S1: E9 - Grooming

going along with it. Now we've shared a kiss, there usually is a feeling that there's a point of no return. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, Episode nine Grooming. During the course of our series Betrayal, we learned that Jennifer's then husband, Spencer, had dozens of affairs and sexually assaulted one of his students. Rachel, the student, bravely recounted

her experience. On an earlier episode. She painstakenly recounted how a trusted adult in her life roomed her by first becoming a trusted mentor and confidant to a sexual predator. It was hard to hear, but a lesson in how

adults manipulate children. I think I was more confused with a grown adult telling me that they had these feelings for me that you see it in movies, you know, when someone confesses their feelings, and as a kid, it's shocking when someone tells you at the time that they love you and they have these feelings for you that they don't want to hide, and that you're special. It was a shock. I remember him specifically saying that he had never felt this way before with anyone, and that

I was special to him. That's how he made me feel. He made me feel special and I could trust him if I ever needed to talk to him about anything personal. That interview triggered a slew of responses from many of you. Jen, would you mind reading one of those emails? Sure this may sound scattered because I'm a stay at home mom with four little ones, but I am Rachel. I was groomed by my teacher and coach. He was very calculated and preyed upon me, just like Rachel. I'd never dated anyone,

was very insecure and innocent. I have felt so alone for so many years. Rachel was brave and a huge encouragement for me. Wow, I know right. It's that whole feeling alone thing that sometimes just makes you feel like you've done something wrong. But then when you hear other people tell a similar story, it's just like, Wow, this happens to other people, so it must not just be my fault, or it must not be my fault at all. And we're seeing this in the emails or so much

relief and there's like a weight lifted. I mean, there were so many others just like the one that you just read, actually, including students of your ex husband. Yeah, we got a lot of feedback, but the ones that actually knew him or were one of his students at some point in his career. Oh man, it's sickening in a sickening and it's consistent. Yeah, after we heard Rachel's story, you ended up speaking with two of the women that your husband at the time carried long term affairs with

and these went on for years. One of the women was also a friend of yours at the time. Let's hear a little bit of that. Okay, the way I was talked to to feel good about myself, to trust him, surely that happened to that same girl. I bet you any money it was the same steps. Just continuously building a relationship with somebody and making them feel good about themselves, but also making them feel like they're not doing anything bad. I had remembered saying like, I can't do this, this

is wrong. Well, no, no, it's not wrong. You just can't help when two people just click like we do, it's rooming. It is rooming, and they don't mind taking the time to build that trust. We received a lot of emails about this particular episode. You know, out of all the episodes, this one getting the most feedback from was really interesting. I think it really started that whole discussion about what is grooming, what is predatory behavior? Can you be groomed as an adult? It was so interesting.

So many people were just curious but also had a lot of feelings about it. Do you mind sharing one of those? Sure? I learned so much from this podcast, but mostly I decided it was time to forgive myself from a relationship that has weighed on me for far too long. I don't make excuses, and I take full responsibility for my decisions. However, now I realized that I was a perfect target, vulnerable and desiring attention, even if it was the wrong kind of attention. This is nothing

compared to what you went through. But Spence in this guy seemed to have similar characteristics regarding how they approached others. Emails like that made me feel really great. Why there was empathy and forgiveness and it's healing for you and the other women involved. A spencer hearing from the other women allows them to release that shame a little bit. You know, people would ask why did you need to

talk to these women? And I understand that some people are going to think it's weird or strange or something like that. But that's how you understand someone else's side of things. You listen to what they went through and you realize that they were lied to, they were manipulated. But there were a lot of other big feelings about this episode that weren't the same reaction, especially when it

came to your former friend. Yeah, you want me to read this one email we got, Yeah shared the woman who had an affair with a married man kept saying she was groomed. That is not grooming. Manipulative, yes, grooming. No, she was an adult and he was not in position of authority over her. This is an irresponsible use of this word and takes away from those of us who are really groomed. You may want to provide some additional information about what grooming is versus being manipulated by a sociopath.

Language matters. And here's another one. The two women were grown adult women, and no right from wrong. I feel it's a dangerous viewpoint to treat women as helpless victims that are at the mercy of manipulative men. Adult women can make their own decisions. We are not weak, helpless creatures. I think it would be a far more effective message to hold the adult women accountable for their choices and

not portray them as victims. When we read that email about how language matters, I was like, absolutely it does, and so let's have a larger conversation and educate the audience about what grooming is and really explore that conversation in this forum because so many people reached out about it, just wanting to know what it is, how it happens, and clarifying the difference between what happened to Rachel and these other women, or how are they similar, how are

they dissimilar. I think we have been very responsible in telling this story, and so when we did get this feedback, we decided to seek out an expert to really help define this stuff absolutely. And look, our job was to tell your story and let women involved speak for themselves and tell their truth and their stories. And by any calculation, it took a lot of guts to do that. It really did. But it's also clear that we need to do some more work on defining grooming in a more

clinical way, so we sought out a top expert. Jerika Heinzie is a resource specialist at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and also the founder of the field Work Initiative, an organization which addresses issues of trauma and gendered violence in academia research field Work. Jerika is a cultural anthropologist who speaks internationally on issues of sexual harassment, abuses of power, and violence prevention. Thank you, Jericho for spending some time

with us. Thank you so very much. I'm always very happy and glad to have these conversations, not because they're particularly uplifting, but more so because they've been so historically absent in conversations that are had in our society, and I think having these kind of illuminating conversations is the ultimate form of prevention. So thank you so much for opportunity to do that. Of course, So, Jerika, how did you get into this line of work and become an

expert in this field. I myself have experiences of grooming and that culminated into the sort of very subtle beginnings of sexual harassment than much more apparent sexual harassment, and

that culminated into a sexual assault. It was still a peach student with an immense amount of trust and moral debt towards an adviser, a person who in my research field was helping and guiding me for many years, offering help and aid and trust in that individual who was significantly older than me, but I was still a very much an adult woman. I was in my late twenties. Since that there was another researcher who was raped and murdered nearby that area, and that was what fully initiated

the creation of field work initiative. My work at National Sexual Violence Resource Center is looking very broadly at topics of the sexual abuse or gendered violence, domestic violence, and

thinking about survivor led and centured resources for folks. For the past three years, I have interviewed survivors of academic trauma and field work trauma abuse, and that kind of lended itself to a corpoise of knowledge that's training and informational where we shed light on this issue about grooming, about the abuses of power and how those dynamics and full So is it safe to say that your experience you went through as a Page D student change the

course of your career. Yeah, that's absolutely spot on. I mean I had this fear that I didn't want sexual harassment to be like my thing. I never wanted to do this work, and this work has continued simply because it's needed. No other organization exists that sheds light in the same way. So in doing this podcast, I spoke with not only the sexual assault victim, but also with a couple of the adult women that my ex husband

had had affairs with. The question that came up a lot for us is how exactly do you define grooming? Grooming is a concept of putting an idea in somebody's mind, painting a picture that will align and allow them to perpetrate whatever acts they intend, and building that emotional connection where you know the people they target, which allows them to set a stage of hiding in plain sight. He's a teacher, he would never do that. He's such a

great neighbor and a coach. That targeting earning of trust with the purpose of exploiting their own motives, be that through sexual abuse, financial abuse. We see grooming with elder adults, right, you know, fiduciary abuse. So grooming is not anything that is specific to anyone age group, any one individual. You know,

anybody is susceptible to be groom. That is so helpful to know, because, as you know, my husband was involved with women of many ages and backgrounds, and so we've gotten so many questions and feedback about grooming in this case, and it's been a topic of so much debate. Jericha.

One of the things that I feel like we noticed with a lot of my ex husband's communication with these women were to kind of prey on their vulnerabilities, saying things to them like how beautiful they are and I haven't felt this way before, lines like that, Would you consider that grooming? Oh? Absolutely, praying on the vulnerabilities, those imaginations of what does that person need to hear to kind of turn the key for this situation to take flight.

And you know what I noticed in the story of the friend, you know, at the bar of the initial contact, was that she was coming out of the bathroom and she had had a little bit of wine, and that all of a sudden, that abrupt. He's standing there, he's saying these things. You know, if we look at our brains when something unexpected happens or traumatic or shocking, I mean, it's lit up like the fourth of July. There's confusion, what's happening or what does it mean? What's going on?

And all of a sudden, there he is standing there with this very information that you know, I find you attractive, I think you're beautiful. I want to kiss you. It's very confusing. I mean, our brain is just on a cognitive level trying to make sense of what's unfolding right now, and then all of a sudden we might find ourselves going along with it. Now we've shared a kiss, now

that person has become part of it. It's not as we might imagine it would go, where we expect a person to say, excuse me, no, I can't do this, or you know, it's all very much preying on opportunism of the person not expecting and also the idea that that person is special and that they're the only one, and that it's not really a bad thing because I

see how specially you are. How do you respond to people saying, well, they're an adult, they have agency that feels different than someone that doesn't have any sexual experience that was so young and really doesn't have context to the sexual and romantic world. And then if you have someone who has lived in the world longer and has had those experiences, they should bring that judgment to those scenarios. So how do you respond to you know, a grown

woman or a grown adult has agency. There's a whole sea of different ways and modes that vulnerabilities are kind of created and exploited. But there's no magic age or a set age in which we are actually fully formed adults that are completely moved on from any of the things that you know, we might have struggled within our past or our traumas, and those are different for different people.

You know, somebody with childhood sexual abuse, it's going to have a different experience with that than somebody who did not have those experiences. And so it's important not to be so kind of on and off about where we imagine adults agency lies. And more so think about trauma and it's role in all of our thinking, in all of our concepts of ourselves and how we move through the world. That's so interesting in the case of the two women I spoke to that are adults that had affairs.

I think Spence used making them feel beautiful specifically for them. Do groomers look for a certain personality type. I think grooming is quite across the board. There was grooming of neighbors and parents at school, There was grooming of the coworkers. Planting that idea about them being a trustworthy individual and planting that idea about who they were is a form

of grooming as well. We do know that when groomors see an opening of a vulnerability, they are really privy to stepping in and perceiving that and seeing and testing sort of where they can insert themselves and insert and yield that power over them and then over time sort of slowly portraying that image, but where the victim still has that strong image in their mind because there was such an impression made, and there was everybody else's holding

the same idea. And how is that different if it's different than being a sexual predator we see at times with sexual predators, even though they might have a desire or an inclination, there may not in every instance be this premeditation, this grand orchestration that we see with grooming. Grooming is that false sense of an extreme emotional connection that the individual builds over time. They're also never the

same person twice. If we ask an array of people who they are and what they know about them, we might hear things about that person we would never even imagine are possible. Because there's a portrait that a groom or paints and they sort of hand it to you. That makes so much sense to me. So much of this project has been about trying to see the many different portraits my ex husband painted to others. Spence painted

himself different ways around different people. To me, he painted himself as the perfect husband and I was his perfect wife, and you just usually accepted, as we do in society. If I were to tell you I was an astronaut, you know what reason would you not believe that that's true, especially if I say it with confidence and have a certain way in which I carry myself with that information.

And so grooming is that sense of dependence and overall vulnerability that's created between an individual and the groomer, and it's all done for the purpose of orchestrating their own motives, be those sexual, be those financial, maybe just the power of it he orchestrated an emotional connection with many many of these women, obviously with the sexual assault victim herself, but also I think with a lot of these other

grown women. So when we were thinking through questions that we wanted to ask you, Dereka, one of the questions was how to victims who are experienced grooming shut it down? And as I was sitting with that phrase shut it down, it just didn't sit right with me because it just felt like it was on the victim. You know, those who do not shut it down are weak. Those who do not shut it down need to work on themselves. They're not strong. And there's like this like weird inherent

criticism to that phrase. There usually is a feeling that there's a point of no return that if that person who knew that you told someone that you're going to be in trouble or that oh well we kiss now,

you know, the cats out of the bag? Yeah, how can victims know that, no matter what has happened, there's always a way to step outside of that dynamic and getting them to realize that that's their right and that they have the freedom to do it, and that you know they're going to be believed and they're not going

to be blamed things like that. And I think that telling survivors that no matter how long something has gone on, no matter what has happened, that you always have a right to set it down by saying and expressing it. It's like, oh, what so much has already happened. I

have to somehow spin it. I have to somehow make it okay or make it better, or there's some sort of burden about it not being as bad, or I have to somehow go down with the ship, or you know, there's so many ways people might feel it, and just letting people know no matter what has happened, no matter how long it's gone on, you always have the right to say, you know what, I'm going to speak my truth about this, this has been happening, this has happened,

and that there's always that exit button. It usually begins with telling someone we trust, usually begins with a feeling empowered to do that because there's an immense amount of fear. It's not easy, it's scary. It's extremely scary. It's one of the scariest things you can imagine is not knowing what's possible when you're scared or operating from a place

of fear. It's really hard to think rationally. We become hypervigilant when we have trauma, and that hypervigilance creates this thing our brain where we have to imagine the worst case scenario is going to happen next. We're going to be blamed. No one's going to believe us, They're going to use some sort of revenge. That's why we need more trauma informed education, starting from a young age, why

we need these kinds of conversations. Absolutely. One feeling I get from some of these women that I've spoken with is they were really upset and angry with themselves for falling for it. I'd say one of the paramount things to understand about grooming is that the groomer has implicated you in this event. You've played a role. And this is why I think for you, Jen, as the core victim, as the wife, we can't really look back and think

that there was any even red flags. But thinking too, the fact that all of these victims of selves played in some way, you know, the groomer implicated them. Well, I kissed you and you didn't push me away. You know, you could have said no at any moment. You didn't have to text me back. You could have told the police at any moment if you didn't want to, and you could have walked away. You know, this is the

way in which it happens. And so what happens is the victims feel this as the first surge of guilt. And that's how rumors are so successful. They find that little wedge between where they can really bring out vulnerabilities in the sense that they're going to ameliorate them, but also drive that wedge wall. Yeah, this is bad, but you know I didn't act alone. You kissed me too, And that's where so many victims feel shame and guilt

and self culpability. What we do is we look back on our role in it and think of a thousand ways we could have and should have done it different. So what are some resources that you suggest for people who have gone through this. I think all victims need there being, of course, having a space to talk about this. I think that having a connection with other survivors is

immensely important. When we have group sessions, the kinds of connections that can be made between two individuals where we can say, hey, I see you're blaming yourself and you totally shouldn't and the other person says, yeah, well you're doing the same thing. It makes connections that we can't otherwise do in a one dimensional way or internally. We need to be much more outward about it, talking about it, saying hey, I feel really bad right now about the

way that you know I'm feeling about it. And it might be on a random Tuesday when we're driving down the road. Feeling is not linear. It's kind of like that, right, and the same with these feelings and these emotions. So I think the first thing that survivors need to know is that there are spaces and there is help to be able to let all of these things out from the internal space where they just usually get worse and fester.

So it's really important to find each other and speak about it, and whatever it's setting is comfortable, be that in a therapy setting, be that in a group setting, be that just with friends or everybody else or whomever the person finds good. And then understanding our ability to create post traumatic growth where we can say, you know, I choose to create an error of where I see

that I was exploited in this way. So starting to put tools and survivors hands to realize the power they have now even though they're nursing wounds, to create that post traumatic growth, whatever that might look like. And again that is so immensely plural what it looks like to the individual, and they get to choose what that is. This has been so enlightening and helpful, and I just thank you so much for all of this information and

just educating. Yeah, thank you very much. It's the education we need and I'm really grateful that you could spend some time with us to talk about it. Thank you so very much. I just want to share one more email we receive that really hit home because I think it's so easy to confuse positive attention and negative attention, and this listener summed it up so well and I think we both thought it was worth sharing. At the end of this episode, Jen, do you mind reading it

for us? Dear Jennifer and the whole crew of Betrayal. For three and a half years, been the victim of a predator who has, unbeknownst to me until this podcast, been grooming me and sexually harassing me. He is a charming, brilliant and powerful CEO. I never had the nerve to tell him to stop. Until now you have given me the power and the nerve, and you have opened my eyes to the fact that it is not flattering to be groomed. I've been in agony for three and a

half years and it stops today a cry. It's education, right, yeah, it's letting people know what this behavior is so hopefully they can recognize it. A little goes a long way, and we just want to help each other. That's right. If you'd like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod gmail dot com. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership

with iHeart Podcasts. The show was executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Carry Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchek. Sound editing and mixing done by Mount de Vecchio. Betrayal's theme was composed by Oliver Bain's music library provided by my Music and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.