S3: E7 – One in Six

On this episode of Betrayal, you're going to meet a survivor of male sexual assault. It's a Hollywood actor. Many of us have an infinity for Anthony Edwards. If you watched er in the nineteen nineties or early two thousands, then you might have known him as doctor Mark Green, and before that as Goose in the iconic film Top Gun.

Pure unadulterated rage, anger that I had never felt before. I wanted to take out a full page ad and Variety and say, you know, doctor Green and Goose was assaulted by this man, and have a wanted picture of him.

I'm under a gunning. This is Betrayal, season three, episode seven one and six. Justin Rutherford's betrayal of Tyler, his wife, Stacy, and family opened my eyes to a whole new community. It's men who are sexually abused and are carrying the trauma into adulthood. They are husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, and friends, and they have been largely silent and hurting. Some like Tyler, are seeking a community. It's something he expressed in an earlier episode.

There's no one that relates to you. You hit YouTube or Google and you know you're searching self help videos or stuff related to your trauma, and you're scrolling there's not a lot of resources out there.

We found a resource that we thought Tyler should know about. It's called one and six, an organization which helps male survivors through providing information and support resources, and the name denotes what research has shown that one in six men have experienced sexual abuse or assault, whether in childhood or as adults. So we arranged a meeting with the heads of one in six and Tyler Stacy. Tyler's mom was there too.

It's huge when you're a talmum in our studio.

B we wanted to spend a day peeling back the layers of why it is so difficult for men of any age to seek help as victims of male sexual abuse and assault. Anthony Edwards is the chairman and national spokesperson for one in six dot org.

I'm a professional pretender by trade. I've been an actor professionally since I was sixteen.

Anthony has spent his career in the spotlight, but it wasn't until he was fifty two that he came out of the shadow of abuse to tell his story.

I was assaulted by my mentor, the man who had taught me a lot about theater and about art and was intimately involved with my love for acting. And as a result of the betrayal, I lived most of my life and fear because my experience of having been assaulted as a kid set me up for being afraid and not trusting in people, places, or things.

Anthony is now a leading advocate for male sexual abuse survivors. One of the one and six's co founders also joined the discussion.

My name is David Lisak. I'm a clinical psychologist. I've spent my career working in the area of trauma and also violence. I've studied perpetrators and I've also studied, primarily men who experienced child abuse. I have spent the last thirty some years working at applied areas training law enforcement and prosecutors.

We wanted to give Tyler the opportunity to connect with someone who truly knows what he is dealing with, so we asked Anthony to share more of his story with Tyler.

Men by nature minimize, deny, hide, and isolate, and that's the tragic result of what happens to people who were assaulted or traumatized as kids. And I learned to survive by hyper focusing. I think probably the reason why I worked so young and so hard is because that was the way to survive. That was the way out be an actor, achieve everything. The other flip side of that

When you were fifty two, what inspired you do start talking about this?

What happened to you? Pure unadulterated rage, anger that I had never felt before. The man who had been my perpetrator been the perpetrator. We try not to say min because he's not mine. He is a perpetrator. Was back in the news and twenty two years before I had had the experience. When I was thirty years old of being a new father, and I had run into him on a plane and I said, hey, you did was wrong.

So you almost turn that anger into purpose.

I luckily did, and I think a lot of survivors don't. We've learned a lot from the Me Too movement and there's a lot of women that were hurt and abused and they need to get together and get angry and shout out. My experience or experience at one and six is that a lot of men are already really angry and they're already acting out.

I asked Anthony how the trauma of his sexual abuse impacted important relationships.

The same year that I disclosed, the same year that my marriage ended. The problems within that relationship were directly affected by my inability to be truthful and honest with myself and what my experiences were. So you'll see that when you talk to men in their fifties, they're at this crisis of looking at this because a lot of their life has exploded. The result of unprocessed trauma will definitely manifest itself in unhealthy relationships.

Tyler, what parts of Anthony's story resonate with you?

A lot of it, having to like overachieve and just be super successful in life, having that desire to want to do something bigger than myself and help others because of what I've been through and use my story for good. At the end of the day, we've gone through the same thing. I can relate to him.

I know you guys spoke a little bit in the green room, but can you give us a little bit to the extent that you're comfortable what happened to you?

Yeah. So I was abused by my stepfather growing up, started around age nine to ten, all the way up until right before I turned sixteen. He had assaulted one of my friends. And growing up as a kid going through it, I didn't know that it was terrible thinking I was all alone. And I'm not saying that it's good to know he did it to other people, but it let me know that I wasn't the problem, that this was just like a terrible man, and other people

You learned so much unfortunately when you start uncovering these rocks. But the predator in my case very much worked with a group. We had a group of boys that were all into theater. We were his special group. And so the grooming aspect, which you realize that so much of this is about control and power and not I mean sex, yes, but the most important thing is the control and the manipulation and the power and part of the silencing is the fact that you think, oh, well, I'm not being

And then like for me, I was always trying to bring friends over like as much as I could, because it gave me a sense of safety. I thought like, this was only happening to me, that he had something for me. I don't know why, necessarily. I didn't think like it was him. It was just he had something for me. Little did I know that I was bringing all those friends into a dangerous situation because I wanted

Psychologist David Leasak heard something that didn't sit right with him.

I sniffed a little guilt.

Well, yeah, because you got like some friends who he had done stuff too.

But who did it to him?

To your friends, it was.

My stepdad at the time. Don't call him that no more.

Yeah, I really don't want you to walk around with that guilt because it ain't yours.

It's not your fault.

I'd say, that's probably like the worst thing of it all to this day now, because I like worked on what my problems were, but not I guess that problem because I thought it more so had to do with just feeling bad for those people, but more so it's feeling bad for how I went about it.

Yeah, that cut me silent for a long time because my best friend Scott was the one who was repeatedly raped, and he was a gay man, and he died of AIDS in nineteen ninety four. My silence really weighed on the fact that I thought, my God, if I could have said something, if I would have done something, would his relationship to sex and promiscuity been different? God still

Tyler's willingness to share his story at his young age really is remarkable. Anthony understands the significance, and so does David. He isn't only an expert on child abuse and perpetrators, He's also a survivor.

I disclosed for the first time I know.

It was in my thirties.

I think the way in which the abuse that I suffered affected my relationships primarily was sort of a deep lack of trust. I was abused by somebody who was living in our house. He was a border in order to help cover the rant. We were pretty poor, and my mother was a refugee from Europe, and this guy was a refugee from Asia from all World War two.

And he would come into.

My brother and my bedroom and he would wake me up by suffocating me, and then he would take me out of the room. In between our bedroom and his room, there was a hallway about maybe eight feet and in that eight feet every night I would be terrified, knowing what it's about to happen to me again. And my brother is sleeping over there ten feet from me. My mother is ten feet down the hall way and I'm alone and nobody's protect me. I was five years old,

And it took me a good chunk of my life.

To get out of that hallway.

Yeah, to get out of that hallway exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, that moment affected everyone in the room. It was heartbreaking, not only the awful abuse David suffered, but the years it took for him to process and work through the trauma. Anthony pointed out that Tyler was changing the pattern.

You're setting an example not of success. That it's all gone and done and we got rid of it, but the shame is less. You're not going to carry that. You're not going to carry what's not yours. You know this was done to you, not because of you.

Coming up. Doctor David Lee Sach explains how Tyler's experience was like living in a war zone. We are sitting with Stacy and Tyler as they speak with actor Anthony Edwards and clinical psychologist doctor David Lee Sack.

Here's Anthony to this day, I believe the perpetrator in my experience, believed that he was doing it because that's what I needed, what I wanted because there was a lack of that role model in my life. I didn't have a father figure. He was going to be the father figure. That exploitation of someone's desire is where they get in. Oh you want to be loved, Oh your

Yeah.

No, it's hard to find joy in things. Really, Like I would say, I've worked past my depression, and I've worked on myself. I've come very far, but it's hard to really find something I enjoy. Like I love watching a movie with my mom or my girlfriend, but like I couldn't do that alone. I wouldn't enjoy it. I don't know what I want to do. I know I want to do something big and important, make a change, but I have no clue really what that is.

It's interesting that you both felt this need to overachieve in your own ways. Where do you think that comes from?

In my head, I like picture where I want my life to be, and like I just sometimes tell myself, I know I'll be happy when I have that dream job and I have that wife that loves me and that family that I wanted in that house that's paid all, and that maybe not sports car, but decent car. I'm not looking for anything crazy, but still that's what i want.

But the irony, of course, is that you're using all of these conditions to do it. I use techniques that I learned which were conditional. Oh, if I do this, if I get this role, then that will take care of it. If I get this, I'll believe with it. If I find the right person, then I will have the perfect family. It was always looking ahead as opposed to right here and now. So I have to do all these things to get there, and that is a habit trail or a spinning wheel that is impossible to

Yeah, I live a lot in what he was saying. You constantly tell yourself, oh, I'll be happy when I get this, or as I'm approaching this, I'll be happy. And yeah, I'll frequently say that, but I've been trying to be better about it.

Anthony. As a child to learn that love is conditional, that's a really scary thing. Was it until you came a parent did you unlock this unconditional love?

It was directly related to being a parent. That's the miracle, Like I found the strength to confront this man. When you're a parent and you experience that unconditional love, it changes you.

With the stigma and the fact that men typically don't disclose until much later in life. Could the number be actually.

We know it is different. That's just what's I mean, David could speak to that. It's a notoriously difficult area to study, because there's actually a couple studies that have shown that even when you have documentary evidence that a man was sexually abused as a child and you then ask them later in life if they were ever sexually abused, the vast majority of those men will deny it, Some have lost the memory, most probably are just not willing

The conversation about denial sparked a thought from Tyler's mom Stacy.

You even said, had it not been for the discovery of the cameras in our home, he intended to take it to his grave. I mean that was just his thought.

I mean, the plan was to get the hell out. I kept telling myself next year, it'll stop because I'll be older, I'll look more like a man, and never stopped, and I just kept telling myself I can push through high school.

You know, it's important to understand that the intensity of Tyler's need for purpose, it's the same as soldiers coming back from war. The experience in a war zone is so intense. You're frightened all the time, you see death, and it actually affects your brain. You know, your brain gets kind of reset to live on edge, and every second, every moment is charged with you know, what if, what if?

What if?

And what do I have to do to survive this? When you live with the kind of daily fear that you lived with you were in a combat zone, yeah, you know, it's the same thing, and it really recalibrates your brain, and it takes really a long time to sort of recalibrate again, so that, yes, you could be in a situation where you are once again in that kind of danger, but most of life isn't that way. It just takes a while to get to a point where your nervous system and your brain are kind of

Stacey was sharing something with me this morning about one of her concerns for you.

Do you want to share a little bit.

A huge concern for me is when I start to feel that something's not okay with you. You're kind of quiet or things like that, and you tell me that you're okay. You're trained for so long to be quiet and to lie to everyone around you about what's going on in your world and how you feel. But I worry that there are times where he's telling me he's okay, and I'm still dealing with that child again, who's lying to me.

You're bringing up just a really important part of all this too. Everybody's affected by this event, these traumatic events. Everybody who loves and cares about these individuals is affected. And in the same way that you have to give Tyler space for his change, he also has to and you have to take the space for yourself as a parent to process what it is to feel that, oh

It's worthwhile to remember from time to time that there's another part of the equation here, and that is that both of you were groomed. I've spent a lot of my career studying predators, and grooming is an integral part of these predations, and it's not just the direct victim who's groomed. We're in Boston here now, and I was here during the nineteen ninety Catholic clergy eruption of cases.

Everybody.

What grooming is is taking human trust and perverting it. It's almost impossible to detect it. And predators practice this, so they're not just doing this for the first time. They practiced this over many, many years, and they get better and better and better at it, so everybody is susceptible to it.

You typically hear from men that are much older than Tyler. Can you talk about the impact of a conversation that's starting with a nineteen year old on this public of a platform. What does that do to the overall conversation.

Well, Tyler, let me turn a question to you. All right, Let's imagine that there's a fifteen year old boy who's in a situation like you were in.

What would you say to him?

Probably tell him to listen to the podcast Good Start. I don't know. I'd probably tell him it might seem like the end of the world, but it's not. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's going to be easy. But just like anything that, you find ways to overcome it and it'll happen. It's possible. You just gotta want it.

And one in six dot Org has tools to help.

You can find not only therapists, you can find support groups. You can find pure support groups, you can find other survivors. What we are really focused on here is to confront and challenge the stigma that silences men, so that young men like Tyler here who has the guts to come forward. We appreciate what you're doing and we don't want you to be alone.

Like what he was saying, men definitely minimize because I was talking to one of my buddies a while back and he was talking about how he had lost his virginity at like twelve, and I was like, yeah, no, that's that sexual assault. Dude.

Well that's what you're doing men. You're naming it, and you're just that's you're changing it. You're changing the world. But those simple conversations. That's what I also like to say too, is like you don't have to be on a podcast to affect you know, these are the normalizing conversation and that's where the change happens. And you're doing

Coming up, we ask Anthony and doctor Lisak how we can approach children who are holding back what has happened to them. As we continue our conversation with Stacy Tyler, Anthony Edwards, and clinical psychologists doctor David Lisak, we wanted to hear their advice on how to approach children who are afraid to share their abuse. How do we help them feel safe enough to disclose.

It's a question comes up all the time. How do we stop this from happening to kids? We normalize the conversation. We take the power of the stigma out of this by doing exactly what we're doing here today, so that that can role model for people to do it privately and quietly. It's not about me going out and being public. It's about taking away the power which is done through secrecy. And like breast cancer, many many women were dying of it because there was shame about even talking about it.

I don't see how we could absolutely come up with a plan. Here's a planner, Here are the rules. Right follow these rules and it'll never happen in your family or never happen to your kids. It's being willing to talk about this.

There are a couple of big things that we could jump at right away, right now, and that's institutional protection. You shouldn't have a place where, you know, unvettered adults can go and spend three days in the woods with children. That's just not okay. And we accept these things because we're accepting institutional norms that need to be looked at, and institutions need to be held accountable, especially when they

Saying it out loud to a safe and trusted person is the begining of a new chapter.

Literally, that moment when they had that first conversation where they said, you know, something happened to me when I was a kid, and someone listened and they were heard and they weren't hurt. That's all we're looking for those moments because that's the beginning of recovery. And all we want to do is start people on their journey, because everybody recovers differently. Isolation is the killer. No one gets out of this alone.

And finally, what advice do Anthony and doctor Lisak have for Tyler.

It's the beginning of a journey. That's a good one. It gets better, it's worth it. It takes some time, you know, and that's what you're going to be able to share as a nineteen year old that we couldn't share as old guys. And there's one other.

Thing I want to make sure you understand this part in all this time, and it's going to take that.

We're telling you to really heal.

You know it's an ongoing process, but you know it deepens you, really does deepen you. You go through this process that you have already started on, you're building yourself, you know, not your physical self, but who you are, and that gets bigger and stronger, and the trauma stays the same, and so the relationship between the size of that trauma and the size of you keeps changing, until you'll find yourself as a full of doubt in your thirties or forties, and you'll realize that.

You know, it's a much.

Smaller part of you than it was, and in a weird way, the trauma has helped you grow.

It's truly well.

We just want to say that we appreciate you doing this for us.

Thank you.

This was huge. On the next episode of Betrayal, Stacey goes back to the Berks County Courthouse for the final part of Justin Rutherford's criminal prosecution, where he answers for his plot to kill Tyler.

I was prepared to testify it.

If you're a man who has experienced sexual abuse or assault or you know someone who is seeking support, go to one and six dot org. That's the number one I n number six dot org. Find a path to a happier, healthier future. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to follow us at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content, news and updates. We're grateful