my married neighbor. And that's what comes to mind, that at least if I'm pregnant, everything will be out in the open. But it turns out I'm not pregnant. So for the next couple of years, I'm living in this alternate reality where on the surface, Mark and I are just friends and neighbors, but every time he gets me alone, he's grooming me and maneuvering me to feel sorry for him and stay quiet. And within the first couple of months, he just wears me down. And I use all the energy I have left to ward off his sexual advances and try to support him through this supposed midlife crisis he's having. 

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, he's molesting a nine-year-old child and grooming another victim. And about a year after the rape, he tells me he's in a new romantic relationship because, and this is an important detail, Mark always framed all of this as being about love and connection, not about sex. And by now I've washed my hands of his double life. He knows how I feel about it. I've tried to get him to go to counseling and address his issues. And he just spins everything to make me feel like I'm the only person he can talk to, the only person he can really trust, that the community doesn't understand me or him. And all we have is each other, et cetera, et cetera. My job is just to be as confidant and his emotional support and not judge him. All these textbook abuser moves, but I had no idea that's what was happening at the time. So he tells me he's having an affair and now I have this new information I don't wanna have. And he makes sure I know it's my obligation to keep it secret because the same reasons as last time, it will destroy his wife and family. And now also for the sake of this new woman, so I don't destroy her reputation.

And this woman is also very young. So he immediately paints this picture of her being extramature and on his level, while at the same time leveraging her social vulnerability to convince me to stay quiet. At this point, he's also already bullied his way into getting access to my apartment whenever he wants it while I'm away at work or wherever. So at one point in the conversation, he maneuvers me into saying he can hang out with this young woman at my apartment, which I almost immediately realizes him turning me into a direct accomplice to his affair, which of course, in retrospect, isn't an affair at all. It's predatory sexual abuse. And I feel even more completely trapped. Like I can't take back what I said. So I eventually just tell him to do whatever he wants. I just really don't wanna know about it. 

A few months after he tells me about his “affair,” the first child victim accuses him of sexually abusing her. And these other stories surface from minor victims. And all this time I tend strongly towards believing these accusations, but I'm also failing to draw the connection between these stories and what's happening to me and the young woman, because Mark has framed my rape and her abuse as consensual acts between adults. So they seem entirely different to me than the children accusing him of abuse. 

Meanwhile, word in the community is that we need to treat Mark just as we always did because if the accusations against him are false, he's facing total ruin and he needs our support. So I stay friendly and normal with him, even as I'm wondering if he's maybe the sickest and most perverted person I've ever known. Then a couple of weeks later, he's arrested and goes to jail. And that is the very short version of how I became a rape victim and an enabler of my own rapist.

So one of my biggest questions for myself when I was first coming forward in 2020 was, what on earth possessed me that night to tell Mark he could hang out with his abuse victim in my apartment? Of all the things in my story, this is by far the most harmful thing I did to someone else. And far more than anything else makes me wonder, what kind of person even am I? Why would I do this? I couldn't really understand it even in 2020 when I was ready to expose Mark. So I just came forward and did my best to apologize to everyone involved about something I knew I did but couldn't exactly understand why I did. And I just want to say before I talk about this in more detail that I'm going to explain how it happened because I think it's important for people to know how this kind of thing goes down. But what I'm going to say is not an excuse for what I did. It's an explanation, but it's not a defense because there is no defense for enabling abuse. There are only reasons. Most people who enable abusers don't do it maliciously. They do it out of a combination of ignorance and brainwashing and fear. And this was true of me, but that doesn't absolve me of responsibility for what I did. I caused immense harm to a vulnerable person and I can't change that or fix that. All I can do is tell people how it happened so other people can learn and hopefully do better than I did. So this part of my story is the biggest source of shame and confusion for me still. And I didn't put more of the pieces together until quite a bit after I came forward when I looked back through the emails between Mark and me again and analyzed the progression over time. Basically, there are dozens of emails between him and me in the first four months or so following the rape in February of 2018. At the end of this several months, he sends me this really gross email, again, suggesting that we should have a sexual relationship. And I kind of snap on him and write him back saying that is not on the table and he knows it and I need him to stop asking. It's just not gonna happen. And he sort of half apologizes while also making me feel bad about snapping. So I apologize back, of course. And that marks this turning point where he stops emailing me. 

I start dating someone around that time too which I think also helps him realize I'm actually off limits. So we still see each other as neighbors and fellow gardeners, but we're no longer in constant communication which is really relieving for me and I'm just compartmentalizing what happened in February and trying to go on with my life. I have this ongoing sense that my relationship with the community is fundamentally broken that I need to start looking at moving on because I can never live honestly in this space, keeping this secret. But I'm also compartmentalizing it and sort of just going on living with this irreconcilable split inside myself. Fast forward a month and a half and I've asked Mark as my neighbor to check in on my cat at some point when I'm not home. And then a bit later I get this email from him and the subject line is “Home Invasion.” And the gist of the email is, I hope this doesn't seem creepy, but ever since I checked on your cat, I've been going over to your apartment sometimes just to be alone and think because it's so peaceful there. And he says something about how my cat is a good listener and she was also the only one who was there that night in February, so she gets it. It's the sort of joking way of saying, yeah, I've been doing something really creepy while also appealing to how great my cat is, which he knows will soften me. My cat is about 20 years old at this point and she's dying of kidney failure. So these are my last months with her and I love her to death and I'm already in mourning, but she's a very one person cat. She's super attached to me, but doesn't really warm up to other people. So most of them just ignore her. So anytime someone takes an interest in her and seems to have a rapport with her, of course I feel gratified by that. So Mark knows all that and he's capitalizing on it.

For more context, this is a tiny rural town where people don't lock their doors, including me, and where people drop by unannounced at each other's houses, which Mark had already done with me for months whenever he wanted to talk. And it wouldn't be weird in this context if someone went to someone's house when they weren't home to borrow something or other. So it's not quite as out of the blue as it may seem, but Mark's now taken it to this new level of hanging out at my house when I'm not there. And now he's confessing that while also making it into kind of a joke. Like, look at me, I know I'm pathetic, but this is such a safe space for me when I need to get away and just think about life. And I'm still in this mindset where I feel kind of guilty that I wasn't able to help him more with his apparent midlife crisis. So I told myself, well, I'd let any of my friends use my house like this. And yeah, any other friend would ask first, not just do it, but that's just Mark. What am I gonna do? So I write him back and say, sure, that's fine. And I forget about it because I take the whole thing at face value and have no idea it's this incremental boundary violation. So there's that one odd email exchange in August, then no emails for months. We see each other here and there and hang out occasionally. 

Then one evening in late winter of 2019, he suddenly wants to hang out and reconnect and talk about life. And he comes over to my house with some kind of alcohol. At this point, he's promised me that he'll never do anything sexual with me again when I'm under the influence. So I'm not worried about that. I feel like we've long since established that we're just friends. So we have a couple of glasses and are talking and he suddenly tells me about this so-called affair, which instantly throws me off because I assumed after his infatuation with me that he just gave up. And I hoped he was maybe even dealing with his issues and working on his marriage. So he drops this awful news in this really excited way. And he's going on and on about this as I'm trying to absorb this new reality. And I'm a little bit tipsy by this point. My brain is slow, which I think was also part of his plan to soften me up with alcohol. So I would be off kilter and more receptive to his narrative. And the thing is he knows how I feel about him cheating on his wife. He knows that I agreed to keep what happened in February secret because he leveraged Chris and all these pity plays to make me feel like that was the only real choice I had. But during those first few months of him grooming me, I played this dual role of refusing to have an affair with him while also continuing to sympathize with him as a friend about the state of his marriage and backing down from judging him because he seemed so desperate and torn and all around pathetic. He made it very clear that my moral values were mine and his were his and they didn't match up, but that was just how life goes. And I of course thought since he was a Christian and new adultery was wrong that he'd eventually come to his senses. 

So now I'm learning all in a moment that he's pursuing another relationship and I'm doing this thing like, well, “I'm happy you're happy” because I've been trained that there's no point in pushing back on him. And there are two different things going on. One is that he's cheating on his wife. The other is that it's weird that this person is so young. And of course he knows that's a red flag. So he addresses it proactively like, yeah, isn't it so weird that there's this age gap but somehow it still makes sense? Which is the point where anyone with a firm grasp of power dynamics is just like, no Mark, it's not weird. It's categorically abusive and you're a sexual predator. And I have that notion somewhere in my brain that age is a power dynamic that can be exploited. But my sense of this also has a ton of caveats that immediately flood in because anytime you're trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense, your brain grasps at all these things to cobble together an excuse that preserves the abuser's narrative. 

On one hand, there are all the creepy old men who have hit on me over the years when I worked in the service industry. And there's the concept of rich older men with trophy wives which is obviously repulsive. But there's also my married neighbors who have a 20 year age gap and got together when they were maybe 25 and 45. They didn't know each other when she was still a kid and that's okay, right? They're doing fine. And there's another person peripheral to the community who apparently married her high school teacher and that seemed to end up fine and everyone approved. And then there's my own formative childhood experience where I had a crush on a 21 year old man at church when I was 14. And at this point, as I'm talking to Mark, I still have no idea that that man groomed me. My narrative for the past 25 years is just that I was a really mature 14 year old and that's why we connected and the cuddles and hugs and long emotional conversations weren't bad. And maybe if things had gone differently, we would have ended up married. And while I'm glad that didn't happen, I've never realized how totally inappropriate it would have been. Overall, I also have this idea from childhood that girls mature faster than boys and that age is just a number. I dated a 41 year old when I was 31 and we met because he was my college professor and he hid the relationship from the school because it would have been frowned on or maybe even be grounds for discipline. And that relationship ended badly, but I never thought about the age or the authority gap being a problem. My own parents are eight years apart and they met when my mom was, I think, 21. 

So there are all these examples and more where age seemed immaterial. And I don't think I thought about them all consciously in that moment, but they are the backdrop for how I'm going into this situation. Meanwhile, Mark is super immature in a lot of ways and always seems to connect with younger people, which again is an actual red flag. But at the time, it just seemed like confirmation that this wasn't that strange. Plus at this point, I think that his only extramarital dalliance ever has been with me and we're close in age and he's confessed his attraction to other adult women to me. So my overall image is that he's generally attracted to people in his age range. And this is just a very unusual connection, which I just want to say that this is why it's so important that we understand what grooming is and how some relationships are just categorically abusive because of the power dynamics involved. If we don't have these lines really clear in our heads and we aren't ready to stick to them, no matter what someone tells us, we are susceptible to an abuser manipulating us into thinking they're just one of those exceptions to the rule, it's a special case, they would never abuse anyone. 

If I'd had those lines crystal clear in my head, I would have identified three huge things that make this relationship abusive. First, the age gap. Second, that mark is a church leader who always plays kind of a mentor role with teenagers and young adults. That's his thing to be this informal youth pastor figure. So inevitably he's been taking on that kind of role with this person. And third, it's all a secret, which means he's isolated her and she isn't going to tell anyone about it. But this last thing is also something he's done to me and I failed to identify that as a problem because again, I don't know the first thing about grooming and how isolating the victim in a secret relationship is central to practically every grooming situation. So I'm not making any of these connections. I'm just sort of nodding along as Mark feeds me all this nonsense about how he's so surprised this ever happened, that he had no idea she liked him, all the same things he told me about what supposedly happened with him and me a year before this. So I'm seeing this echo of the first scenario and the narrative Mark created back then about himself is that he falls in love hard and fast, that he's a hopeless romantic. And I chalk this up to immaturity, that he can't separate love from infatuation, but I've already given him this speech a year ago and he's rejected it. So again, it feels pointless to remind him that he's acting like a teenager instead of an adult who can recognize that feelings are just feelings and don't mean a connection between two people is written in the stars, which is always how he portrays it. I don't remember play by play how this conversation goes down, but at some point he segues into how it's just sad that spending time with her is the only real bright spot in his dreary life, but it's hard for them to find places where they can truly be alone and connect. Because again, it's all about connection and romance, not sex, which he says hasn't happened at this point anyway. 

And out of nowhere, I hear myself saying, well, you already hang out in my apartment whenever, you could just hang out here. And of course he pounces on that. “You would do that for me? Really? Oh my God, you're the best friend ever. I can't believe you would be that kind.” Looking back on this, I realized that he normalized territorial rights over my apartment in those emails months before, then came over to my house with alcohol and a sob story and walked me up to this place where the next logical step in being a good friend seemed to be to offer to expand his privileges to include bringing someone else to my apartment. The next day he sends me an email, the first email since the home invasion email exchange, where he's like, “so you made an offer last night that I'm not sure you remember,” which is a direct jab at me blacking out a year ago and him reinforcing the idea that he can't tell when I'm blackout drunk. So maybe I was last night too. And I read this email and I do remember, and I start to feel this alarm inside like, oh no, what did I get myself into? Why would I ever say he could include my apartment in his extramarital relationship? This is a whole new level of complicity in him cheating on his wife. But I'm also defensive because he sort of poked at me as someone with an alcohol problem. 

So I reply all cheerily like, “of course I remember.” But as it sinks in, I feel this sort of mounting terror. Keep in mind that at this point, I have no sense that this relationship is abusive, just that Mark is having an affair and now I'm directly aiding and abetting that. But I've already offered and I've already confirmed that offer. And I feel this deep pervasive sense that I can't back out now. And part of my brain does this guilty drug dealers defense where I'm like, well, he's going to do this regardless. If it's not me, he'll get his drugs somewhere else. So what does it even matter? But it does matter. Now I'm complicit in an ongoing affair. And if I ever expose him or he gets caught, I've actively condoned this affair. And maybe the community could forgive me for the one night in February, but no one's ever going to forgive this. This is way over the line. 

Immediately this immense feeling of futility sets in. I'm already compromised. I'm already full of shame. I'm already a traitor to the community, even though Mark and Chris may say otherwise. And much worse than that, I'm a traitor to my own values. I've already grudgingly accepted this sort of Bridges of Madison County defense, where it's not me, it's better not to tell the spouse who's been cheated on. But also, Meryl Streep presumably never sees Clint Eastwood again after the movie ends. So at least the affair is compartmentalized in time, but Mark's cheating is ongoing. And all this time I assumed it was a midlife crisis moment, but now all of a sudden with no warning, I find out it's actually escalating. I think it's really interesting that in absolutely every way, the most self-protective thing I could have done at this point, the thing in my obvious best interest would have been just to say, “actually Mark, I was drunk when I said that. And now that I'm thinking about it more clearly, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't wanna be an accomplice to your affair.” 

Like in the most bare bones, selfish way, all morals aside, I gained nothing from this. And I have everything to lose at whatever point Mark gets caught. But I fundamentally feel like it's impossible to stand up to him and walk back my offer. I don't know how to explain this part of it, other than just say that somewhere deep down in my subconscious, somewhere I couldn't access at the time, I was afraid of Mark. Not just that he could throw both of us under the bus at any moment, but a deeper fear that I couldn't name or even identify as me being afraid of him. And I think this gets to the heart of emotional, like intimate manipulative emotional abuse. When someone like Mark Rivera targets you and grooms you and abuses you, you end up with two levels of knowing reality. Consciously you believe you are not being abused because that's the lie the abuser has told you. But deeper down in your core being, in your cells, in your nervous system, you know something is terribly wrong and you just can't put your finger on it because the abuser has made you feel like you are complicit in an equal partner in the relationship. So the idea of abuse is just not on the table. You can't explain the terror you feel. So you turn it back on yourself. I was terrified of myself and ashamed that I was apparently this person I had never known myself to be. But I was also defensive and this is key because deeper down I knew what happened the night of February 16th was not my fault that I did not consent to have sex with Mark. Consciously I had to believe I was complicit because Mark described me as the initiator. But I also knew somewhere deeper, somewhere I couldn't access with words but could only feel that I did not choose this. That I hated it. That there was nothing in all my life I wished more. I could rewind and take back. And I could never resolve this cognitive dissonance because I had no framework for abuse and because Mark was such an effective liar. So I learned to live with it. But whenever I'd think about trying to tell one of the women in the community what had happened that night in February to come clean, I would immediately feel this deep sense of injustice and defensiveness because I knew I would be branded. I knew they'd forgive me but that I'd have a big scarlet letter on me going forward. And this upset me because it was so unfair. So I preemptively resented it which fed this guilt resentment cycle in my mind. I should come clean. I did a terrible thing. But also I didn't do it. But also I did it. But also it's not my fault. But it must be my fault because some perverse part of me must have wanted it and acted out while I was blackout drunk. So at least it's my fault that I never fixed whatever sexual brokenness led me to do this awful thing. But also if I'd known I needed to fix whatever it is or else it would lead to this, of course I would have fixed it. So is it actually my fault? And on and on and on. So everything was at odds. I was both broken and not broken at fault and not at fault. And it took almost three years for me to find the answer which was that I was not at fault because what Mark did to me was rape. 

And in the meantime, new guilt developed because even though I could mostly say to myself that night was not my fault, it clearly was my fault that I had decided not to tell anyone. And yet I felt fundamentally powerless to tell. So that's my reality while Mark is telling me about his so-called affair. And now all of a sudden I have this heaping new pile of guilt and I'm more trapped than I've ever been. I can't find it in me to make the one choice that is so obvious, which is just to tell Mark, “I take back the apartment offer, keep your affair to yourself. I want no part of it.” So instead after a few days, I send him another email and then a followup email, which are cringe inducing to reread where I'm like, hey, look, I'm not judging you for your choices and I'm glad you're happy, but this whole thing puts me in a really precarious position and you seem like you're being kind of reckless. And you do realize if you get caught, I'm going to lose everything because maybe they'll forgive me for the first thing, but this is just so far over the line. I'll lose my job and my apartment and all my relationships here. So do what you want. I already told you you could use my apartment for whatever, but I'd rather you just not tell me about it. I don't want to know. So I have at least some level of plausible deniability when you get caught. 

And the first time I reread this email in late 2020, I was absolutely horrified how self-protective I sounded in it. And finally, quite a while after I had come forward and even gone public about Mark, I forwarded the emails to a couple of close friends who knew the story already. And I was still drowning in shame and cringing, waiting for their response. And their analysis was it's so clear how scared you were. And you told him you were risking everything to go along with what he wanted. And he just ignored all that. It's so clear he didn't care about your feelings at all. And I realized they were right. I was terrified and I felt completely trapped. And I made it clear how high the stakes were for me. And Mark just sent me back this email that was like, “Okay, you got it. We'll do it your way. And don't worry, I'll be careful.” And I feel absolutely sick. Like mostly the past year I've been dissociative, only sporadically able to feel any emotions with relation to Mark. But this situation finally makes me feel something, some combination of nausea and deep seated terror. I know he brought his victim to my apartment at least once after the initial conversation. But after that, he didn't talk to me about using my apartment more, I guess because I told him I wanted distance from it. So again, I learned to compartmentalize it all and accept a new normal. At some point early on, he casually mentioned telling my brother about all of it. Since my brother also popped into my apartment randomly during the day because he was working nearby. And what if they ran into each other there? And my reaction was, “Don't you dare bring my brother into this. That's not fair to him. He didn't ask to be partied of the situation.” I don't think Mark was actually planning to tell my brother. I think he just said this to scare me and also to make it all seem more normal. Like, oh, your brother would get that it's not a big deal. I just took it as him being reckless. And it's interesting that I was deeply defensive of my brother who didn't know anything at all at this point about anything. And I felt like I was protecting him from being in the compromised position I was in. But I had no concept of protecting myself, let alone protecting Mark's other victim. I just hope Mark would realize the apartment thing was too risky since my brother did stop by randomly when I wasn't there and would forget about it all. But I didn't know for sure. And I didn't wanna know. Meanwhile, in that same conversation that night at my apartment, Mark had made another play to get me deeper in, which was that he told me I should hang out with this younger woman he was having a so-called affair with because I was the only one who knew and women always need someone to talk to about their relationships. So I was the obvious choice, plus we'd get along, et cetera, et cetera. So of course I felt obligated to do that as well. And she and I got together on a few occasions over the course of the next year and texted each other at various points. 

So not only did I greenlight my apartment, I became the default confidant of Mark's abuse victim. He'd already convinced me that I was sworn to secrecy, which wasn't hard to do because in this case, her reputation was on the line and it was easy to persuade me I had no right to out her to the community. So instead I hung out with her and tried to withhold my overall judgment of the situation. And to my absolute disgrace, I treated her like a peer to women chatting about life stuff, including her relationship with Mark. So in my mind, I was being neutral and acting as an outlet for her to process. But because I was living inside a lie and she was actually a victim, I effectively helped Mark groom her further. And the same way Mark used Chris to help keep me silent and normalize my abuse, he used me to help keep this victim silenced and normalize her abuse. 

When you're being manipulated by someone like Mark, what you need more than anything else is someone to talk to who can tell you, actually, this is abuse, you need to get the hell out of there. So when the only other person who knows about the relationship seems to condone it or even just doesn't tell you categorically that you're being abused, this is a massive betrayal that normalizes the abuse to you as the victim. And that's what I did. I became Mark's most direct enabler in the case of this victim. 

Another interesting thing is that in my email to Mark, where I tell him that I'm really worried about this arrangement and don't want to know what he's doing at my apartment, I'm trying to tell him what I think he doesn't know, which is what a big deal all this will be if he ever gets caught. And in the course of that, I point out to him that if people ever find out about this because she's so young, the community might even see her as some kind of victim in this situation and maybe see him as a predator. So it's there in writing this way in which I can see how other people might identify her as not having the same agency he has, then I'm reassuring him that I understand that's not what's going on, because of course he's told me it's not, and I believe him, which again, all comes out of this place where I'm suspicious of age gaps and romantic relationships, and I take note of them, but I'm open to exceptions. And Mark has successfully painted this relationship not just as an equitable one, but one where she holds the power over him. And that was his narrative about me too, and he just continued that narrative with her. 

According to Mark, we were the ones who had both the power to break his heart by rejecting him at any point and the power to destroy his life if we ever told anyone. I can't emphasize enough how often abusers do this. They convince their victims that they are complicit, and then they go further and flip the actual power dynamics on their head by saying it's the victim who holds the real power. And this absolutely works. You feel powerless, but you are constantly being fed this lie that you hold all the power. So what you feel and know deep down, and what you believe in your day-to-day life don't line up. So the dissonance just continues indefinitely. And the shame and guilt, because if you have all the power, why aren't you choosing differently? Why aren't you ending the relationship? Why aren't you exposing this person who's cheating on their spouse? And as long as the abuser can keep you stuck in that lie, they can control you, especially if you have the correct intuition, as a lot of victims do, that if you do come forward, you will somehow be in more trouble than your abuser. 

This is why in so many cases when the abuser is done with the victim, the victim will just quietly disappear and not speak up for years or ever, because there's no point in telling anyone because you're still buried in shame and confusion, plus it's going to burn so many bridges you can't afford to burn, because somehow you know that you will either be disbelieved or you'll be blamed for the abuse. So all of this happens, and I have this renewed sense that I just have to move out of Big Rock and get away somewhere where I can clear my head and no longer be living next door to Mark. 

And then a couple of months later, Cherin's nine-year-old daughter comes forward to say Mark has been abusing her. And a couple of weeks after that, Mark goes to jail. And I'm so relieved because this does a few things. It stops his so-called affair. It gets him off the property, so I don't have to see him on a regular basis. And it feels like it might just take care of everything. If he's found guilty, he might go away for a good long time. But in the meantime, there's a pause button on the lingering question of exposing him. 

It wouldn't be fair to do that while he was in jail. I figure because how is his wife supposed to talk to him about it only on expensive phone calls to the jail? It's not like they can go to marriage counseling while he's locked up. So for six months, I have this respite where Mark can't actively cheat on his wife. So I'm not an accomplice. And I also feel more justified in not telling anyone what had happened to me. And even though I don't realize his affair with the young woman is really abuse, I do think it's a total dead end for her. And that if she can get some distance, she might lose interest in him and go a different direction, which would have to be better for her because I still believe in my own set of values that Mark has long since steamrolled, that whatever Mark says, this relationship has to be a net negative for them both because cheating is just never good for a person's soul. All of this is of course me thinking she's actually acting with agency as a willing partner and kind of just being continuously confused how both of them could be Christians and yet keep doing what they were doing. All of my questions about why she was making the choices she seemed to be making would have been answered in one minute if I had been able to apply a framework of coercive control to the situation, but I just didn't have that framework. 

So one final thing about the situation. I distinctly remember the moment when the first little light flickered on and something tried more actively to tell me that what Mark had done to this young woman was abusive. It was summer of 2020, a few months before I would end up coming forward. And I was finally actively plotting my escape from Big Rock and there was this little trail of breadcrumbs I was following unconsciously, things that helped give context to what was happening and eventually planted enough seeds in my brain to lead me to the next big steps that then led me to coming forward. At this point, I have no idea if Mark has resumed his so-called affair with this young woman or if it's long since over. We haven't talked about it in months. And at that point, it seems to be over. She and I still text sometimes, but we don't discuss Mark by text, just everyday life things. So it feels very distant. I vaguely hope it's all over. And of course, I try not to think about it anyway because I've never really recovered from that feeling of terror and being trapped. And at this point, Mark has raped me a second time and I'm more and more disgusted with him and want as little to do with him as possible. 

So one day I'm scrolling Facebook and I see this really nauseating post someone's shared about Steven Spielberg. It's screenshots of a transcription of a conversation. Someone on Twitter had dug deep into these recorded conversations between Spielberg and producers or show creators or whoever, where they're plotting out, I think it's the first Indiana Jones movie. And they're debating how young they can make Indiana's love interest when he would have first met her and had some sort of romantic or sexual encounter with her in the movie backstory. And they're throwing ideas back and forth and going down to as low as I think age 13, discussing whether the audience will object if they do the math and realize she was that young with Indiana obviously being an adult man. It's just a thoroughly gross conversation in every way among several adult men about how they can get away with making Indiana Jones a child molester while still keeping him as a hero. 

And of course, ironically, I've been all #metoo on Facebook since me too began right before Mark first raped me. But meanwhile, I'm unable to see all the me too happening to me and all around me. So I go to share this post and then something in me pauses. Like of course 13 is too young, 14 is too young. 15 is too young. And I count all the way up to the age of Mark's victim. And I finally have this thought like, well, what isn't too young, categorically speaking? And this is the thing about denial and brainwashing because the light bulb didn't go fully on in that moment. Something deep down inside me, this almost physical sensation said, there's something here, something's off. This is too close to home. But then Mark's lies came rushing back in. Well, Mark isn't some dirty old rich man, some powerful Hollywood guy, casually discussing child molestation with his dirty old man friends. There's a reason 18 is the age of consent, right? It's to be on the safe side, right? Because we have to draw the line somewhere. Mark's situation is totally different. I know he's not predatory, he's just kind of immature. And I think I went ahead and shared the Facebook post. 

But there was that twinge, there was a moment. And that's what people don't realize about escaping abuse. There are all these little moments where that wise little voice inside you, intuition or instinct or better judgment or whatever you wanna call it, that thing whispers to you ever so faintly trying to be heard. And the first few times, the first few dozen times, you can't fully hear it. It isn't loud enough to cut through the abuser's narrative. And then usually there's a moment where you can finally name it. And often that isn't until you talk to someone else and they name it for you, which is eventually what happened to me. And then you look back and you see all the tiny moments that led up to it, all the ways you were fighting the abuse deep inside you somewhere, looking for an escape, looking for a way to explain what was happening, looking for a way to give it some shape and some definition outside of the abuser's narrative. I was always terrified of what would happen when the community found out about what I had done for obvious reasons. And I always figured there would come a day. Mark would trip up and expose himself or something. I think maybe I even knew deep down that eventually I would expose him once I could get away to a safe place. In retrospect, I think it was inevitable because I hated the secret so much and I couldn't ultimately live with the guilt. I just didn't have the psychological distance or support to come forward before I did. 

And when I finally followed the trail of breadcrumbs to the point where I told the whole story to someone who could name things for me, I realized very quickly that I had been raped and psychologically abused. And as that sank in, I pretty quickly realized that I was also an abuse enabler. And the reason I'm telling people about this part of my story is because that's the very worst part of it. It's one thing to be an adult victim and to be a victim of a sexual predator and to finally realize that's what he is. And it's another thing entirely to realize you directly helped him abuse a much more vulnerable victim. Not only will I never fully get over that, but how much worse is it for that victim? 

And I can drown in that shame all day long, and I have, but the only constructive thing I can do with it is tell other people how these things happen so they can avoid being either a victim or an enabler of someone like Mark. You can say hashtag me too or hashtag believe survivors all day long. But if you don't have an ironclad analysis of what abuse is, an abuser can worm his way in and convince you that what he's doing isn't abuse. And I know there are people out there who have never gotten blackout drunk who don't have the specific vulnerabilities I had who may even have a decent analysis of grooming, who think this would never happen to them. And they're right. Exactly what happened to me wouldn't happen to them, but that's the whole point. Abusers are highly adaptable and an abuser that's going to target you will find your vulnerabilities and they'll groom you accordingly. And no defense is perfect, but the more you know, the more stories you hear, the more you put the pieces together and draw hard lines around certain types of behavior, the better of a shot you have at not falling for it when an abuser targets you. 

This has been the first part of Joanna's story. Part Two, when she finally breaks free, continues in the next episode. If you believe in what the Wall of Silence podcast is trying to accomplish, please consider supporting us through our Patreon page at patreon.com/wallofsilencepodcast. Each month, there will be extra interviews and conversations released exclusively for Patreon members. Again, that is patreon.com/wallofsilencepodcast. Relatedly, there is also a subscriber option on Spotify. That’s another way to get the extra episodes if you desire, again, through another monthly fee. I appreciate you helping to make this show a reality has me lift up the voices of church abuse victims. 

The Wall of Silence podcast is produced and edited by me, Chris Marchand. I also do the music and our artwork is by Alice Mitchlick. You can find her other work or commission a piece through her Instagram account, @mouthful.of.stars. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast service you listen on. You can find a link to the transcript of this episode and through related links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening.