Transcript of BONUS | More from The Guys at The Door

Today, I wanted to share a conversation Katie and I had with the federal agents who knocked on Stacy's door, Jim Cole and Josh Finley. Jim and Josh both worked as special agents for the Department of Homeland Security investigating cybercrimes and child exploitation.

And since retiring from DHS, both have continued to advocate for victims and children. Just a heads up, we talk about crimes against children in this episode.

Please take care while listening. And before we get started, I wanted to dedicate this episode in memory of Special Agent Bob Peterson. Thank you for your work protecting children. Let's get into it.

Obviously, this has been a journey for us to find you guys, and it was very, very healing for Stacey and incredible for us to learn. And I, like, was so moved by the part where you were talking about how you didn't miss very often and how this was kind of an exception in a weird way. And there was all these tiny little cracks that we were able to trace through and follow. I wanted to hear a little bit more about the work you guys did in other institutions, like in, in Portland, in Oregon. Were there other schools that you saw this problem in? And churches, summer camps?

Boy Scouts, churches. Yeah, all the above.

I'll go with a Boy Scout story. So this Boy Scout leader had 2 nieces and Would kind of inappropriately touch them, like give them piggyback rides and like reach his hands around. And then his niece moved to Massachusetts about 5 or 6 years later. So she's an early teen now. He hit her up online and started talking to her and wanted her to come and visit him in Oregon and lie to her parents and fly out. so they could engage in sexual activity. She tells her parents, they call the police. A local detective in Massachusetts takes over her account and starts talking to the suspect. He indeed does buy a plane ticket for his niece and comes up with the most elaborate scheme to get to spend a weekend with her. His sons had a Boy Scout meeting at the coast, He went there and then was going to feign he was sick and didn't want to get the rest of the Boy Scouts sick. So it was out like in Seaside or something like that. And so he goes out, pretends he's sick, and says, I don't want to get anybody else sick. He goes to a hotel, and then as soon as he gets to the hotel, he packs up his stuff, drives back to the Portland airport to pick up what he believes is his niece coming into town.

And, um, the dark humor in law enforcement, we all have it. Sorry. The detective talked him into showing up at the airport in his Boy Scout uniform.

It was the best.

To meet his niece, which for us was, was, was great because very identifiable, right? So if you got to do surveillance, you want to watch them, all those kind of things, to put them in a Boy Scout uniform, a grown man in a Boy Scout uniform in an airport, Very easy to pick out. You know, you don't have to, to be that careful. He, uh, came to the airport to pick up what he thought was his niece and was going to take her back to the coast. But luckily for us, we intervened and, uh, arrested him, uh, at the airport. And, uh, he went to prison for, I think, 20 years.

The other part of that is, uh, it was a holiday weekend Friday. And generally speaking, you put, you know, you need people for surveillance and the arrest team, like transport. So Josh puts out an email to the office, hey, looking for volunteers. And we have a task force. There's other agencies on there too, like FBI and some. So it kind of went out to everybody. We had more volunteers than we knew what to do with that, that wanted to be there on a holiday weekend just because it was such a unique situation with this Boy Scout leader.

My God, that's crazy. That's crazy. It was lucky you guys were able to intervene like that. Lucky she went to her parents.

That's the biggest thing. I'll give you another story to exemplify what I was wanting to say to you. Okay, so it's probably 2008, 2009. My 16-year-old niece calls me up on a Friday morning. We were planning on playing golf that day. We'd taken it off, so it was like 8 o'clock. She woke me up. And she said, hey, Uncle Josh, there's a creepy guy at my house. And so I was like, okay, I'm on my way. So I grabbed my gun, put it in the back of my pants, and drove to her house, which was about 5, 6, 7 minutes away. And so I get there, go knock on the door. She answers it. She said he left. And I was like, what in the hell is going on? And she's like, well, I met this guy online and I was like, what? And she was like, yeah, he said he was like 26 or something like that. And she's 16. It turned out he was 53 years old. And while we're standing there talking, I was like, how did he get your address? She's like, well, I gave it to him. And I'm like, oh, you can't do that.

You can never give out your address. And then she gets a text message and she's like, it's him. And so I said, okay, give me the phone. And so she gives me the phone and it says, it's okay, baby, if you're scared, we can just have phone sex if you want. And I was like, reply. Sorry, was in the shower. You can come back now. And so this Like, 53-year-old shows back up at the house. I introduced myself to him very nicely and called the local police. And so he'd come from Vancouver, Washington, so he had crossed the state line in order to have sex with a 16-year-old, which is a federal crime. And so The local police arrested him. We adopted it, the federal charges for it. And so he was charged federally for that crossing of the interstate line. Now, this is the point that I was trying to get to you, was my aunt who was raising my niece came to the police station and I could see her walking up and she was just pissed. Right? Just angry. And so I went out and intervened with her, and I was like, hey, look, I know you want to go in there and yell at her, right?

I know you want to like tell her she was stupid for doing this and all those kind of things. But I said, at the end of the day, she made the right decision by going to somebody, by calling somebody she trusted. If you go in there and yell at her, the end result of that going to be is that she doesn't want to admit when she makes a mistake in the future. And so, so many parents like miss that point of they come down on their kid for making a mistake where the kid admitted to it or came to them and said, hey, there's a problem. And so many of them are just like, they'll yell at their kid like, oh, you were talking to somebody online? What they should be focusing on is their kid was able to come to them and talk to them. And so that's what shuts so many kids down is the fear of being judged, of being ridiculed. That's one of the things I always try to get across to parents is like, keep that open line of communication and reward your kid when they communicate with you.

Yeah, that's such a great point. There's so much that can be done when you bring in those like safe adults. One thing we wanted to unpack with you guys was in Brett's case, when IT flagged the computer use, they didn't call you guys immediately. And so we were kind of wondering like whether it's an IT person or anybody else, what should you do when you find suspicious material on an electronic device?

First, before we get into what they should do, that is not uncommon. We see a lot of organizations that are worried about once you call the police, you, you open Pandora's box a little bit because we're going to come in, it's going to be intrusive, we've got a criminal law violation, and that's going to open up like their IT systems to law enforcement scrutiny. It's going to open up the organization. There's They're thinking about risk and reputation. Schools in particular are thinking about what are parents going to think, what school board is going to think. And oftentimes one of their first, like, these are like churches and these organizations, even youth-serving organizations in the past. It's getting a little bit, it's getting better. But their first thing, especially if the IT person goes to Like, they're not— they may not independently make a decision to call law enforcement. They find it, and then they're reporting up like, hey, I found something concerning, and put the ball in their court to do the right thing. And often those people are just thinking about that risk, like that risk, particularly reputational risk. And a lot of times they're thinking, well, we don't really know all the facts, so we should kind of do our own investigation.

I cannot tell you how many organizations we dealt with that knew something long before we got involved and were trying to do their own kind of investigation. And then it kind of got to a point where they recognized they had to, but they do not want to. They do not want to get us involved in a lot of cases. And so, what should they do? Yeah, they should contact the police, but not just the police. One of the other issues is, look, not to disparage, you know, but different law enforcement components have different levels of training and experience in these crimes. These are nuanced, and there's lots of horror stories that I can tell you about, like a patrol officer who's not been exposed to these things, doesn't have the right training, and oftentimes is going off of some pretty bad misperceptions. who responds to these types of incidents and maybe the first person, and then don't do the things that they should have done or like actually cause harm. There's a really famous case that went viral out of Columbus, Ohio, where a father discovered that his 11-year-old daughter was a victim of sextortion.

She had been cajoled into taking a topless photo She thought she was talking to a teenage boy. It was really, you know, an adult male who had psychologically manipulated her. She's 11 years old. She does it. She starts— he then starts making demands for really, really terrible things. She then goes to her father. He then looks at the messages. He knows immediately it's an adult. Calls 911. 6 hours later, at 11:30 PM, a patrol officer and a sergeant arrive at the house to follow up on this report because it wasn't treated as a priority. And when the father tells them the circumstances, the first thing out of the sergeant's mouth is, well, I mean, if you want to pursue this, then we could arrest your daughter for child porn. And it— and, and the only reason that anyone even knows about this is because it was all captured on his Ring doorbell camera at the door. He's like, she's 11, what do you mean? And, and they're like— and the sergeant was like really unempathetic. There's no empathy whatsoever. And just like, well, she's the one who took the photos, right? And since she sent them, like, yeah, like she, she's Guilty of, you know, she just kept saying child porn, which is a term we hate, by the way.

And the guy is like, he's in disbelief. And after she— they, they're like, look, I just wanted someone to come talk to my daughter. And like, you know, and, and they're just like, you know, well, if you want to— if you want us to follow up on this, and then, then this is what's going to happen. Which is completely like the antithesis of what should happen. So he then released that video to the media. And of course, now the police have to respond. The police chief is having to respond. Then they pulled the body cam footage from the police officers and got more conversation after they left the porch about it. It was bad, bad, bad. And I use that in a training course that I run that tries to teach police how to be more trauma-informed. And so, but it's a great example. But the problem is, if that IT guy just calls 911, You are going to get a patrol officer who responds and probably does not know what to do. So the reality is, it is more nuanced than they should just call the police. What they need to do is specifically call a cybercrime unit, or an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, or a federal agency like HSI or FBI.

We had one case in Centennial Middle School in Gresham. where the computer teacher was viewing CSAM at the computer and it got flagged by their IT department and their IT guy deleted everything just because he thought it was probably a student that was looking at like age-appropriate material or whatever. Then he went and reviewed the security cameras at the time when the downloading occurred and saw that the only person in the room was the teacher, that there was no class at that time. Good-hearted, good gesture, but he went and recreated all the downloads and went and downloaded it. And again, he's lucky because he was dealing with Jim and I. Right? And we were like, dude, we can't use that as evidence. You went and recreated it. That's not evidence that we can use in court. But like Jim was saying, another patrol officer would be like, well, you downloaded CSAM. You committed a crime. And it's like, no, you have to judge people by their intent. And most federal statutes have that qualifier that there needs to be an intent to commit the crime.

I'm curious, like, right now, you know, obviously this is a problem. Like, CSAM has exponentially grown since the 2000s, since some of these cases unfolded. Are IT people still on the front lines in this way? Like, how has that changed in the past 20 years?

Yeah, I think they are still to a degree. I think offenders get smarter as time goes by. They find their ways into these communities of offenders where they're, they're, you teaching each other how to avoid law enforcement. And, you know, one of the ways, but one of the reasons we used to see this a lot at work is offenders' mindset was, well, if I do it at home, my wife might find it, right? So if I do it at work, and it, it is kind of interesting how people would risk the work kind of environment thinking, well, you know, but now most people know that their companies are screening. There's probably more awareness about that. So I think it's one of those things that, yeah, IT people honestly should still be watching out for this. And to be honest, there's some software out there that you think about it like antivirus for this type of conduct and material. But there's a huge resistance from IT companies in deploying that software, to be honest. They don't see the need for it. And I would say that it's probably more prevalent than most IT people believe that it's happening, but they're not necessarily looking for it.

Normally when they find it, it is more about happenstance than it is by design. And so I think it is still relevant to them, but I think for a couple reasons, They don't find it all that often, and there's more awareness by the offenders that are aware that companies are, you know, looking at content that's going across their network.

So a lot of the platforms that CSAM's distributed on, like, can be just, you know, denied by their IT to begin with. Like, you know, you can't get to it. You can only get to certain, and then And then most of the large tech companies receive what we call a hash list of known CSAM material, and they're screening for it and making cyber tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children anytime it comes across their platform. So Google, Apple, all those kind of things.

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Before we get into some other cases, I would love to talk to you guys a little bit. I think you'd be able to like shed some light on this. Basically, like in the news in Wisconsin in the last few weeks, there's been—

Ander Egg.

Yeah. AIC Sam.

So there's a, there's a huge misunderstanding about the Ander Egg case, to be honest. And so the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals took up the Endora case. He was charged with a variety of violations under federal law, under 18 U.S.C., basically the child pornography statutes. And I use that term only because that is what they are called. And which included the distribution of the material, the possession of the material, and the receipt of the material. And, and I think the production of the material. It was all AI-generated CSAM that did not, did not depict an identifiable child, right? So after being convicted in federal court, they took up an appeal based on some previous case law that the Supreme Court had decided, one of those being Ashcroft v. the Free Speech Coalition, which came about after legislation was passed establishing the current child pornography statutes in federal law. And the, the actual statute that defines child pornography as a definition, including, and then one of the, the, the provisions of the, the statute that makes the the illegal to possess, to distribute, etc., included, um, like computer-generated imagery, cartoons, drawings, all these things, right? And that's what they were litigating, was that was a violation of the First Amendment, uh, free speech, because no real child is harmed.

And so under, under the Supreme Court analysis they agreed that it was protected by the First Amendment if no real child was harmed and it happens in the confines of your, of your own home. So when he was convicted of the possession of this under not child pornography statutes but obscenity statutes, which are a lesser burden and don't have the same free speech protect— at least it wasn't believed to have the same free speech protections— it got appealed. And the Seventh Circuit Court— and I feel bad for the judge because all over social media people like We need to search that judge's house and we need to look at his hard drives and all this stuff. And the reality is this: the judge is writing for a panel of judges. He didn't independently make that decision. It was a panel of judges who made that decision, and they were stuck with the Supreme Court ruling. They really had no choice but to rule that way. They also, as part of their decision, basically said, this is concerning and the Supreme Court needs to take this up. and basically fix this. And so they weren't in any, in any way, shape, or form really sympathetic to Andurag or anything, but they had to rule based on the law and Supreme Court case precedents.

The other piece is what they actually ruled on, and the ramifications of that are widely misunderstood. I've spent a lot of time trying to correct people. We've talked about it on our podcast because there's, there's a huge misunderstanding So one, there is a very nuanced set of circumstances where this is protected. The protection only covers AI-generated CSAM that does not depict an identifiable child, that never leaves the confines of your private residence, is never shown to another person outside of your residence. Those circumstances are incredibly rare. And so there's a misunderstanding in the headlines where, where again, people want, you know, all the media want clicks and views and eyes on content. So the headlines are dramatized. And it, and if you read a lot of the headlines, it makes it sound like the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals basically legalized AI-generated CSAM, which is not what happened, not even remotely what happened. Andurag will not get out of prison. Out of all the charges that he— it was the least of all the charges that was reversed. So his sentence is actually predicated on the other charges that are not affected by the ruling.

So Andorag is still in prison and will be in prison for the complete length of his sentence. It didn't really affect anything in that way. And I'm not saying it's not concerning. Like, look, we, we, we— I think Josh, I speak for Josh. All CSAM, whether AI-generated, whether in the confines of your own home, I think are incredibly concerning and should be illegal. I know that there's free speech advocates that would argue on the other side, but they've not seen it and they don't understand that even though it's AI-generated, it does damage real children. And in the reality, you know, unfortunately, I don't think the prosecution was ready to get into the weeds On how AI-generated CSAM is created, even if it's, even if it's not like a face swap for a real child, or I'm not using an image of a real child, they're using these things called LoRAs, which are predicated on usually on real people, real children, and to, to generate this material, although the end result may not be that person. And We also know that there were instances where large language models and visual language models have been trained with CSAM mistakenly in the corpus of data that was used for training.

But not only CSAM, we know that real people are part of the data training set. So it doesn't have to be CSAM, because if there are real children that are part of the corpus of training data that was put in there, then the synthetic material that's created through diffusion is using pieces and parts of real people.

I think it's so important to, like, understand those nuances. And I think, um, it's an important discussion to be having. And it's upsetting that I guess people are just kind of reading the headlines and not diving into it deeper. But it does bring up the law and the law's inability to adapt to the world we're living in.

Yeah, well, we're slow. The law is slow to adapt.

If you have a man who's downloading and looking at and getting sexual gratification from looking at violent rape videos, right? Where do you— what pathway do you think that that's leading that man down? Like, like, the more you see it, then that's more what you want, right? And so it's the same exact way with CSAM. Like, the, the production of that material, the possession of it, the viewing of it for sexual gratification is leading that person down the pathway of abusing a child. And that is the only thing that it is going to lead to.

These offenders exercise in these things called cognitive distortions. They know something is wrong, and then they get the courage or the, like, the gumption to actually Like, take a step toward that thing that's wrong, and then nothing happens. And then they start— their brain starts to say, well, nothing happened, so I can go a little farther. These barriers to acting on it start off as really big, but the more that they progress down the pathway, these barriers get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point where they almost don't exist. So this material and the argument that, gosh, we should give offenders AI-generated CSAM because then they want to fend against a child is not borne out by the science nor human nature.

The Supreme Court was to take this up. If you could design like what the outcome of that is, what does that look like in the law, in practice, in, in all the ways?

I would like to see that all, all illicit sexual abuse material depicts any form of a child or childlike would be illegal to possess, to view, to distribute, to receive, to advertise, to produce, etc. I basically think it needs to be folded in just to the child pornography statute. I wish we would change that to child sexual abuse material, but I think it needs to be folded in that statute. And actually, the provision is actually there. It is just there is one that is not currently enforceable under those statutes because of of 2 previous Supreme Court decisions. I mean, that is kind of where I lean toward, because I know that this material is not only consumed by people, but it also can be used to groom children. It can be used to show children that, look, this is normal. I have these pictures of kids doing this, and they are happy, and all these things. But I do think that Andorag is not necessarily the best vehicle to, to take this to the Supreme Court. It's not the worst vehicle, but it's also not the ideal vehicle. What DOJ and the, the Appellate Division and Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section are going to do, I don't know.

They— there's a couple different ways they could approach and use Andorag, but they might look at other pathways to get this in front of the Supreme Court, but they need to— there's— I think there's some things they need to do to be prepared for that, and I'm sure they're, they're doing that.

The thing that needs to change is the law, right? The, the Congress needs to change the law. Currently, you know, it states that it has to be a real child, um, and it should just be able to add or indistinguishable from a real child, and then you let the jury decide that.

That would be a way. Yeah, that would be a way to, to do it. And it go— it's going to get appealed, like, without a doubt. Once you do that, there— the first case where something like that is prosecuted, it will get appealed. But then there's a much stronger vehicle for the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Sorry, Jim and I getting into a legal debate here.

No, no, no, it's fascinating. It really is. It's like Such a can of worms, and it's just like there's so many little parts to this.

Facets and nuances. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I just received a, a text message.

And then he said, so, okay, sorry for the mix-up.

At least I accidentally texted a female.

I received a phone call from One of the investigators.

His name is Bob, and he's a police officer.

Bob Semonchuk.

Robert Semonchuk. Robert Semonchuk.

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There was another case that we had come across in our research, and you guys had briefly mentioned on our interview before and I wanted to go back to it.

Knudsen. That's another crazy case that has a lot of nuance to it as well. Then I actually learned some pretty valuable lessons from that that I carried with me like up to this day. That case was an interesting one because it started with, he dropped off his computer at a computer repair shop and I had dropped a business card at several computer repair shops around Portland. Like, hey, if you're ever on someone's computer and you see concerning images of children, call me. And I had not received a call from any of them, I mean, you know, ever. And then this was the first one. It turned into a really, really good case and a very dangerous individual who had been really operating as a wolf in sheep's clothing in this community and in this school for a very long time.

If you are up for sharing, like, some of the lessons that you learned from that.

So, a couple of things. So, we did not have probable cause to to, um, be able to execute a search warrant or arrest him because the computer repair person that saw the material and called me, another employee had actually called Knudsen to come pick up. So I called a detective from the jurisdictional Gresham Police Department, and we went into his home to contact him. He had only been home for maybe 10 minutes when we got there. I basically say, we need to talk to you about some concerning things. And he invites us in and we start talking. His body language was such that once I got to the topic at hand, I knew, but I did not know, uh, the mountain. I, I mean, I had no clue, like, the mountain. And this is one of the craziest CSAM collections I think we ever had. And so we get to the point where he admits, uh, that he's collecting CSAM, that he's created CSAM. This is like the predecessor to some AI-generated CSAM because he was taking students, uh, from the school imagery. He was a photographer. He took a lot of pictures. And let me tell you something, you've got to be pretty determined to print 53 binders, you know, 2 and 3-inch binders worth of CSAM.

So after we had done everything, we got the confession. I did not know he was a teacher until he told me. And so I had to go to the school and talk to the principal, and she was absolutely heartbroken. Uh, she— it was devastating to her and completely unexpected. They never saw this coming. And so, but we got her on board pretty quick. I was able to describe enough that she was like, okay, this is serious, and, and I believe it. We then did a search warrant at the school in his office. We recovered a camcorder where he had blacked out the red light and was surreptitiously recording students. Like, he would offer students who wanted to change out of gym clothes or after school and other clothes to do it in his office. He would leave his office, but he would have the camcorder record them and would, would black out the light. And so we recovered a lot of that, the camera and where it was and all those things as part of that warrant. And then A few days after all of that, of course, the rumor mill in the school, right?

And all the teachers and everything. And the teachers are all going to the principal like, what is going on? They can't believe he's been arrested. This has to be false arrest, all these things. And so she called me and said, will you come out and address the teachers? So I grabbed the prosecutor in the case and we went out there and we addressed the teachers. And I had no idea. How much hate we were going to get. We had teachers who were like giving us hate and and just making these statements like there's no way, you guys don't know how to do your job. You're not looking at this right. Like all these things. So we're trying to kind of explain to them that like this is real. This is serious. This had this is not of. You know, a mistake. This isn't mistaken identity. This isn't entrapment. This isn't, you know, someone didn't set him up. This is, you know, and he admitted to the conduct, right? It was a sentencing hearing that had the biggest— one of the biggest lessons in my life. We're in the sentencing hearing. He's pled guilty, so we're not going to a trial.

But the defense is asking for a lower sentence and the government's asking for a higher sentence. So that will result in federal court in what we call sentencing hearing, where both sides get to put on evidence of why, why the sentence that they're asking for should be more supported by the court. And so the defense put on some character reference witnesses that were teachers that he had taught with. And I remember this one female teacher, and I'll never forget her face. She was also one of the most loudly protesting at the auditorium event. And I remember her talking about how awesome he was and how he volunteered to spend time with kids from difficult homes and backgrounds and broken homes, how he volunteered to drive these kids home when their parents didn't come pick them up after school or after-school activities. And I'm sitting there listening to this. And it was the first time it dawned on me that grooming wasn't just about the victim. But what I realized here is even more diabolical than the kids is offenders groom the protective people around kids to do it so that they will never believe the allegation and that kids are less likely to disclose, or even if they do disclose, they're likely to be dismissed or gaslit.

Because, I mean, think about if a student had gone to that teacher and said, well, Mr. Knutson's touching me, she would have said, oh, sweetie, like, like, this must be a mistake. Like, she would have brushed it off and not believed it. And so it causes me to think how many kids, and not just unique to Mr. Knutson, how many kids may have tried to disclose and been then dissuaded by someone who's been groomed? And then also, how many people protect these offenders in their communities, in their, in their peer groups, in their work, in their, like, churches, any things, because they just cannot wrap their head around— and they were groomed by that offender to think that they are a pillar of the community, that they're, they're just the, the greatest person ever. And so that's when that dawned on me, and I started teaching that as part of my training. But that was one of those moments that was like a real light bulb went off.

One of the anecdotes I'll throw in there is Jim and I are kind of founders of an operation called Operation Renewed Hope. The basis of this is looking at old CSAM material and applying new technology to it because, you know, when, you know, that CSAM first was discovered by, you know, NCMEC or Interpol or whoever, Um, we didn't have those technologies. And so we were always getting better and better technologies. And so, uh, Jim and I were like, let's go back and look at all the old stuff with the new technology. This was our— the second Operation Renewed Hope. There was a girl in New York. So they, they had this series of CSAM. They grabbed the face, um, they put it into facial recognition software. They find a YouTube channel of this girl in New York, and they start looking at the videos on her YouTube channel to see, like, you know, you know, is this her? Is there any mannerisms or anything? And so one of her YouTube videos, she talks about how she was molested when she was 11. And that she went to her parents, she went to the police. And nobody believed her.

Nobody believed her. The guy never got prosecuted, nothing. And all this, all this time, these images are sitting in the, the ICSA dataset is what we call it, the, you know.

Yeah.

And so by using that new technology to identify her, we were able to prove her story that she had told when she was 11 and nobody believed her. and go back and arrest the offender and charge him federally with the production of child pornography.

Yeah, that is enough to make you cry. And we've heard this a lot of just like, why are you digging into this old story? Like, what is the point? And we're like, well, it matters for the people who lived it. Like, 20 years might seem a really long time for you who wasn't involved, but like, that's not for those people.

I will argue that telling these stories empower new victims to disclose and empower them to know that they're not alone. I think there's such a disservice when we don't like that, that whole idea of like why this is old, why. But what I have learned doing a lot of podcasts, like I've been on a lot of podcasts, Josh has been on a lot, and a lot of different media, is I go look at the comments and people, and I also know other survivors who have been on these shows, and it empowers new, like Survivors who either are undergoing abuse now or did and never disclosed. And so I think these, these things are really important because it's not just about— like, like, look, it's really important about Stacy and what happened to her, and it's definitely helpful for her, right? And you guys know that. But it hits people way beyond her and in a very important and meaningful way. We suffer vicarious trauma by having to view this material. And, and, and like, I've got— I go to a therapist, and one of the things my therapist, she's like, well, when are you just gonna go fishing?

You're retired. Like, like, like, the way that you heal is stop talking about it, stop being in it, stop doing the work. And I'm like, yeah, that's not a— that's, that's, that's not a thing for me. But it's really important for, for those that are out there, and it gives people hope.

Yeah.

Yeah, completely.

And thank you guys so much for being so open to sharing. It really is so important. And we've already started to get really great messages from other students at Centennial who were there during this time.

Thank you so much for listening to Not Just a Terrible Story. We are an independent production You can support us by sharing this podcast with a friend and leaving a five-star review wherever you are listening right now, or hop over to our Substack terriblestory.substack.com. There's a lot of great free stuff over there: archival photos, resources, and stories that didn't make it into the show. And you can also get early and ad-free episodes as a paid subscriber. To get in touch, send us an email at terriblestorypodcast@gmail.com. This podcast was created. Created and produced by Katie Klein and me, your host, Sydney Gladio. Show art by Casey Brunell. Original music by Sean Simmons. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Maria Pagliologos is our strategic growth advisor. And a very special thank you to Stacey Love, whose bravery, honesty, and determination made this series possible. May her truth-telling give others permission to trust their own stories. Use their voices and know that they are not alone. If you or anyone you know is experiencing sexual violence and needs help, please visit rainn.org. That's R-A-I-N-N dot O-R-G. Or call the National Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE or text HOPE to 64673.

If you'd like to learn more about educator sexual misconduct, check out the show notes for additional resources.

Thanks for listening.