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This episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
There were things that were spoken about and things that weren't. There were ways we acted in public in ways that we didn't. The house had to be cleaned before we could have anyone over. My mom had a phone voice and a regular voice. We were encouraged to make up white lies to get out of uncomfortable social situations and always present our best selves to teachers, friends, and especially boys, only allowing the uglier parts of our personality to come
out in private. I was ready to break that pattern. No more lies, no more pretending.
That's Michelle Horton, writer and advocate, author of Dear Sister, a memoir of secrets, survival, and unbreakable bonds. Perhaps all secrets are dangers, but Michelle's story is about the most dangerous kind of secret, the kind where life itself is on the line. It's also a story about tremendous courage, tenacity, and sisterly love. And it has a happy ending. I promise.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
So I grew up in the nineties early two thousands in the Hudson Valley of New York, which is positioned like halfway between New York City and Allpany. It was, you know, cul the sac kind of neighborhood where everyone kind of had two kids in a dog situation, including my family. It was me and my little sister, Nikki, she was born a little over two years after me. To me, seemed very normal, you know, a breadwinning dad and a mom who stayed at home and then did
odds and ends to make ends meet. We always had somebody home with us, We always had food on the table, involved in activities like dance and gymnastics. Everything from the outside just seemed very normal. My dad grew up in a tough environment where he was bullied. He spent a lot of time working and was kind of emotionally checked out. But it was who every weekend with us, and to the best of his capabilities, he showed up for us in ways that I know his parents didn't show up
for him. So I think from his perspective, he was, you know, just mile above what his family was able to do for him as a kid, and I think he just te did his best. He was very in love with my mom and just completely enamored with her our whole lives. My mom is a very warm person. She was very easy to get along with. She loved us intensely. We were kind of her world. She always said she felt like her purpose in life was to
birth us. She didn't have great career aspirations, she didn't think very highly of herself as far as her own life. She really gave everything she could to us and in some ways kind of lived through us.
So growing up with Nikki, what was your relationship like as sisters?
But we were very young we were close playmates, and then as we got older we were always close in proximity, but emotionally we were not. There was like teasing and rivalry, and again, to me, it was all in the realm of what's normal, Like you're wearing my shirt, take off my shirt, you know that's my toy. Kind of to me, typical sibling kind of dynamic. And then we've definitely drifted apart. During our teenage years. We just had our own social circles,
our own lives. I was very outward focused. I looked out for validation. I looked out for my goals and my dreams. And I really had this sense that if I could just be an A plus student and do all the right things and get the right internships and the right jobs, and I can just plan and control
my life how I wanted it to be. So I was very tenacious, and I had ten year plans down to like the year, and I just had a tight grip on what I wanted my future v and I was kind of tunnel vision as far as what I wanted for myself. That probably contributed to our distance, because you know, I just was really like focused on getting
out and doing big things. And we were both good kids, you know, like we didn't really get into drugs and alcohol, we didn't get into trouble at school, we got good grades. I was really focused on my career what I wanted to do. She always wanted to have babies and be a mom. And she was just quieter. I mean, we were both pretty quiet, but she was quieter, more timid.
We both kind of had internal lives that we were focused on and that we didn't totally share with each other, you know, looking back now, I know, but she was struggling with as a kid at the time, I didn't. I just thought she just kept to herself. She didn't share a lot about her likes and her dreams and her thoughts. You know, she was just a very private person. I went away to college when she was in high school. The family really fell apart, not because I left, just
who knows, just for a lot of reasons. Everything fell apart, and I kind of left my sister with a lot to handle on her own. My parents separated. We were very distant during those times, and then I had my son right out of college. I was twenty two, and Nicky showed up for me in a huge way. She was in college at the time, locally to where I was living, and just babysat all the time, and really showed up in a way that was different than we had in the past. We stopped bickering, we stopped fighting,
we became friends. And then four years later she had a baby, and it really was motherhood. I think we both really became more ourselves through a motherhood and we realized we liked each other and we helped each other, and I think that's when we really started to form a bond through the lens of motherhood. Her showing up for me during that time was really a continuation for how she only showed up for me since my son
was born. She was someone I could rely on and she was just always there for me, and I definitely confided in her a lot. When you speaking of secrets, you know, I was married to someone who had a crippling addiction, and it took a long time for me to even say that out loud and to call in help for my family for a variety of reasons. And once I did, she never judged, she never lectured me.
She was just there for me. So when it all fell apart and I knew I had to get out of that situation because it was getting dangerous, she was one of the first people I went to and she really did help me through that.
Did you know that your husband had an addiction or was that something that sort of crept up on you. Was it like frog and boiling water territory or was it you knew and you just kept it to yourself for as long as you could.
I think both. I think it did come out of nowhere for me, as far as he had a prescription from a doctor and that prescription got pulled when he was showing signs of dependency, and then he was moving into street drugs and he let me in enough to know there was a problem, but he still kept a lot for me. So it took many years of kind of unraveling the truth of how deep his addiction was and how bad things really were. And in that time period, it was like, am I overreacting? Maybe this isn't that
big of a deal. Maybe the lies he's telling you are true, you know, in that sense, I kind of like,
wasn't making a big deal about it. And then when it got to the level of multiple car accidents and he's in and out of the hospital because he's you know, crushing his pills and snorting them, and you can't breathe in the middle of the night, and I'm pretty sure he's going to die any day, and my bank account is being siphoned, and it got to an extreme level where I had to let people in because he was going to die.
And was Nikki among the first people that you let in during that period of time.
Definitely, her and my mom were some of the people that I went to because, you know, we shared a life they were helping me with my son, and they were around my ex a lot, and it was becoming obvious as something was very wrong.
It's early twenty seventeen. Michelle has extricated herself from this difficult relationship and is raising her son Noah as a single mom. But she's not alone in it. She has the help and support of her sister and her mother, along with her tight knit community in the Hudson Valley. She also works at a well known retreat center called the Omega Institute, one of the most perfect places to land after a chaotic time.
Omega Institute is this beautiful kind of oasis in Rhinebeck, New York. Just the grounds itself are special. There's this healing energy that's there that is I mean, I don't even want to sound woo woo, it's palpable when you're there. That there is just a real connection to nature and a connection to community that's there, And from what I experience working there, it really transfers in the people who
work there. It's just a really beautiful, holistic environment where they see the whole of people and situations and their mission driven. So everyone's there because they want to do good work. In the world, and truly, if you're in a crisis, there's not a better place on earth you
could be. It was just this cradle for me when I both like in the crisis of needing to get an order of protection against my husband and separating and all of that like chaos that I was dealing with, I was really getting on my feet for the first time in many years just getting out of that relationship. It really felt like there was like a frequency that was clearing, and I was becoming more attuned to myself and my own needs and my own wants and healing.
In a way, Omega really introduced me to all of these other healing modalities I never would have considered, and I was very committed to meditation and checking in with myself and paying attention and being mindful. It was just kind of like an emergence of myself after that relationship ended, and I was just so excited for my future and I felt so hopeful that this was my time to step into myself fully. And then in September, the end of September, just an ordinary day, I'm going to Omega,
my son's getting ready for school. There's a very loud and aggressive knock on my door and I open it and there's a police officer standing there, and I'm sure that it means my husband's dead, because of course it does, like this is everything in my life was leading up to my husband dying and a police officer telling me that.
He then instead says that my sister is at the police station and we have to get her children, who are two and four, and they give no information other than that, and I'm just kind of thrown into this day of complete uncertainty of what the hell is going on, like why is my sister at the police station and what is happening? And no one's giving us any information.
And by the end of the day, it's revealed to me through my mom that my sister killed her partner, Chris, someone I knew very well and the father of the two kids, and she's arrested and potentially going to be church with murder. I was shocked. There was nothing that could have been crazier to me at the time, knowing my sister, I knowing Chris, and you know, all this
normalness that we had. I was the one with all the problems, you know, Now, all of a sudden we're in this family crisis, and it's like reality is flipped on its head. I felt completely groundless and numb and just like sheets of adrenaline. That is kind of what the physical sensations were like. And my mind was just constantly spinning trying to make sense of it. I couldn't come up with the like how she would have done it,
why she would have done it? Nothing made sense, Like there was no narrative I could put to it that made sense. So I kind of was just living in this space of openness of well, someone's gonna tell me at some point make this make sense, because me trying
to imagine what this is is not possible. So I'm just going to kind of put one foot in front of the other and completely and utterly present because there was no reality on either side, Like everything in my past and everything in the future was completely obsolete, and I was just living in this strange reality where I knew nothing.
We'll be right back. Nicky didn't allow very many people in. She didn't let a lot of people get too close to her, but she had mentioned a friend she'd made named Elizabeth. Michelle isn't sure how close Nicky and Elizabeth are, if at all, but in her desperate need for information, she reaches out and Elizabeth proceeds to tell Michelle that Chris was a really bad guy. Her exact words. Okay,
so Elizabeth and Nicki were close. Elizabeth continues to share everything that she knows, all the awful things she had witnessed, and everything Nicki had confided in her about the abuse she'd been enduring.
As she was telling the story, it was like, oh my god, this makes sense, Like all of these little inconsistencies throughout the years, things that didn't totally make sense, but I wasn't going to ask about it because it's like, it's not my business, and especially in the last like six months to a year before the shooting, like the bruising that was on her, Niki always had an excuse. But once Elizabeth was giving me the contact that it was actually Chris who was doing these things, it all
made sense. I didn't know that there was a gun in the house, Like there were so many elements of what my sister was living that I didn't know. Elizabeth was one of the only people that Nicki led into her life and said, yes, I'm being hurt and I'm trying to get out of this, and Elizabeth was working closely with Nicki's therapist, and they were safety planning and trying to figure out how to leave and what she would need if she were to leave, and you know
the logistics of it, which are complicated. She was there when Nicki would drive past her house with the kids and then ultimately go back to an unsafe house. She was there taking Nicki to the hospital and Nikki wouldn't get out of the car and get help because she didn't want to get police involved. Elizabeth had been my sister's person for over a year at the time, so really she was telling me so much information about my sister that I didn't know.
One of the things Michelle didn't know was that there was a text chain shared by several women who were concerned about Nicki's safety. On this chain, aside from Elizabeth, was Sarah, Nicki's therapist, and Laurie, who had been Nicki and Chris's landlord at one point. So on this same day that the world is crumbling, the same day that she's learned that her sister has killed her partner, and Michelle is trying to sort out what to say to
her tiny nephew and niece. She's also discovering that there was a small world of women who were terrified for her sister, and that none of them had thought to reach out to Michelle herself.
There was so much going on at once that it was almost like there wasn't even time or space for my own feelings to emerge. It was kind of like, Okay, I'm clocking that I'm actually feeling really angry that nobody came to me. But when I express it in a gentle way, because I was not, you know, there was no space to even like really emote. But when I would say why didn't anyone tell me, the answer was always that Nikki didn't think I would believe her, which
is humiliating. So there's like the embarrassment that all of these people knew what was going on and I didn't. Shame and guilt that I'm pulling in all of this help for myself a situation that I was like labeling as dangerous, but I never once thought going and getting an order of protection meant it was going to be the end of my life, like it is for so many domestic violence victims. You know that the level of lethality in what my sister was dealing with was a
completely different level. All of those feelings were very cerebral, where I was like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that I feel like that, but I'm not dealing with that right now, Like I'm not actually going to make space for that in my body because there's no there's no reason to like, this is a crisis and I just need to gather as much information. And it wasn't really a choice. Am I going to show up for my sister? Am I going to take in her kids? It was
just this is what I need to do. And I think me showing up the way that I did so immediately helped my sister realize like, oh, actually my sister is here for me and she is going to believe me. So, I mean it took a long time. We're even having these conversations in this time period that I'm living, like going back and apologizing and because it's so deep, those feelings of guilt and shame and embarrassment are so deep.
But at the time, it was just like information is information, and I will deal with all of those feelings another time.
I'm also having to talk to CPS worker Child Protective Services because there was a case that was opened right before all of this happened of someone anonymously in the community saying they think Nikki's being abused by Chris and it's affecting the kids, which was really the catalyst for what I know that was going to be a murder suicide, and it ended up Nikki saving her life that night, but someone opened a CPS case, so there's still an
active case that they are investigating. So as I'm talking to the CPS workers and just kind of parroting back what I'm learning from Elizabeth, all of the bruising that I saw all of my own like real time confusion and like, oh my god, I can't believe I didn't
see this earlier kind of revelations. I'm doing it to someone who's recording it, you know, the CPS worker, And it was very immediate that it came up of this is deeper than just someone snapping and shooting their partner, Like this is very, very deep, and it goes back to Nikki's childhood and I know there was sexual abuse when she was a kid that nobody ever got her
help for. Like it was just kind of the route to me immediately that I knew we didn't talk about her being sexually abused, but from what I saw in her diary and then just putting the pieces together as I grew up. Oh, Nikki doesn't like to talk about sex.
She's actually super disgusted by sex. I first discovered her diaries when we were in the stage of not being so great to each other and snooping in each other's rooms, and you know, I went through her stuff and I found an old diary and I brought it to my mom then when I was in high school at the time, and she got a little flustered and was kind of like, I don't know, maybe, And I would bring it up to her a little bit throughout the years, and it
was always with a question mark, like I don't know, maybe something happened, and she would say like, well, I did find blood in her underwear, and that was when, you know, all of this happened, and she says, you know, I did find blood in her underwear and she was
wetting the bed. But it brought her to the doctor, and the doctor said it was normal because she was you know, five, and all of her separation anxiety was normal, and the change in her personality was normal for that age, and there was a lot of just like authority figures like doctors to kind of like telling her it wasn't a big deal, so she believed it my mom, But you know, once all of us happened, it was kind of like really obvious that this question of maybe something
happened to her was not a question anymore. This absolutely happened.
And the word that you use is foundational.
Yeah, And I just knew that there was something that happened when she was little that no one got her help for. Then wanted the CPS workers to know that because to me, it explains its context. I think there was also a real escalation of violence. So before the injuries were visible, there was such an escalation that I
didn't see. So there were so many more subtle signs that I don't think I would have been capable of really picking up on at all unless I was super tuned into like the science of trauma and domestic violence. A lot of the abuse to start was sexual which happens, you know, where no one is seeing, and the injuries where clothes are so there was a lot of ability for her to hide the actual evidence of the abuse because it wasn't showing up on her skin until it
was escalated to a highly lethal level. I don't think I had the imagination to really grasp what was happening. You know, her saying that she tripped or that Ben hit her in the face with a guitar or something was like way more plausible than the idea that she was living in a very dangerous home, just because I had been I had known Chris. He you know, abusers don't just their partner, and they condition everyone around them.
So everything was very strategic on his part too, of like who he showed himself to be, which is a tactic where she thinks, no one's going to believe me because this guy seems so great to everybody. So there's that aspect of it. But then as far as like even prior when it comes to like the childhood stuff she went through or the very beginning of her relationship with Chris, there were signs where even police were involved. There was this culture of I don't want to say
something to make her upset. I don't want this is this really my business, you know, like if she needs me, she'll talk to me. I don't want to like rock the boat family dynamic where we just don't want to upset each other. As I've grown older, I've kind of like wondered if that's kind of a part of codependent enmeshment, where it's like I don't want to point out this issue because then it becomes my issue because there's no
boundaries between anyone. But there's just this this element, this unspoken element of what is appropriate and not appropriate to talk about and to push back on. And I just never really wanted to embarrass her or I just wanted to keep the peace, I guess, which is just I think pretty common and a lot of family dynamics.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's so.
Hard because whenever something happens and there's someone who was an abuse there there's always people who say like, well, he wasn't like that with me, so he couldn't have been like that with anybody, And it's so hard. I think whos was to me is very different than even like his friends or his family would say to me. He was just very distant, kind of had just a flat personality, like he was very hard to get close to, never really shared much about himself, was just kind of
very surface, like, hey, how were you? There was no depth to our relationship at all. I'm sure that was for a reason, but I just never felt like I really got close to him ever. But he was just very nice and he worked with kids. He was a gymnastics coach. He was really good with kids, like as far as my own son was very close to him, and he seemed good with his own kids, you know, just kind of like this goofy kid like he was really into video games and superheroes and just seemed very
like safe and non threatening. That's just kind of how he came off to me at the time.
When Michelle finally sees Nicki, she learns there's even more to the story. Nicki had felt like she was under a constant threat in her relationship that if she ever left Chris, he would kill her and she would never see her kids again. That was the threat the trap. Michelle also learns from Sarah Nicki's therapist that Chris had also been trafficking Nicki. He was a videographer who made horribly degrading, violent videos of his wife and put them up on the Internet for people to watch and in
some cases, for a profit. At a certain point, the police had received an anonymous tip about this trafficking and this is the moment Chris threatens murder suicide, And this is the moment Nikki says, enough, this is her breaking point.
I mean, the way she described it is it it wasn't really even a choice. It was just she had the gun in her hands by crazy luck as far as scrambling and getting the gun, and the way she described it as like milliseconds of time of him making the threat and then her just lunging and pulling the trigger like without a thought. It was just her body
a natural reaction to the threat. It was not like she hemmed it hot and made a decision or even that she like snapped, just her body's survival instincts kicking in. But she tells me basically what happens on the phone that night. Because we do not know anything about the law, We've never been in trouble, we don't really understand you're not supposed to say things on the phone or like
you know, the role of prosecutors. We're completely naive. But she says it on the phone, and all of the context is able to be said to me through like Sarah, her therapist, through Laurie, who has a background in sex trafficking, like She's on a coalition for sexual violence and her job is helping sex traffic youth. She just also happens
to be Nicky's landlord. Like all of these people who have this expertise and are able to communicate it to me, teach me and help me understand so that Nicki doesn't have to dump all of that and like relive all of it with me, which was great for her because there was so much she was keeping for me that to have to like go back like it was a relief for her when I would come and visit her and I already have the information, so then she can just start from there instead of having to drop all
of these bombs about trafficking, and I mean, it was humiliating for her. It was another layer of keeping her tethered to him, because the blackmail of you know, well, I'm gonna tell everyone that you like these videos and I'm going to get your kids, and I'm going to get custody, and you know, I'm gonna slutshame you, and it was a real true factor in keeping her in an unsafe situation.
Nicki's case begins to be processed in the Duchess County Court system. But then is abruptly moved to Putnam County. The reasons for this move are concerning. There had already been record in Dutchess County of Nicki as a victim of domestic abuse. There was already an awareness within the police department of the trafficking which they were tracking, of a gun in the house of small children of Chris
as perpetrator. It was a tinder box of a situation, so they were moving carefully trying to figure out how to keep Nikki and the kids safe. So instead of dropping the murder charges as they could have done, they accused themselves without giving the real reason. They just say there's a conflict. This is where Hannah, a prosecutor in a Putnam County justice system, enters the picture.
It takes like quite a few months for the Dutchy's county to recuse themselves, where Nicki's just sitting in jail, and so by the end of twenty seventeen beginning of twenty eighteen, Hannah comes on board. And she's a woman who previously worked prosecuting domestic violence and sex crimes down in the Bronx. So we thought that was a good thing that she would understand these kinds of cases, and she was a woman, which we also naively assumed would
be a good thing. And then she came in kind of as this person saying, I just want to understand the truth. I'm going to investigate thoroughly. That took many months, which is real time that my sister's doing, sitting in jail and the kids don't know when their mom's coming home.
And then over time she really expertly manipulates the evidence and manipulates a lot of things and concocts an alternate narrative where my sister is, as Hanna said, a master manipulator who planned a very imperfect murderer, and she was pursuing a conviction very aggressively.
Did you end up ever having any kind of theory about why? I mean, because her reasoning was so preposterous for why a woman would end up with these really grievous physical injuries and hide them from everyone, So that really the people who end up knowing are a very small circle of people and have to figure it out. And you know, you yourself or sister aren't seeing it.
She's hiding it and coming up with this counter narrative, and one of the things that seemed most confounding to me is that she uses the abuse that Nicki suffered at the hands of Uncle Butch, and also another incident where Niki was later abused by another man named Dave who sort of took her in under the guise of I'm going to protect you and then was in a position of power over her and raped her. What Hannah's
response to that is, lightning doesn't strike twice. In other words, there's just no way that Nicki would have been, you know, abused this many times, and you know that that would mean that Chris wasn't her abuser. And Sarah the therapist's response is a really powerful one, you know, which is you know that when it comes to sexual assault and abuse, like thing strikes again and again and again. It's a complete misunderstanding of what that pattern is.
Psychologically, Yeah, it did seem like she was using every domestic violence myths and trope and exploiting that. And I don't know if that was purposeful or that was really her own biases and her own misunderstandings. I've spent so much of my life trying to like figure out what her motivations were, because it does feel very personal. But from what I've seen, because I've been advocating for my sister publicly brings a lot of other people to me.
So a lot of other cases I'm privy to like seeing how they were handled, And it does seem across the board that this is the tactic that prosecutors use because it's what wins cases. It's very easy, you know, all of the cultural foundation is there to get a jury, to disbelieve women, to blame women. It just doesn't take a lot to like, very burn engage women. It's very easy. There's a playbook there, and Hanna really plugged into it
and it felt personal. But I can't know if it was really her just doing her job to get a conviction. I don't know.
Meanwhile, Nicki is doing time. Even that phrase doing time is in this case so poignant. Time is passing. Michelle and Nicky's mom suffers a stroke from which she never really recovers. Michelle's own health is suffering. I mean, how could it not be. She's responsible for three kids who are all in different states of being traumatized. Thankfully, Michelle is blessed with next level executive functioning skills. She's effective
together with Nicky's loyal, supportive friends. They rally the community and when bail is set at four hundred thousand dollars cash six hundred thousand collateral, raising, Nicki's bail becomes an around the clock job and they do it a testament to their amazing community. Nicki is released on bail and here is where another kind of extraordinary human enters the picture. A well known child therapist named doctor Crenshaw.
So Sarah the therapist and Laurie the landlord both worked with doctor Crenshaw. He does teynotes all over the world and is very renowned in play therapy and just an incredible human with a wealth of knowledge. And everyone was pointing us towards him, so Sarah and Laurie pulled him in and he was just giving us advice as a person. We weren't paying him or anything. He just sat with
us and gave us advice. And one of the first things he told us is that children can handle the truth much better than they can handle the mystery, because they are not stupid, and they're going to take the temperature of the room and figure out something's wrong. And if you lie or you hide things, they are going to put a story to it that is often much worse than what is actually going on, and that story will often involve blaming themselves. So he encouraged us to
be age appropriate. I mean, no one could really guide me on Okay, well, what's an age appropriate way to say their mom killed their dad? What? So? I mean, there really isn't really a very age appropriate way to say that, but to answer truthfully when they ask, and that when they're ready for the information, they'll ask for it. You don't have to overload them with information that it's going to be hard for them to process. Just answer their questions as they come, as truthfully and as age
appropriately as you can. And that really was our north star as we were figuring out how to talk to the kids about this. He also said that it's crucial for Ben and Fey to be able to trust the grown ups around them, and if they get the sense that we are lying to them, it is just fundamentally damaging for their attachment and their sense of safety in the world. And at that time Ben had been screaming, he's four at the time, screaming for us to tell
him the truth, where is his mom? Because we didn't know like, should we say she's in jail, should we say she's away? Like what's the language? So we just kind of weren't giving him a clear answer, and I was very worried by that, because I was worried the damage was already done as far as him trusting us.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Michelle and Nicki's mom passes away in January of twenty nineteen. Nicki's trial is set to start in April. In the months in between these two major family events, Michelle is still trying to put all the pieces together of Nicky's life, all the while trying to do right by three traumatized
kids and grieve the loss of her mother. Because Michelle is now deeply ensconced in the world of child psychology as she's been trying to apply it to Noah, Ben and Fay, she begins to think more and more about the questions that were never asked in their own childhood, and so now in adulthood she does. She asked Nicki about the sexual abuse she'd been through with their uncle. What did Uncle Buche say to you, Michelle asks her sister, And what was it that made you think Mom wouldn't believe you.
I couldn't imagine a world where Noah or Ben or Fay would get hurt as much as Niki was hurt and not come to me for that idea that they would hold that for me was so scary, and I didn't want to blame Nicki and say, like, why didn't you just say something? But I wanted to understand the psychology what was really holding her back. And Niki very plainly said I did tell her. She didn't remember exactly what she said, but she knows it was hard for
her to say. She remembers exactly where they were in the backyard, and she remembers my mom's initial response was to tell her the story of the Boyant christ Wolf and to be careful because people wouldn't believe her, which you know, was absolutely devastating for me, because this whole time, I kept thinking Hannah wasn't the first person to say they won't believe you, or her attorneys. Wasn't even Chris saying they won't believe you. It was butch who was
the one saying they won't believe you. To me, he was the original villain that implanted this idea in her that no one would believe her. So then you know, in the middle of my grief that my mom had just passed away, and I still had all of these conflicting feelings about feeling angry at her but also compassionate for her, and the grief was just so big that to then get this information that that original voice was my mom's was crushing.
Nicki is offered a plea deal, but of course, a plea deal means pleading guilty in order to receive a reduced sentence. Michelle learns that this is often the case in the criminal justice system. Trials are time consuming, expensive and risky. A deal is often considered the most practical solution by the prosecutors. But there are a whole bunch of things wrong with this picture. First, it will still mean a significant number of years in prison away from
Nicki's young kids. Second, it will mean she will forever be someone who's guilty of murder. And third, once a deal is accepted, it cannot ever be appealed. Nicki decides not to take the deal. Her trial is set for three weeks later. The community is in an uproar. They form the Nicole Atamando Defense Committee. Many of whom attend the trial each day, along with journalists from local media.
Nicki takes the stand in her own defense and does a remarkable job, something that seems almost impossible because of the trauma she's endured. She is strong, powerful, and eloquent. But when the verdict is handed down, it's a guilty verdict, which carries with it a sentence of a minimum of fifteen years to life. This is the worst day, worse than the knock on the door, Worse than Michelle hearing her young nephew say that everything has been taken from him, everything,
his father, his mother, his home, his whole life. Five months later, because it's possible that Nicki's case should have fallen under the protection of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, the family is hopeful that the judge will take this into account in his sentencing. But things do not get better if such a thing is possible. They get worse, and Niki is sentenced to nineteen years to life.
It's important to know that the judge was given a lot of evidence. Of that evidence, Hanna, the prosecutor really tried to get a lot of it suppressed. As you know, that's a prosecutor's job, I suppose, and he agreed to suppress it. But he saw the screenshots of the porn sites and how it was linked to Chris, and all of the reports that Nicki made that named Chris, and
he saw all of it. He also was the bureau chief in the District Attorney's office in Duchess while Niki was being circulated as a VIC, so for all sorts of reasons, he was very embedded in this Duchess County
system and we thought he would use the law. It was a brand new law that was signed into law right after Nicki's conviction, and it was a law that took ten years to get passed, mostly because it was opposed by the District Attorney Association and you know, people who thought women would use it as an excuse, like the abuse excuse they say, so they wouldn't pass it. But all it really does is give judges a lower sentencing structure if you think that or if it's proven
that the crime committed is connected to domestic violence. So in Nicky's case, when she was convicted, the lowest was fifteen years to life. Under the law, the lowest could be five years and the highest would be fifty team with no life. So I mean, it's very significant. And the reason that it passed finally was that it gave judges discretion. Judges really did not want their hands tied. They didn't want to be told what to do. So the judge had discretion and he chose not to apply
the law. And it was devastating because it was the proof that the system was not going to believe her.
Nikki's story goes from being of local to national interest. News outlets pick it up and people from all over the country become involved. It's a precarious time for our country and for our world. Remember we're in twenty twenty.
At first, it's impossible to separate it from like the cultural context of what was happening in the world, Like when this first happened, when the shooting happened, it was right when the Me Too movement broke, and there was just more organizing in general as far as the women's movement, you know, everything that happened in twenty sixteen, and there was just more of an attitude of organizing at least where we were that we were able to tap into.
And then when she was sentenced, we're now in COVID and divesting violence rates are skyrocketing. They were already skyrocketing. It's a silent epidemic everywhere, but COVID was especially dangerous time and people were really paying attention. And also the judge put some things on the record, like her verdict
was very unfair, and that got more people involved. But it was really her sentencing when the judge very publicly said he didn't believe her and used phrases like, you know, he thought she reluctantly consented to the abuse, which just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of consent. And he said that the motive for the killing is that Niki's a broken person, which really activated a lot of people. They're like words of abusers, and I think that did draw a lot
of attention to the case. And you know, she had a change dot org that got six hundred thousand signatures, like very quickly, and we as a committee organized just relentlessly around the appeal, and then we did more around clemency. We were hoping Governor Hokeel would give Nikki clemency. But yeah, we definitely activated a huge movement, you know, not even in the country, like around the world.
So then the case is appealed.
Yeah, the case is appealed by different attorneys than the trial attorneys. It was the first case that this Appellate Department decided on this new Domestic Violence Survivor's Justice Act, and they decided that she should have been sentenced under it. They could have said there's a mistrial because there was so much misconduct on the prosecutor, but then that would have just made another trial happen in front of the
same judge. They also could have said that the trial judge leads to resentence her, which is insane because he would have just given her the max of fifteen years. So the Appellate Corps was pretty kind in resentencing her themselves, and they gave her seven and a half years, which to me, I think is still way too much for someone who's defending their life from their abuser, but much better than nineteen years to life.
Nikki's sentence was reduced to seven and a half years, including time served. She's home now. She was released from prison in January of twenty twenty four. While she served out her time, she became involved in a nonprofit program called Puppies Behind Bars, and she spent her time raising service dogs for wounded vets and law enforcement.
So the day after she was released, we close not a house, just the way the world worked, like the timing of it all. So we have a house now where we all live together. My dad lives in like a basement apartment area, and then the rest of us live in the upstairs and all the kids have their own rooms, and my son's at high school and Ben is going into middle school and Fays the last one in elementary school. So like, you know, they're nine and
eleven now. They were two and four when this happened, and we have been so therapeutically supported throughout this that everything is as smooth and good as it possibly can be.
The kids, you know, it took a lot to maintain connection to Nicki in prison, but we did it, and I think that paid off because they still have a bond and you know, Niki can put them to sleep, and she went to Ben's orchestra concert for the first time yesterday and got to be there for Fay's dance competitions and all of these things that she missed she's
now able to experience. And it's still surreal. It's been, you know, but like five months that she's been home, it feels kind of like forever, but also it's still very surreal. Even just to be able to text her is like very surreal. So we're all really enjoying our time. And also the layers of trauma that she endured, everything she went through with Chris and everything that happened in the courtroom. I didn't really understand when the people say
like they're suing for like emotional distress. I didn't really get it until I watched what happened with Nikki, and just having your identity decimated and your story told in ways it didn't happen so publicly. That is something she's healing from being institutionalized and being property of a state for so long. You know what that's done to her psychologically. There's just so much that she is only beginning to heal from, and some days are really really hard for her.
But she's in therapy and she's doing everything less she can do, and she's doing it really courageously. But it's definitely not all rainbows and butterflies, you know.
Here's Michelle reading one last passage from Dear Sister, a letter Nicki wrote to her during her last days in prison.
Dear sister. A few hours after I received my appellate decision, I was walking up the hill to METS at six pm. A big, bright yellow butterfly landed next to me, and I stopped walking. Even when the officer yelled at amando, what's the hold up? I just pointed it was so beautiful. Two more inmates and the officer stopped next to me, looking down at the butterfly, whose wing was half missing. Not a small tear, a whole chunk gone. We watched her lift off, fly in circles, and delicately land again.
Oh look she's broken, one of them said. I shook my head. She's not broken. I said, look, she's still flying.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Mollie's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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