Not Alone | EP 7 | Saskia's Story

If Saskia's story sounds familiar to you, it might be because of another case that's been in the news.

The mass rape trial which his Sun France, has ended with fifty one men all being found guilty for what they did to Gizelle Pellico.

Our top story today is the mass rape trial that has horrified France.

Gizelle Pelico's story was shared around the world. See for almost a decade, her husband drugged and raped her and invited dozens of other men to.

Do the same.

In those years, Giselle thought she was seriously ill. She thought she was blacking out because of a possible brain tumor or maybe early onset Alzheimer's. She'd been married to her husband for nearly fifty years. She never suspected he had anything to do with her symptoms. Like Saskia, she only learned the truth when she saw videos of herself being raped.

I chose to have the trial hold in an open court and hopes the public trial will help change society.

When Gazelle's story made headlines in December twenty twenty four, we were a few months into talking to Saskia.

We forwarded her.

An article about the case. It was the first time she'd ever heard a story like her own.

It was empowering. I didn't know that there are other people out there like me.

But Saskia and Giselle aren't a club of two. In the last two years, there have been more and more stories like this of people raping their partners and publishing images and videos of their crimes. For example, German authorities uncovered a group chat on the app Telegram where men were sharing intimate images of their partners. Some were even sharing live videos of sexual assaults. This wasn't a group chat of ten or even one hundred men. There were

When you go home at the end of the day and you crawl into bed with the man that you love, that should be the safest place you'll ever be in the world. I found out that that was the most dangerous place that I had ever been, and that is a real mind fuck.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, Season five, episode seven, not alone. Really quick, before we get into the episode, I have a small favor to ask you. If you're enjoying listening to Betrayal, please take a second to hit the follow button on your podcast app and please rate and review. We read all the comments, and your voices help our show improve and evolve. I really mean it

All right, onto the show.

We're not finished telling Saskia's story, but before we dive deeper into this season, we need to zoom out a bit because what happened to Saskia wasn't a one off. There are people all over the world committing these kinds of crimes, and there are more survivors who are just now climbing out of the dark. In the past few years, we've heard from other people like Saskia. They're women of

Everyone described me as like just a very strong individual. I myself thought, if you're strong, you're not going to fall prey to that kind of thing.

At twenty one, Ember was confident, outspoken. She knew who she was, and her faith was a big part of that. She's Christian, and she drew clear boundaries in accordance with her beliefs.

I really did not want to engage in intercourse until I was married, and I was honest about that with every guy I dated, like, this is what I believe and if you don't like it, there's the door.

With her fiance, she found a guy who understood, a man who'd respect her values. His name was John.

At this point, we had been together for about four years on and off.

During those four years, there'd been ups and downs, periods where John's mental health suffered. But finally Ember saw him becoming the man she always knew he could be. He was stable and thoughtful, and he was getting more involved in the church.

I thought that it was really from a place of him growing and healing and changing.

Everyone around them saw the shift in John. Their friends and family were so excited about the engagement. Even their pastor gave his approval.

It's like all relationships go through really hard times. You guys seem like you're really good together, and I think this would be completely okay, and we're like okay, and I'm sitting there going if there were red flags, this person would point this out, and nobody pulled a red flag out.

Their engagement was the start of a new chapter, a beautiful life together. Then a month into their engagement, Ember got sick. It started one night at John's house. She remembers sitting down to study, but after that.

I don't recall anything happened other than I somehow made it home.

It was like her memory just jumped. One second she was at John's, the next she was home. She explained it away, she must have had a long day dozed off, But nights like this kept happening.

There were so many occasions where I would fall asleep studying and he would wake me up and be like, oh my gosh, you fell asleep again. You need to hurry up and get home, and I would be so out of it. I wouldn't know what was happening, and I just somehow make my way home.

Over time, Ember started experiencing other symptoms like chronic pain without any clear cause.

It was a pain that was indescribable. I couldn't sit, I couldn't stand. I just couldn't find any comfortable position, and I couldn't remember anything that had happened.

And that wasn't all.

I'm breaking out hives all over my body, having migraines I've never had before.

Through it all, John was there for Ember.

I remember him coming over to like comfort me. He just sat with me and like rubbed my back and was like, I'm so sorry you're not feeling well.

He supported her as she searched for a diagnosis and went to doctor after doctor. No one could figure out what was going on.

They were just like, oh, you're probably really stressed out. I was, you know, in the throes of school and working full time. And getting married and all that stuff. I was still able to function, but internally I was falling apart.

Things went on like this for a year, with Ember at a total loss, just like Saskia. She wanted a solution, some answer that would tie all her symptoms together, and then one day an answer began to emerge. During this time, Ember was taking class is to become a massage therapist. On this particular day, her instructor was talking about the so as muscle.

The so as muscle is a highly protective muscle that a lot of people don't even know exists. It attaches on the front of our spine, and if we are in fight or flight, it is engaged instantaneously.

The instructor asked Ember to come up to the front so she could have someone to demonstrate on. This happened all the time in class, and Ember didn't think anything of it.

I'm laying on the massage therapy table, all of the other students are watching, and she goes to address my so as muscle, and I immediately dissociate. I don't remember anything that happened on the table. I don't remember anything that my body did that I said. All I remember is at the end, her saying Okay, that was interesting. I get up from the table and she's like, hey, do you have a minute? Can you come outside? And I said okay, sure. She's like, do you know what

Else, somewhere else. Lying on the massage table, her mind and body split off into separate directions, just like it did on those nights studying with John. Things were happening around her, but she couldn't remember them. Looking back, Ember now has an explanation for what was going on.

I was dissociating for my trauma.

The association occurs when the mind separates from the body as a way of protecting itself from harm. The brain mutes physical sensations, thoughts, and memories, such that many people coming out of dissociative episodes feel like they've just woken up from a dream, but the body stores memories of trauma even if the brain tries to push them out. That day, on the massage table, Ember's body demonstrated that something was wrong.

It was kind of the beginning of my body and brain thing we need to be in this together instead of separating. In fact, it was shortly thereafter that I actually woke up mid attack.

The night started the way so many others had. She was hanging out at John's house when her mind went dark. But on this night, in the midst of her dissociation, she woke up and her brain and body snapped back together. When she came to, there was someone on top of her. Her eyes focused and suddenly she could see it was John.

I freaked out and I was like, what is happening. She's like nothing, nothing, nothing happened, And I'm like, there's evidence that something happened.

His pants were pulled down, so were hers. And remember Ember didn't want to have sex until marriage. Immediately Ember could tell John had taken that choice away from her. In the moment, she was still groggy.

I'm still not fully there, but I'm conscious enough to know something is really really wrong. But I lost it.

In a daze. She threw on her clothes and ran out the door, went home, she called people she could trust, and one of those people notified the church. The next day, a pastor called John and Ember in for a meeting.

And we sit down at the pastor and he's like, what's going on? All I can do is look down at my shoes. All I remember is the floor.

She was quiet, but to her surprise, John spoke up and he told the pastor everything. John came right out and confessed.

He was drugging me and raping me. The pastor goes, how often has this happened? He goes, this has happened probably once a week, almost the whole time we've been engaged. That is now almost an entire year. It was so much worse than anything I had ever imagined. And I'm just completely just numb, just numb.

John and their pastor kept talking, but Ember tuned them out. All of her senses blurred together into one loud hum. Finally, their pastor asked John to leave the room so he could speak to Ember alone.

So he leaves the room and pastor looks at me and he's like, you need to get out of this relationship. This is not safe, this is not good, this is not going to stop.

But as shocked as Ember was, she wasn't ready to hear that yet. After all, she loved John and leaving him would mean calling off their wedding.

Were like three months before our wedding at this point in time, and breaking that off now means I have to tell everyone what has happened. That to me was almost as devastating as realizing what had happened now everybody's gonna know. This intense desire to hide in that amount of pain was just insurmountable.

Ember couldn't allow herself to face the reality of her situation. She was still holding out hope that maybe if John got treatment, it would all be okay. They could forget about this and move ahead with the wedding. So John started going to therapy, and so did she.

I was seeing a therapist that specialized in sexual abuse, and he was seeing a therapist that specialized in sexual addiction.

But therapy gave her different answers and the ones she was seeking. Ember and John's therapists worked at the same location. One day, while waiting for her session, John's therapist came through the waiting room.

He walked past me, and then he stopped and he came back that you could see his wheels turning. He's like, I'm not supposed to say this, but I feel like you need to know. We've run through a series of diagnostic tests on your fiance. He's not a safe person. He's officially diagnosed as a sociopath, and you should get as far away from him as possible.

Ember was waiting for her therapy session when she was approached by John's therapist. He told her that John was a diagnosed sociopath and she needed to protect herself. The therapist had to have felt strongly because he was taking a huge professional risk. Telling Ember threatened his license, he violated client confidentiality.

But it was a godsend because honestly, if I hadn't heard those words, I think I probably would have assumed that everything was going to be okay for a lot longer. I really thought that I was doing the good Christian thing by staying with him, that sacrificing myself so that he could experience love. And that was the point where I was like, I can't marry this man.

We'll hear more from Ember at the end of the episode, but now we want to introduce you to another survivor, Natalie. At twenty three, she started dating a guy we'll call Stephen. When she was with him, I felt like I was a queen.

He would make me feel beautiful and smart, and he would type up these really nice poems or just say how he looks forward to spending time together and getting married and having a family.

Their relationship was a long time coming. He was her best friend's older brother, and in every way their lives just seemed to fit together. They played on the same softball team, they had a lot of the same friend friends, and when they talked, the conversation flowed.

It was very natural and it was just easy. I felt like we had a really strong foundation.

Eventually they got engaged then married, but when Natalie got pregnant, that was when Stephen really became her rock. She was nervous about being a mom. In the months leading up to the birth.

I would rearrange the nursery.

I don't know how many times I rearranged it, and I'd like vacuum it every day.

Stephen grounded and supported her.

We had a lot of.

Late nights setting things up, and I would feel bad because he would have to work in the morning. But he was all about it, all about helping and getting everything ready and being very hands on.

When their son arrived, Stephen really stepped up. He made everything feel manageable.

He would get up with him, he would feed him in the middle of the night, even when he had to work the next morning.

He would be wanting.

To help with my son and changing his diaper or just being with him to give me an hour of time for myself.

Stephen was a dream dad. They were in this together and for a while they lived a great life as a family. Then came one night when their son was five, Natalie was helping him get ready for bed. He had his own tablet where he could play games and watch TV. All the family's devices were linked in a cloud.

And I had his tablet because I was going to put it on the counter to charge it.

She was plugging it in when she saw something on the home screen.

There was like a little window that had a man and you could see a penis on the screen. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like horrified that my son could see that, And I'm like, I hope he didn't click on this, like what I didn't notice that before her.

Husband was at work. Natalie messaged him right away Stephen put her at ease. He thought it must be spam. Once her son went to sleep, Natalie went back to the tablet to reset it to factory settings.

I was looking in the cloud where the photos and images are because I didn't want to delete all of that, and then that's when I saw photos and videos, dozens of these clips and images.

It was all graphic sexual material.

I was like, I got to get this stuff off of here. But then as I'm looking through, I noticed my bedroom.

She froze and she zoomed in on the photo.

You can see his hands, his wedding ring, and then I realized that I am in these images. I'm just like horrified because I'm not awake. Some of them, I'm like barely conscious, and I'm like, how do I not know what's happening to me. There's no way that he's doing these things.

To me, and I have no idea what's happening.

I would have woken up.

She kept clicking through more photos and videos, and then the images led her to fetish websites. She could see that one of the videos was posted for anyone to see.

The title of the video that he had posted was something like creeping around without her knowing, and I was nauseous.

I was so embarrassed, and I was I just like shut down.

Really, the most upsetting part of it all.

I was pregnant with my daughter when I found this.

One of the things I remember thinking was, oh, my god, was I an active participant in making my daughter? And just remember thinking like, oh my god, okay, this many weeks a long and counting back like, oh my god, okay. And I remember the weekend and I remember like, oh, thank God, like okay, yes, I remember this was when it happened.

When Stephen came home, she confronted him.

I remember us sitting in the back room of the house and I just gave him the tablet and I had the images pulled up and I'm like, what is this? And you just kind of looked at it and was like, I have a problem. He was asking me like, let's go to count sling. Can we do counseling? And I'm thinking, I think you need counseling. From the day that I confronted him, I never slept in the same bed as him.

But leaving altogether didn't feel like an option.

I remember shutting down and thinking like, what am I supposed to do, like I work two days a week. He's a hands on dad. He's supporting us. I need his help. What am I going to do?

So she stayed.

She picked up as many shifts at work as she could, and when Steven would come home at the end of his workday, she'd find an excuse to go out.

I wouldn't want to be home when he was home.

As the months passed, Natalie began to uncover the full extent of Steven's abuse.

I found in his bedside table, underneath some files, he had a bottle of Tailen LPM and they were all broken up and they were in pieces, and then there was some other powder stuff in the bottle too, And I'm like, that is probably what he was using and putting it in my drinks because I was not just asleep, I was literally unconscious.

It shattered her sense of safety in her own body and in her own home.

I didn't even want to drink anything that was opened in the house because I was afraid that he would put something in it.

In the aftermath of her discovery, her friends and family could tell something had changed in her, but she kept the truth to herself.

People would ask me now, are you okay or you know you're quiet. Oh I'm just tired, Oh I didn't sleep well last night, or oh I'm just nervous about the baby coming. It was so embarrassing to me. It was like I was trying to avoid really thinking about that. It was just like this deep secret that I had.

When her daughter was born, she continued to stay silent. Her priority was giving her kids a good life, and for a long time she thought that meant smiling through the pain. But eventually she realized she couldn't keep living in that house. She had to leave.

I remember starting to pay things off that were in my name, and I was starting to try to save a little bit of money, like my own money, because he was in charge of our finances. It took me well over a year just kind of living in the same house with him and being paranoid and then being just angry and then being bitter.

Three years after her discovery, she finally saved enough money to move out. The new house wasn't much, but it was hers.

She was free.

My realtor unlocked the door, and you know, we had walked in and she's like, here it is, here's your keys, this is your house. I was like, oh my gosh, you know this is great. And then after she left, I sat in there on the floor and I cried, and I was excited and scared.

I'm just really proud and thinking like, Okay, this is going to be really hard.

But I told myself that day, I'm going to do it. This is mine, this is something that he's not going to take from me. I'm going to do it by myself, me and my kids, and I'm going to be the best man that I can be. This is the first day of the rest of my life.

There's one more woman to introduce you to, or maybe reintroduce you to, because we've told her story before on the first two episodes of Betrayal Weekly. She was the woman who got us thinking about this kind of two years ago when she discovered what her husband did to her.

I couldn't think. I couldn't function.

I mean the kids had to like sit me down at the table and force me to eat, and I just laid in bed and cried.

I didn't just lose my husband.

I lost my job, I lost my home, I lost my community, I lost trust, I lost safety. I really had to start over from square one.

Stephanie was married for twenty three years, but then she discovered something horrifying on her husband's laptop.

He had a Flicker account that was filled with nude photos of me, hundreds of pictures. He explained that he puts the picture up in a chat room, and twenty five people at a time can be in the chatroom. But people go and so as they come in and out, these other men are explaining how they would rape me.

We asked Stephanie, what is it that only people who've experienced this crime can understand?

Every woman has that fear, that awareness that there could be a stranger that could jump out and assault me, rape me.

But for her and for women who've been through what she's been through, it's this other thing.

It's that when you go home at the end of the day and you crawl into bed with the man that you love, that should be the safest place you'll ever be in the world. I found out that that was the most dangerous place that I had ever been.

And that is your real mind. Fuck Ember. Natalie, Stephanie, and Saskia four women who wrote into our show with strikingly similar stories. All of these women survived drug facilitated sexual assault. For three of them, non consensual photos and videos were shared with strangers online. All of these women spent months, even years in the dark, not knowing what their partners were doing to them, and they all thought they were the only one.

Nobody that I knew had been through anything similar. So even though I had all these people around, I still felt so alone and like a freak.

The shame was really unbearable, Like who am I going to tell this to?

It is such an isolating experience to feel like nobody else can relate to what I've been through.

So we decided to bring these for women together to connect with somebody else who says, I get it, I see you, it's a gift. After speaking to these four survivors, we knew we wanted to gather a group together because we're at an inflection point. Like us, the public is just waking up to this crime, opening their eyes to the fact that intimate partners can do things like this and share them on the internet. To get more victims to come forward and to expose how pervasive this crime is,

Hi.

Everyone, My name is Megan Cutter, and I am the Chief of Victim Services at RAIN.

RAIN the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National.

Network, which is the nation's largest anti sexual violence organization, and we operate the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

RAIN has been consulting with us throughout this season.

And I'm really honored and grateful to facilitate this conversation today.

For the rest of this episode, we'll be playing you excerpts from our group discussion, and as a note, we'll be sharing more excerpts in a bonus episode.

I thought we could kick off the conversation talking about this idea of community. What has it been like trying to find community or support groups after what happened to you?

Saskia jumped in first.

I hadn't heard about any of this before it happened to me, and when I did try to reach out for help, I felt like, because it was such a unique experience, nobody really wanted to touch it with a ten foot poll. One of my favorite parts of all this is meeting other people who can relate to having these acts done by someone who is dear to you.

It's like, Wow, you did this to the person you're supposed to love most in the world.

That's Stephanie, the woman who told her story on Betrayal Weekly.

I had no bad feelings about my husband.

I trusted him one hundred percent, and so what that told me is that my gut for who was good and who was bad was busted.

I felt a lot like you did, Stephanie, of like, clearly my ability to judge is broken.

That's Ember, the woman you heard at the top, because fiance was assaulting her.

And I had always prided myself on being a good judge of character and being able to read people. So that was like a hit to my sense of safety.

Honestly, it has been a real journey for me to get to the point of realizing that it's not my gut.

That's broken, it's him that's broken.

Natalie brought up something we hear about in so many of these stories.

You know, just talking with my perpetrator, I know that he sort of normalized that well I'm not the only one.

There's more than just this site, or there's a lot of people doing it like it's normal.

My husband actually said to me, you know, otherwise, just participate.

In this and like it really well, not me.

It's almost like, because you don't want to participate, this is happening to you. I wouldn't have to do this if you were just a willing participant.

And also that idea, like Natalie said, they're trying to normalize their behavior and make us feel like we're the one that's wrong.

I completely get why people don't come forward because we've been so traumatized already and it's so re traumatizing to have to then put your life on display going through the criminal proceedings. I had no idea how shamed I would be in the process or how difficult it would be.

So Askia, you are so brave. I did look.

Into trying to press charges against my husband, but it didn't have what it takes to sit there and to be shamed and have every decision in my life looked at.

One hundred percent. I think that's one of the hardest parts that I still carry a lot of shame about, is that I didn't have what it took to batter back against the justice system. I was being drugged and raped, and at one point I woke up an attack, and I remember going to law enforcement about two days later when I finally had my head about me, and I tell them what I knew, and they're like, well, if it's been two days, the drugs are out of your system,

I didn't report either, and I try to remind myself about that being the best decision at the time that I made.

And I just was feeling guilty for not even thinking about being able to file restraining order because I was financially dependent on him as well.

And then that's another part where people like diminish what's happened to you because it's like, oh, well, did you press charges? And if your answer is no, automatically you lose credibility. If you really did that to you, you would have pressed charges, is essentially what people believe.

There's no sure thing, So even if you had file charges, I mean, I think if you look at the statistics of people who do report, how few people that the perpetrator actually is convicted.

Our facilitator from Rain, Megan Cutter, jumped in to share a statistic.

Ninety eight percent of perpetrators walk free, and for every one thousand sexual assaults, fifty reports lead to arrests, twenty eight cases lead to felony convictions, and only twenty five perpetrators are sentenced to some form of incarceration.

These numbers shocked us. We knew that few perpetrators ever faced justice, but we had no idea it was this view. On the next episode of Betrayal, we dig into one reason why.

I said that is not allowed.

That is illegal. It's a crime.

He can't do that.

Come to find out they're married. Come to find out here we are.

In twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, twenty three, he probably was allowed.

To do that.

Resources on sexual violence visit RAIN dot org slash betrayal. That's our ai n N dot org slash betrayal. You can also get free confidential twenty four seven support through Rain's National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text hope to six four sixty seven three or call one eight hundred sixty five six. Hope you are not alone. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your story, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That is, Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com,