You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on from Mamma Ma. I'm mea Friedman. You're listening to no filter, and you're about to hear a very big story. When she was just fifteen years old, Darcy Olick was sexually abused for the first time by a woman called Malka Laifer, who was the principal of her school. So were Dussi's sisters and likely many many
other young girls. And these girls were particularly vulnerable because they were part of an extreme ultra orthodox religious community, which meant that they had no understanding of their bodies or their body parts, let alone what sex or abuse even was. Many of these girls faced unimaginable cruelty at home, and they had no content act whatsoever outside their community. Even though it wasn't in some far off remote location,
it was in the middle of Melbourne. The girls in this community were barely educated and they quite literally didn't have the words for what was happening to them, and so the abuse went on and on and on for years. This chronic abuser of girls who were in her care hid in plain sight as a pillar of her community, powerful, admired, respected. It wasn't until later in Dussy's life that she learned the words for what happened to her and found her voice.
And finally, thanks to Dussy's incredible courage, the crimes of Malchalafer were finally exposed to the world. But that wasn't the end of the story, because soon after she spoke up, the leaders in Dussy's community spirited Leafer out of the country and back to Israel overnight to protect her, and he could be said to protect themselves. Darcy, along with her sisters, police and prosecutors, would spend the next thirteen years trying to bring Malchaleffer back to Australia to face justice.
So how do you survive all of that? Because Darcy didn't just survive it. She is finally tentatively thriving and she's ready to talk. She's written an extraordinary memoir about her life called In Bad Faith, and after reading it, I wanted to know how she got through it and how she's doing now. It is a story unlike any
I've ever heard. Before you meet DUSSI though, I want to emphasize that the community in which she grew up practices an extreme type of ultra orthodox Judaism, and like any form of religious extremism, it bears very little resemblance to the lives of most Jewish people living in Australia I'm one of them, or around the world, including Israel.
There are pockets of extreme religion in many countries, to be sure, but please do not let this color your view of Judaism, which even in its orthodox form, is nothing like what Darsi has experienced. Thank God. Now Dussi is unflinchingly honest about the nature of Malkalaifa's abuse, So please listen mindfully, and there are links in the show notes for anyone who may need support. Here's Dussi. For those who don't really understand where in the spectrum the
Jewish community that you grew up in sits. I guess every religion is on a spectrum, right, And at one end there's people who have a very loose relationship with their faith and are maybe more culturally Jewish, And at the other end there is the most extreme form of Judaism. Where did the Adas community and the community you grew up in sit on that spectrum?
Well, from people looking in towards the religion just community. They would see it as the most extreme way of religion, the extreme way of living religion. But growing up in that community, that's not at all what I thought. I was taught that the best way to practice religion at all was to live the way that I did and to be in the community that I did, and that if you did not live in that way, if you do not experience religion literally every single moment of your day.
We looked at the Jewish people outside of our community and didn't really consider them Jewish, or we saw them as Jewish but not living the right way. And if only they opened their eyes and saw that, you know, there's a better way to live, There's a more superior way to live.
It was Judaism, or it was religion really in its most extreme form. Can you explain what the life of a Jewish girl as you were growing up would look like according to the faith and the way your religion was practiced in your community, some of the things that you had to do, say, dress, all of those things, like from the moment you woke up, can you take us through a typical day.
I mean, when I look back at my life and I see that it was already predetermined before I even was born, who I was going to be, what I was going to do, what my journey was going to be like. As a young woman growing up in the Dusk community, and I knew my role was to do everything that I needed to do in order to prepare to become a wife and a mother. I was told from very very young, I needed to be the person that could support my husband in learning Torah and bring
up a Jewish family. That was my role, and a lot of my childhood was framed around that idea. So from very very young, we learned all the rules about how to have a proper Jewish life. So I remember being three years old and waking up and getting really nervous about what way do I wash my hands? Because there was a certain way about how to wash your hands. What foot do you put out of your bed first? Because it goes down to the minutus details. How do you step out of bed, how do you get dressed?
There was rules around absolutely everything, how to go to the bathroom, what do you do after the bathroom? So I remember being very nervous as a little kid that I was going to make a mistake and that I wouldn't know what to do. But there was our schooling, and my parents were reminding us all the time about how to be that good Jewish girl. From three, I knew that I had to in some ways be invisible and not be seen, and not be recognized and be hidden. And I knew I had to wear tights and long
dresses and skirts that go over my knees. The idea was that modesty was very, very precious and I shouldn't all bring attention to myself, and that was something that you know, carried through right till I was an adult. There was a very big separation between men and women in the community, and I didn't speak to a man except for my father until I actually sat down with the man that I was going to marry.
How old were you then?
I was eighteen at the time, and my mother was in the next room supervising our date to make sure that we didn't touch. You know, I would have not even thought about touching. The idea of touching this man that I didn't know, this stranger, when I had never spoken to another man, was so ludicrous to me. But she was there to make sure that nothing underwards happened, and we had four dates. I think it was over a week, and by that weekend we were engaged.
The idea of following all those rules was that to please God.
I grew up with a very fearful idea of God. So God would punish anyone or anytime anything bad happened to the community is because we had angered God or you know, God was displeased in some way. And I know my parents also really drew on that fear a lot that you know, we would be bad Jewish girls. And I wrote about this a little bit in my book. But when I turned twelve, I knew that the responsibility of being a good Jewish girl was on me. It
was no longer on my parents. And this idea that I could be a good Jewish girl was something, you know, I would rather die than turn twelve and know that that responsibility was on me.
Were your parents born into that community.
They actually weren't. They joined the community when they moved to Australia before I was born, quite a few years before I was born, and they were welcomed by another ultra Orthodox community, the Hubbad community. I imagine, coming as immigrants to a new country, where did they come from. They came from England. My mother was born in Israel, my dad was born in England and they met when
they were both quite young as well. I think my mother was sixteen and got married at seventeen to my father and moved to England several years later with two young children.
Were they both always very religious.
No, they weren't religious, so they kind of were traditional culturally Jewish. They weren't religious at all actually, so they moved here and were welcoming into this religious community. The Hubbad community does do a lot of outreach, so they were instantly you know, as these new immigrants had this ready made community for them where people were very welcoming, they were friendly, they were open. By the time I was born, though, my parents had realized this was what
religious life was like. But they didn't want to be in a community that welcomed outsiders and allowed everyone to be a part of the community. They wanted the more exclusive, a dust community that was very closed and very insular.
So it was almost like an even more extreme version that they were looking for that was completely separate from the rest of Melbourne and the rest of Australia and the rest of the world. How many people were in that community, and how do you actually live in a community within a big city and not have any exposure.
Very easily actually, when you don't really go outside of the community more. I think it was four blocks. I pretty much lived my entire life up until eighteen. I mean, of course we journeyed out and went to the country or the beach or stuff like that. But I remember going in the car and my parents passing a billboard and telling us all to look down because there was
something immodest on the billboard and we couldn't look. So we lived pretty much within those four blocks where everything existed, Jewish shops and my school or my friends lived within that you know kind of area.
You know, what about things like services like doctors and police, and you know, having to go and get your driver's license. The members of the at US community must have had to interact with the secular world to do those things, or was everything within those four blocks.
Not as a young girl, and definitely not even as a teenager, so I didn't get my driver's license. That was something that, you know, if my husband allowed it when I got married, that would be something that I would discuss with him. There were people that existed outside of the community or worked outside of the community, but it was kept very, very protected from the young people
and the community. Like my father had to sign something with the school to say that he didn't use internet at home, and if he did have internet at home was heavily heavily filtered. But he worked in it, so he needed to have internet at home.
So people within the community, there are about two hundred and fifty families. You said within Theodas community, they did often the men, I assume not the women worked outside the community, right, because how did they earn money.
There's a lot of different businesses within the community. And as a young person, I wasn't aware of people working outside of the community. I mean I kind of had a knowledge, but it was something, Oh, maybe the men do that and they don't bring it at all into the community.
What was your understanding of the outside world, Like you had a lot of siblings. How many siblings did you have growing up?
Six siblings?
What was your understanding of what was outside the community.
It wasn't something that was of any importance to me, actually, so I'm just trying to think back. I don't remember having conversations with my siblings about what was beyond the existence that we were living within. There was too much going on, you know, within my family home and even within my schooling to even think on that. When I would see it on the street, it was this other.
It was very much that was something that I would never be a part of, never expected to be a part of, and almost didn't never want it to be a part of, because I was taught that the way I was living was so superior and so much better, that that was the most important and best way to live. So it was almost like everything else was beneath me or beneath our way of living.
When you were around twelve, there was a break in at your house and your parents had to call the police.
What happened, we were sent to our rooms so that we at all, you know, didn't interact with the police or didn't have an understanding of the secular world outside of our community. In any case, we were terrified of the police, and we were told, you know, as young kids, that engaging with any of those people outside of the community, including the police, would pull us away and tear us away from our way of living.
When I heard your story and when I picked up your book. I expected the period in your life when you were abused by Michael Laifert to be the low point in your life so far. What shocked me was the devastating abuse you'd experienced in your own home before that. I'm not going to push you on all of the things that happened, but I want you to tell me a little bit about your mother.
So, my mother was extremely abusive, but her abuse had a cruelty to it. We were utterly, utterly terrified of her, and I think she wanted that fear. She wanted us to be these little robots that did and exactly as she expected, and when we didn't, there was a very very heavy price to pay. And maybe instead of explaining to you kind of what that was like, I can kind of share a story with you about that speaks
to how it was to live in that house. I mean, we experienced a lot of fear and a lot of hunger. Those are the two emotions that I look about and think. We were hungry all the time. Food withdraw was used as a constant punishment. And I remember when we were maybe young teenagers. By this time, my siblings had kind of were banded together and realized that we needed each
other in order to survive. And my young brother would steal a little, you know, a couple of dollars from my father's draw and he would ride off because as a boy he was allowed to, you know, ride on a bike. We weren't allowed to as girls because it wasn't modest. But as a boy, he would get on his bike and ride down to the stores and he would buy something for us to eat, and he would
bring it home. And we were so terrified of my mother finding out that we had bought something to eat, and our time was so so so controlled that she knew what we were doing at all times. So my brother would actually tie up the food in a bag and throw it up onto the roof of the garage, and then later on in the evening, when my mother had gone to sleep and we knew that it was safe, he would actually climb back up onto the roof, bring down the food, and then we would all share it together,
and it was a moment of really close bonding. But it really speaks to that fear that we had and the control of every minute of what we were doing, and that intense hunger, but also the way that we kind of banded together as siblings, you know that still exist till today, to help each other survive through that time.
The idea that there could be little children being staffed by their own parents as a form of abuse in the middle of a bustling city and what should have been from the outside a loving community is so deeply shocking. But to you, that was just life, That was just your childhood.
Right, yeah, And it wasn't something that the community even were aware of, or I mean, there must have been signs, but they weren't educated enough to understand what those signs were. I was led to believe that if I was abused, there was something wrong obviously with me that you deserved it. There's this big black mark against my name. I would
never get married if people know that I'm abused. So there was all the intention in all of my sibling to hide that abuse as much as possible, because we would be seen as something wrong or bad, and we knew the only way of leaving home and maturing and having an independent life was to get married.
So in that way, that's so evil. Your parents conscripted you into hiding their abuse. We would have been scandalous had it have been known or is that what was happening in every family? What have you learned since then?
That was definitely happening in many, many families. The abuse and still even today, you know, abuse at home, domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual abuse happening between siblings, all of that is still kept extremely, extremely hidden. And it's this idea that if the abuse is a part of your family, it affects all the children in the family. The matchmakers just won't look at you. And that's still the way that marriage happens within the community.
Wow, So your well, parents would do things like just drop you off at a park. Tell me about that.
Well, at different points, my mother would just you know, announce that one of her children or several of her children were not her children anymore, and you know, she's disowned them. They're not her children anymore. They don't deserve to be a part of our family. And she would ask my father to take one of us, or sometimes a couple of us, and just drop us off at a park and you know, leave us there, abandon us there. And of course, as young children, we didn't know that
eventually she would come back and pick us up. When hangar had settled, we literally thought we had been abandoned, and we had no idea what to do, and being so insular and not having any understanding of the outside world, we did nothing. We literally just stood there hiding behind some bush or some bench or something, not knowing what to do or where to go or how to exist.
And you were taught to have such fear of the secular world and the people in it that it wouldn't have occurred to you to go and ask someone for help.
Not at all. This idea that my mother could send us to this outside world really double down on the idea of how bad we were. We must have been terrible, terrible children, because you know, the secular world is so bad and here we are being sent.
There, literally cast out into the wilderness.
That's exactly what it felt.
So where did school fit into all of this? I mean, you had to go to school. What is school for girls and boys within the ad Us community.
So school was my safe place for a long time. You know, it was a place that turned up. At eight thirty we started school. We did prayers for half an hour, We had Jewish classes till about one or two o'clock in the afternoon, had lunch and then we would have our English and maths, and of course we were taught at school. You know, we don't need English and maths if we're going to grow up and have kids and support our husbands. What do we need that for?
Our school life was very heavily focused on Jewish studies.
And how is the education or the school life a girl different to the school life of a boy. What did your brothers do at school?
My brothers had quite a similar life, but they were actually taught in Yiddish and they had I would think, even less secular education than we did. The idea is that the boys grow up and study Torah and they finish studying any secular education at around year eight.
So what did you see as a girl when you're at school that your life would be like? Like when you looked at Darcy's future, what did you imagine that it was going to be.
I very very much hoped that the matchmaker would find me someone that I could get married to, that I would get married and create a home with my husband, and that I would have as many children as I was able to. That was my life and I was excited for that life.
You'll hear more of my conversation with Darcy Elk after the short break stay with us and so into this very difficult situation with these very vulnerable kids. In walked Malkalafa. When was the first time that you met her, must.
Have been in year nine, year ten. I have this really clear memory of the prior principle being forced to resign and hearing that Malkalaifer had taken over as the new principal of the school because the former principal had an education, a secular education, and she wasn't religious enough. That was my understanding as a young girl.
Lifa came from Israel with her family. What was her family situation.
She came with her husband and quite a few kids, and she had quite a few kids while she was in Australia.
It sounds like she was a real figure.
She was and it was completely mind blowing, I think to everyone in the community. He was this woman who wasn't just respected because her husband was a rabbi, this woman that was this utter powerhouse. Everybody respected her in the community. I had never seen anything like that growing up. You know, it was always the men that led everything. It was always the men that you know, we went to for advice, and suddenly there was this woman that
people were so in awe of. It was something unlike anything I had ever seen.
How did she get the respective men in the community.
She was said to have had the roofs, which is like the overarching rabbi's ear, and he was someone that was very well respected in the community, and to get an audience with him was, you know, particularly hard. So the fact she had this open communication with him and could go to him for everything in some ways, that drew a lot of respect.
So how did Maklaifer relate to the girls? Like? How did she interact with them? At school?
I would say there was probably about maybe two hundred and fifty kids across the boys and girls school. I remember her being incredibly, incredibly warm, vivacious. She was just this person that could do everything, and she was everywhere all the time. She had this really big, bubbly personality. She was just this very warm, engaging person that people felt, you know, they just wanted to be closer to her.
It sounded like she was your first experience of adult kindness in your life.
At first. At first, I really did believe he was this woman that, you know, everyone looked up to and she's being kind to me. She's pulling me into her inner circle, which is a place everyone wanted to be.
When was the first time that she sort of picked you out of the pack, as it were.
I remember I was in year ten, and by that time she had her favorite girl, She had the people that she called on the most that she took into her office to speak to privately, you know, with all the blinds down and the doors closed. And I remember thinking, if only I had like an adult that, you know, that would talk to me like that, that I could share with what was happening at home, that I could trust.
It must have been around year ten she called me into office and she said, you know, I've spoken to your older sister, Nicole, and she's told me a little bit about what's going on at home, and I'm here to talk if you need someone to talk to. I mean, because I didn't speak to Nicole about these things. You know, this idea that she knew what was going on at home, something that was so hidden and so secretive, and that she had approached me and said to me I could
talk to her about that. It was this instant trust, and you desire to be able to have that with someone.
With what you know? Now, was she abusing other girls already? Like from soon after she arrived.
She was, And all those times that I witnessed her in halfice with her lines closed and you know, her doors closed, I came to know why that was happening.
Now, Darcy, I don't want to ask you to recount the specifics of these but something I want you to help me understand is the context in which she led you to believe that what she was doing was okay.
She very much had this sense of intimacy when she was talking to me. You know, I'm here for you. You know, this is how I show that I'm close to you. When she was touching me, this is what a mother does. And knowing that my mother was different to other mothers and was abusive, I really believe them and maybe this is what loving mothers do to their daughters. That was my complete innocence and naivity around absolutely anything that she was doing to me.
Now I'm just jumping in to tell you. I didn't want to ask Darcy to recount the specifics of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Malclafer because she's had to recount it so many times, to so many people. And at the start, I told you about the memoir she's written. It's her book called In Bad Faith, and we're using some clips of the audio version of her book,
of course, with her permission, which Darcie narrates. This is her recounting the beginning of the abuse when she was just fifteen years old.
I had never been a speaker. Silence had always been my friend. My parents' abuse expected silence. Obedience is silent, Silence is safe. Missus Lifer moved her arm to my knees. Her touch was reassuring, and I didn't want it to stop. Her hand traveled up my thigh, and even with my gaze lowered, I could feel her watching me. Now she realized what she's doing. Overwhelmed, I kept silent. She continued to move her hand up my thigh. This is weird,
but she's Missus Lifer. It must be okay. I didn't know it then, but this was a start of a pattern, one that would escalate. I went to lessons with missus Lfer for several weeks. I never found my words. The longer I was silent, the more Missus Lifer touched my body. She told me. I was closed, and she needed to help open me up, help me to trust her.
And this from when she was a little older. As the abuse progressed.
From far above, I saw myself a picture of passivity, eyes that were empty and saw no color, a frozen sack of skin and bones. I escaped to a place she could not reach. I watched her and worseless fingers undress me, the crawl of her touch over my skin. She kissed and caressed me, Her mouth tasted me, her body was excited, and she wanted a reaction from mine. That I was not there in that room. I did
not exist. She had killed me, a silent death no one would ever know about, no one would ever believe me.
When you're growing up in this community, I'm going to guess that you don't have a lot of access to sex education or information about your own body. What did you understand about your body and sex?
Absolutely nothing. What I knew about my body was that it was to be hidden, to be covered, to ensure that I do not draw the attraction of men, that I do not show my shape of my body in any way. So always wearing loose clothes and nothing that was too revealing, a woman's body is not something that we think about, we discussed, we talk about. I didn't know the names even of different parts of my body. I didn't know I had certain parts of my body. My whole body was shrouded in secrecy.
Had you ever had anyone be physically affectionate with you before, touch you in a way that wasn't literally painful, like just hugs and touching and holding your hand or stroking your hair, all the things that kids grow up with in the non sexual context. Had you ever experienced those things before?
No, And that wasn't even a way that let's say I interact with my friends like, we didn't hug each other. We didn't you know, this idea of just even touching each other in affectionate ways just didn't exist. So when lifea came and she started, you know, putting her arm around girls or pulling them in for a hug, people just saw that, oh, that's her different ways, that's not how it is. But well, you know, she's just a bit different. She's not Australia.
There was a big gap between when you were fifteen and the abuse started to take place. It went on for about four years until you got married and left the country. Is that right?
Yeah? It continued while I was engaged, you know, under this guise, I'm teaching you what it is like to be married.
At what point, if there was a point, did you realize something was wrong, that this was not right.
I mean, I've been asked, you know, did I recognize that it was sexual abuse? When I eventually learned about sex, you know, a few weeks before my marriage, when I was actually taught why what's called a color tea, a bridal teacher about what sex was. But even in those lessons, I was taught sex is to procreate, that is what sex is. Is to have children, That's it. I wasn't at all taught this idea of what sex was. It was like, this is how you have a child. That
was how I was taught. So even then, in my mind it wasn't this was sexual abuse. But I had always had an idea that what was happening was wrong. But I had so much worthlessness, I had such low self esteem. I believed it must be me, it must be me that was wrong. I mean, how could someone like missus Lifer be wrong?
And you had no context, you had nothing to compare that experience too, and no one to talk to about it.
Absolutely no one. And even if I would have had, let's say, someone I could talk to about, not that there was any safe adults in my life that I felt I could have that conversation with. I didn't even have the words. There was no words to have that conversation. There was no way, you know, because I remember broach kind of another teacher to have that conversation and say, you know, can I talk to you about something? I didn't know how to create those words that I needed
to use to tell her about what was happening. Again, like my whole body was shrouded in secrecy. It was impossible to actually voice what was going on or how that was wrong or why I felt that was wrong.
That idea of modesty that you spoke about, that you see in a lot of extreme religions, and this idea of a woman having to be covered, is that grounded in this idea that women's bodies are inherently tempting and that their bodies are inherently sinful and men need to be protected from them.
Oh very much, so very much so. But that wasn't what I was taught as a young person. As a young person, I was told the daughter of God, and my modesty is something precious and it's something that's just for myself. And then as I got older, it was exactly that. It was. We don't want to distract them men from learning Torah, and by you having any shape to your body or being revealing at all, you will be distracting to men. And of course I had no
idea of sex. It was just this idea that my existence in some way was distracting to men.
When you got married, you mentioned the color teacher. Tell me about that. What happens, because obviously if there's no sex education, it sounds like this is how women or girls are prepared for sex when they get married. Tell me what that involves.
I remember one of my friends got married maybe six months before me, and she had gone through the process of going to a color you know, a bridal teacher, and I remember asking her and being so curious, you know what did you learn? Of course, she couldn't tell me because you know, until I was ready, I wasn't allowed to know, so we weren't allowed to have these discussions. We both knew that. I remember going to the color teacher and there's a huge amount of rules around sex.
There's a huge amount of rules about how a woman needs to prepare herself, about how she's unclean during the time that she has her period, and then the seven days afterwards, and how she has to check herself for seven days and get you know, these clean cloths that she checks herself with twice a day. When she's had seven days clean, she goes for a ritual bath. And there's a huge amount of rules about what you're allowed to do when you're unclean with your husband, which is
pretty much nothing. He's like any other man on the street. You're not allowed touch him, you're not asleep with him, you're not be in the same bed. You're not even allowed to pass something to each other because your fingers might accidentally.
Touch and make him unclean exactly.
And then there's this idea of when you have gone to the micfather ritual bath, you know you're supposed to be with your husband, that's a very holy night. There's ideas of when you should have sex. You know, Friday night is holy, so have sex on Friday night, and
ideally should have a one other night a week. That's what I was told, so I was told Tuesday nights and Friday nights are a good idea of when to have sex, and you say a prayer before you have sex that any child that's conceived through this apur is conceived in a holy way and not through lust. And so you know, my husband and I would both stay
this prayer before anytime we were intimate. And so I had to learn all those rules as a young just about to be a married bride about what I was supposed to do, because it was my responsibility to uphold those and make sure that I didn't have, you know, a child through any other means, because that child then, you know, would be sinful.
That's a lot of pressure.
I was so nervous. I remember going for that ritual bath and just being so relieved to see this laminated booklet telling me exactly what I needed to do, because having all of that in my memory and thinking I'm going to be bathing naked and there'll be something in between me and this holy water and I won't be clean on my wedding night was utterly terrifying.
To me, because it's about making sure there's nothing between your teeth, nothing underneath your nails, that there's not like a speck of lint in your belly button. It has to be nothing. Everything has to be removed, moved first on your wedding night. Without one to intrude on too many details, what was that experience like for you and your husband?
We were both extremely nervous. Again, this was not someone I had ever touched. You know, this was the first time that we were unsupervised in a room together. I mean, we had been earlier that day for the first time. But suddenly we're in this house, which happened to be Malkealifa's house, and she was overseas at the time, and I'm in the same room that she had abused me.
That I'm supposed to be with my husband for the first time, and in my mind, I've completely separated that from you know, what was going on between me and my husband. It was like I had completely I had this disassociative barrier between what had gone on with Malkalifa and now I was married. I was a different person. That's how it worked, That's how my survival system worked. So I'm asery. I'm not thinking about that at all.
I'm just thinking, you know, I'm about to be with my husband and he's helping me, you know, take off my wig that I was wearing, and my dress that had seventy buttons, you know, all the way down my back, and a hundred bobby pins to keep my week in place while I was dancing. So he helped me with all of that, and then I can feel his nerves and I'm nervous, and I just remember this intense amount of pain and him telling me, oh, well, the rabbit
just said I should get it over quickly. That was my experience of my wedding night, and me thinking, oh, God definitely has to give me children now because I survived that pain, and then feeling so relieved that it was over, that we had done what I was supposed to do. And then the rest of the night was such a you know, it was the first time we
could really have a proper conversation unsupervised. So we just sat there talking for the rest of the night until four or five am, just getting to know each other. Who was this person I had shared a bed with. And of course because I had led, I was impure then and I was unclean, and so we had to quickly separate and I couldn't be together, you know, I couldn't touch him for the next two weeks until I was clean again. Was he a nice guy during our marriage?
He was, you know, he was a supportive person who didn't understand me, didn't understand the traumles bringing into our marriage and how that affected me, but did his best to support me in the way that he knew how to.
More of my conversation with Darsie about how much her life changed when she left Australia and had access to the Internet for the first time and what made her realize it was finally time to tell someone about Marco Lafer. So you and your husband moved to Israel after living your whole life in this insular at us community in Melbourne. That must have been so jarry.
So I hadn't been on a plane before because I had gone to New York with my mother when I was eleven to help look after my younger cousins. We very much kept to ourselves, Shu and I. We had this, you know, kind of little pocket of where we just ignored everyone else on the plane. I remember him kind of standing over his prayer book and in the middle of the plane and pray, and just this idea that
we just ignored everyone outside. And really, when I went into Israel and lived in a community, I lived in a very similar religious community to a dust so in some ways I didn't really have that exposure to the secular world. I saw it, and I saw it as very very separate to me, So it wasn't something that really rocked my world at all at the time.
So did you have a computer in the house?
So I needed to find an English speaking job, which were usually American jobs where they had kind of sent jobs where they could pay people cheap. In Israel, we bought a computer and we got internet, and I remember being very excited. This was something I had no access to. Somehow I can look for a job, and of course I could look at other things. And I remember opening the computer and thinking I could look up anything in the world and not even knowing where to start, Like
how do I even do that? And what do I do? And what do I look up? The endless choices were so overwhelming.
What did you look up? What were some of the things you looked up?
I actually don't remember. I remember finding my way to some free website to watch some shows, and of course, like I remember watching The Sweet Life of Zack and Cody, which was like, you know, but that was something even as an adult, that was something that was so interesting to me because I had no exposure to TV and you know, growing up or anything like that. This idea of these two young boys, I think living in a hotel.
It taught me so much. It taught me so much about the world outside, and that was what really captivated my interest.
It's really interesting that you started by watching kids shows because you wrote that on your wedding night you had the same knowledge of sex as maybe a five year old might in terms of the basics of it all, and when the abuse was happening, you knew nothing about sex. It's almost like your introduction to the outside world needed to be through the eyes of a child as well, because you were learning it all and.
It was you know, I don't even remember trying to watch any other show that was like an adult show. It was like too foreign to me, it was too out there. I didn't understand half of what you know, people were saying, so seeing it through the eyes of a child was something that was much easier to understand.
Who is the first person that you told about what malcol Laifer had done to you.
It was a therapist in Israel, and I'd been having quite a bit of difficulties in my marriage, and I went to a therapist and said, you know, these are the thoughts i'm having. These are the websites I'm being pulled into because I had, you know, suddenly had access to the Internet in Israel, and I was drawn to these sites to understand what I was thinking and why
I was thinking that. And I felt a tremendous amount of guilt about the fact that I was looking these things up online because I was supposed to be searching for a job. I wasn't supposed to be on these sexual websites. So I had so much guilt, and I believe that God was punishing me by making me infertile, and that's why I couldn't have a baby, because I
was drawn to these websites. So I went to the therapist with this and said, look, these are the things i'm looking up, these are the things I'm drawn to, and I don't understand why. And we had maybe t and also sessions where we discussed this, and I remember bringing her some pictures of me and my husband and her saying, look, you want to make your marriage work. And I'm me thinking she doesn't understand me at all. It's not that I don't want to make my marriage work.
I feel terribly guilty about this. And at some point she asked me, were you abused? And by that time I had a bit more of an understanding, not much, but a bit more of an understanding that what had happened was wrong with mal Koalaifer. And I said to her, yes, by someone at school. And she said to me, how did a man have access to you at school? Because a man didn't have access to us at school. If a rabbi came to speak to us, they sat behind a wall so we couldn't see him and he couldn't see us.
Wow.
She knew that the gender separation was so so severe that for a man to have access to me it was almost impossible without somebody knowing about it. And I said to her, it wasn't a man. I remember running out of her house where she had her offers and saying, you know, I'm never coming back. And I didn't go back for a while until she rang and rang and rang me again. And I went to her house full of apprehension, and I said to her I can't tell
you who it is. And you know, she was asking me the questions of all the different teachers in the school because she was aware of how the school worked and she had lived in Australia so she knew the school. And when I couldn't tell her, she said, oh, well, I'm going to have to tell missus Lafer, and I
remember that utter horror and fear. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that, and she was insisting, no, if there's someone in the school and you can't tell me who it is, I have to tell her, until I eventually said to her it was missus Lafer and that look of just utter shock and disbelief because she too respected Lifa, she too respected and looked up to her, and she had worked with her, and me trying to convince her you know, yes, it did happen, and this
is how it happened. And I didn't share many details with her at the time. It was just more to convince her. I don't really remember what I said then, but I remember telling her, you know, I think I'll witnessed something with my sister Nicole. I'm not sure we've never spoken about it, but call up Nicole and you know, speak to her and you'll see that what I'm saying
is true. And then until Nicole called me, I think it was later that night, I didn't know if because I'd never spoke about it with Nicole, I didn't actually know if what Nicole was going to say it was going to confirm what I said or deny what I said. I had no idea, And that conversation with Nicole was more, you know, what have you done? What's going to happen now? I mean, we're both terrified.
Well, it's hard to overstate the bravery that it took Dussie to confide in someone about what her abuser had done, especially when you consider how much control and influence the ADAS community still had over Darcy at this time. And I would love to be able to tell you that as soon as Dussie spoke out, life was brought to justice, But unfortunately that is not what happened. She tipped the first domino, and it took so much courage to do that, but there were many more to fall before she would
get what she did, recognition and healing and justice. In Part two of my conversation with Darcy, we discuss what happened. Next, we hear what finally convinced her to break away from the community which had protected her abuser instead of her. And you'll hear what Darcy thinks about life for now and what's next for her in her life now that life is in prison. And you'll also hear the moment where I broke down, which is not something that happens to me often, and it's not for the reason that
you would think. To hear the rest of our conversation, you have to be a Mumma mea subscriber, and I would so love it if you were, because when you do, not only do you get exclusive No Filter episodes and part twos of our conversations here, but you also get to hear Mamma Mia out loud, you get the Move Fitness app and all our other podcasts. This episode of No Filter was produced by Naima Brown with sound production
by Leah Porgies. Special thanks to Hershared Australia for use of the audio clips of Dussi's book In Bad Faith, and we'll put a link to that in our show notes. I know that we talked about some really difficult things in this episode, so we put some links for you that Darcy provided us and other more general links in
the show notes, So please reach out. If you're in a hard to reach community and you're listening to this and you want to know what to do because you're in a situation like Darcy described, we'll have links for you there and also just to Lifeline and other support organizations.