Read and Write with Natasha
This podcast discusses writing life, reviews books, and interviews authors and industry professionals.
Read and Write with Natasha
A human trafficking survivor tells her story
Amanda Blackwood, opens up about her harrowing journey as a survivor of human trafficking, not once, but thrice, beginning at the tender age of 18. Amanda's tale is not just one of survival, but an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit, as she transformed her traumatic experiences into a platform for advocacy and education.
Amanda helps us navigate the murky waters of human trafficking, underlining that it often involves individuals one may already know and trust.
She shares her personal struggle with survivor's guilt and the path towards healing, leading her to pen down her experiences and navigate the labyrinthine world of self-publishing.
Her debut as an author has not only been a transformative experience but also a stepping stone towards establishing her own publishing company to foster the voices of other survivors.
In the concluding segment of our conversation, Amanda equips us with the knowledge to discern the nuances of human trafficking, human smuggling, and prostitution while sharing her own experiences with abuse. She talks about the importance of recognizing signs of trafficking, and how she found strength in her vulnerability.
Tune in to this profound exchange of stories, insights, and life lessons that will not only educate but also inspire you to make a difference.
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➡️ 𝗣.𝗦: If you found my content useful, you might want to check out my newsletter, in which I share the ups and downs of the writing journey: https://natashatynes.substack.com/
My story doesn't look like how it's portrayed in the movies. My story isn't sensational. My story doesn't happen when I'm 10, 11, 12 years old. I'm not kidnapped by a total stranger. It's not a stranger danger. This is a familiar danger and that to mainstream media and to media outlets, and especially to schools, is far more dangerous because they can't control interactions that people have with those who are familiar to them.
Speaker 2:Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. Today we have with us Amanda Blackwood, who's an accomplished artist and an author, public speaker, podcast host, trauma recovery mentor and survivor of human trafficking. Amanda has spoken on multitude of stages international summits, radio programs and has published over a dozen books. Wow, what an impressive resume. Hi, Amanda, Thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun being here with you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. I'm so excited to hear about your story. So, amanda, from your bio it says that you're a trauma survivor and you survived human trafficking, which might be a very difficult topic to talk about. But if you don't mind, if you can share with us briefly what is the trauma that you overcame and just tell us briefly about your life and what happened to you.
Speaker 1:So, with most survivors of human trafficking, we experienced trauma very early in our lives, usually within our own households, so we grow up in these abusive environments. I was molested at four years old and it continued throughout my preteen and teen years. By the time I was 18 years old, I was looking for love and acceptance wherever I could find it, except from within myself and from any kind of faith or religion. I was really struggling in life. I was trafficked three different times once at 18 in the state of Arizona, once at 19 in the state of Florida, completely unrelated incidences, and once at 31 years old by a police officer in Scotland.
Speaker 2:Oh wow. So how did that happen? I mean, you grew up in a what was the family dynamic? And, like you know, you grew up in a regular household and then you would traffic. I mean, if you can just give us a bit of a detail, and also I'm really sorry you had to go through this, this is really horrifying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will never be sorry for it happening to me and I tell that to people all the time and that's because I found out in recent years that less than 2% of all victims of human trafficking get out with their lives. If it had not been me, it would have been somebody else who probably would not have made it. I almost didn't make it myself. So I'll never be sorry that it happened to me, because I have the ability to speak about it and I have this gift for writing and painting and bringing attention to the cause. But when I was four, the person that molested me was actually my brother. My father was physically abusive, my mother was mentally and emotionally abusive, and that was my entire family. So we grew up in a military household. We weren't around extended family at all. I really didn't know grandparents or aunts or uncles at all and, having that be the entirety of my family, I was constantly bombarded with these multiple levels of abuse. I was the baby. I was the youngest one in the family. It was the easiest one to pick on. I was always the target. So growing up like that, I learned that the people who say they love you are also the people who hurt you, and if they don't hurt you, it means that they don't love you. Doing that and growing up like that, when I was 18 years old, I ended up dating a man who was more than twice my age, and this man promised to give me the things that I was needing and sorely lacking in my life. One was love and attention, and one was shelter. I'd started running away at 15 years old. I needed somebody to be able to provide the things that I couldn't yet provide for myself, and he offered me this stuff, and I went for it, absolutely fell for it, and then he gave me away for a birthday weekend for his buddy, and I was locked up in a hotel room in Las Vegas, nevada, for 52 hours. I was repeatedly assaulted. I was told that if I left the room, I didn't have a hotel room key, I couldn't get back in, I would not have the ability to get my ID back, I wouldn't be able to fly back to where I had been living to get the rest of my things to leave. I was essentially trapped in this one place, and it's important to understand also what the true definition of human trafficking is. So we have a lot of misconceptions about it. Here in the US especially, we can't really Google this or look it up on Wikipedia. These are not reputable sources. You have to go to a reputable source.
Speaker 1:The definition of human trafficking, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain labor or commercial sex acts from another person. So there's no mention of transportation. There's no mention of money outside of the commercial aspect of commercial sex. There's no mention of age restrictions, and one of the biggest myths is the kidnapping scenario. There's a brand new movie out that talks about human trafficking and it opens up with a kidnapping scenario.
Speaker 1:Kidnapping scenarios make up less than 15% of all victims of human trafficking. Most people that are trafficked are trafficked by people they already know and trust and they're depending on, like that boyfriend when I was 18. It happens oftentimes with parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents trafficking their children, trafficking their husbands, their wives, whatever these people that are already in their life, and if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It's a lot easier to take somebody that you know, somebody who depends on you, and manipulate them into doing something that you want them to do, rather than snatching a total stranger off the street and saying okay, now you're going to go and do this because I want you to. Kidnapping is very rare.
Speaker 2:So again, sorry about what happened. It's really horrific and I can't imagine what you went through. How old were you when this happened the first time? I was 18?. Okay, and so did you realize that this was wrong, that you know you should. Did you call the police, Like what happened afterwards?
Speaker 1:I tried to get out. I also knew that I couldn't trust the police. I had been a teenage runaway since I was 15 and they just kept on taking me back to these abusive situations. I did try to get out as soon as humanly possible and I managed to successfully escape that first time and the second time. But the third time, when I was 31 years old, I was stuck there 152 days. I didn't trust the police. I had a deep-seated resentment for them for constantly taking me back to this abusive household and telling people that there were no signs of abuse.
Speaker 1:I was put in foster care for a little while in the foster family when I was a 17-year-old kid. They were wonderful people. They treated me so well and the police, when they came to pick me up and take me back to my house, told the family that I had made everything up. I was filled with lies and I did this for attention. And they did this so that foster family and the kids that I went to school with would never speak to me again. And they didn't. I didn't trust them. I did know that it was abusive, but human trafficking. This was in 1998. Human trafficking isn't something that people were really talking about. Yet we didn't even really understand what those words meant, and to some degree we still don't.
Speaker 2:So if you want to define human trafficking as being sold to someone, is regardless of the transportation aspect, so regardless of cross borders. Because when people think of human trafficking they usually think of someone being kidnapped, taken from one country to another country and sold as a prostitute in brothels or something like. That's kind of, let's say, the mainstream definition. But you're saying the accurate definition is being sold by someone you know or being given by someone you exploited.
Speaker 2:And what would the other person get out of it? Like the boyfriend that he gave you, to your friend, to his friend. What did he get out of it? Did he give him?
Speaker 1:money. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's drugs. In this case, he owed him a favor. I was the favor.
Speaker 2:I see, and the second time it happened, was it with the same boyfriend or was it with a different?
Speaker 1:person. No, completely different state, completely different set of circumstances. I had gone to Florida to stay with my dad's mother to get a knee surgery done. When I got there, my family said that I was on my own, they were not going to take me in, and I was basically rendered homeless in an instant. And a young couple came and found me and took me in and said that they had a place for me to stay. They would give me room and board until I could land on my feet. And what they actually meant was they were going to give me a place to stay until they found the highest bidder.
Speaker 1:A young man named Esteban, ended up owning me for a little while. I was sold like a slave at an auction. Without my knowledge, I was locked up for 23 and a half hours in a small room with no food, no water, no bathroom facilities. I managed to break out of the room and when I got out I ran into a police officer who was driving down the road. She did not believe my story at all and was on my own again, on the run, trying to get away from bad people. I have moved 43 times in my life trying to get away from bad people.
Speaker 2:So how old were you when you were kidnapped or taken by Esteban? I was 19 at the time, also like a year after it happened, and were there signs similar to the first one that you had no idea Like?
Speaker 1:you had no clue that this was happening. I knew that I was in a dangerous position because I was depending on somebody that I didn't know very well, but I also had no idea what they were planning on doing with me.
Speaker 2:OK, and what happened to these people? Were they ever caught?
Speaker 1:At the time I was so terrified that I did not follow up. I didn't go back to the place to see if they had broken it down, to see if they had gotten anybody else out. I didn't follow up with the news. There was a hurricane that hit Florida about that same time and I was just concerned with getting out of there completely and I ran off. I had such a tremendous amount of something called survivor's guilt that I didn't know what happened to the others and why was it me that got out and it ate away at me so much that I refused to look it up or follow up with this news story for at least a decade. I was living in California for many years before I finally tried to look it up and couldn't find any information.
Speaker 2:So how many were? There were others with you in the holding cell, I guess.
Speaker 1:I had my own room that I was locked into that I could hear underneath the door that there were other voices down the hall that were crying out for help.
Speaker 2:OK. Did you hear any foreign accents? Or did you think that they brought women from outside, or you think they were more local women, that they could not?
Speaker 1:It was so muffled it was hard to tell. Ok, it would have been really difficult to distinguish any kind of accents, but honestly, in those kinds of scenarios, when it is something similar to that, it's a crime of opportunity. So traffickers do this because there is a high payout for very low risk to themselves. That's what they're going to be looking for, not necessarily people of a foreign descent or an accent. They're going to be looking for the people who are going to be easiest to prey on and the most vulnerable, and that's going to be homeless people, that's going to be runaway teens and that might occasionally be migrants who are undocumented.
Speaker 2:So you said you went back to California, took you a long time to talk about it. When you mentioned it the first time or when you opened up about it, did you report these people or do you know what happened to them? I mean the abusers.
Speaker 1:I tried to report it, but at the time this was, it was 1999 when that happened, so it was about 2009, 2010,. When I first started really talking about it. When I first started talking about it again, human trafficking isn't something that people were really talking about. So I talked about it all the way up until 2018, as though it was a kidnapping scenario. Even though I was physically sold like a slave, I saw it as kidnapping because I didn't understand the true definition of what all this stuff meant. I also confused human trafficking with human smuggling. There's a lot of overlap in those two realms, but one does not equal the other. And I also confused human trafficking with prostitution, and while 95% of prostituted people are victims of human trafficking, it is a small percentage of all the victims of human trafficking that are actually prostitutes. So you can be in human trafficking without actually being a prostitute.
Speaker 2:So what's the difference between human smuggling and human trafficking?
Speaker 1:Human smuggling is a crime against a border. Human trafficking is a crime against a person.
Speaker 2:Ah, ok, so when you smuggle someone, you help them cross the border illegally, right, if they're then forced into trafficking.
Speaker 1:that is a huge overlap and that does happen. But these are two separate issues that both need to be addressed. I mean, if you did a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, there would be a huge overlapping area where the two coexist. But the majority of human trafficking can actually occur with children being trafficked out of their own homes. They don't have to even leave their home to be trafficked, much less a border.
Speaker 2:So after you started talking about it, you started publishing your story. Is that correct? You started writing a memoir and if you can just walk us through the writing journey of you starting to tell your story and what was basically the timeline, you know, you started opening up and then started writing it down, started speaking in conferences. How did that happen?
Speaker 1:It was about 2010 when I first started opening up and talking a little bit about what had happened. I started a blog. That was how it all kind of began for me, and I had written this blog with a three-part series on what actually transpired in Florida how I was taken in by this young couple, how I had been sold to this man named Esteban, locked up in this room, how I got out, and it was a short, you know, a three-part blog, but I put it aside and I kept on writing my other stories and I realized how beneficial it was for me to be writing about all this stuff. It was a form of therapy for me. It allowed me to take all of these horrible things that lived inside my body and in my brain and put them down on paper and physically walk away from them. It was this beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:Then, in 2011, a man that I had known for seven years asked me to get a fiance visa and move to Scotland to be with him. So I picked everything up and I moved over to Scotland. I was madly in love with this guy and it took him seven years to get me there. It took him seven days to start trafficking me. I was in Scotland for 152 days and he did not smuggle me into the country. I was there of my own free will. I did go through all the legal channels, but he did traffic me because once I was there, I was locked into his home and he would have people come in and molest or rape me for the next 152 days.
Speaker 1:When I managed to get away from there, my life was a complete wreck. I needed to write. I needed to be able to get all this stuff out of me again, and it started coming in little, tiny bits and pieces, but I wasn't ready to really write my whole story. So I started out with that original three-part blog. I turned that into a book. That was my first book that came out in 2018. And I did this with some of my other blogs and some of the other stories from my life and some of the stuff that I had gone through when I was younger, with being a teenage runaway and a drug addiction that I broke when I was 15 years old and just really hard parts of my life. But I wasn't ready yet to tackle what had happened to me in Scotland. It was still too fresh, still too new.
Speaker 1:In 2019, I found out that the man who had trafficked me in Scotland made me famous on a pornography website by posting rape videos. And when that happened it completely destroyed me. It tore me to pieces and I had no idea what to do. I had no idea how I was gonna deal with this or how to survive it. I wasn't sure I wanted to survive it. So I went into therapy and counseling and the first therapist was horrible. I'm pretty sure that she's left the industry completely because I traumatized her so much. But the second therapist was amazing. I told her right out of the gate. I said number one, do not comment me with prescription medication, because then they're done that I don't wanna bandaid, I wanna shovel. I need to get to the root of this. And number two, do not treat me like I'm some fragile porcelain doll and I'm gonna break, because if I was gonna break I'd have done that already.
Speaker 2:Let's get to it.
Speaker 1:And about a year and a half went by and towards the end of that she said I don't think there's much more that I can do to help you. What are you going to do to help you? And I said you know, I think I'm finally ready to write my book. And she said well, you've written a few already, right? Said, yes, I've written a few, but I haven't written the book. I haven't written the whole thing. And she said well, okay, it's November. Right now, we'll get through the holiday season. I'll check in with you in January and see how it's going.
Speaker 1:So, as she reached out in early January, she asked me how's it going? And I said I'm doing great. How are you doing? No, no, no, that's not what I mean. How's it going, how's the book going? And I said oh, it's done.
Speaker 1:She said what? How is it done already? She said is it a short book? I said no, it's 350 pages. She said aren't you still working two full-time jobs? I said, yes, yeah, but when you're ready to tell that story, the story that you've had bottled up your whole life, crying to get out, it just comes out of you and you can't turn it off. It was all there just dying to come out and, having gotten it out of my body, having written that entire thing, released so much of the pain and the anger and the hatred that I had been harboring for so many years. And that book was published on my 10-year anniversary of freedom from Scotland, my freedom from human trafficking. And about a month later is when I met the man that's now my husband. Everything in my world changed because I finally listened to that little voice at the back of my head and finally wrote that book.
Speaker 2:Hmm, how did you publish the book? Did you get a publisher to self publish?
Speaker 1:I ended up. I own my own publishing company. Originally I had a deal with Penguin Publishing years ago. They had planned on picking up one of my books. I had written a comedy about all the funny stuff that happened to my first year on the job as a flight attendant and the deal fell through and it broke my heart. But the person who had been the go-between for me with the publisher at Penguin Publishing told me that if I wasn't willing to quit my job as a flight attendant and move from California to Texas to be with him, that he wasn't going to help me anymore and I wasn't going to allow anybody to manipulate me ever again. So now I own my own publishing company and I help other survivors of human trafficking who've written their own stories of survival to get their voices out there and to let them be heard too. I actually just published a poetry book for another survivor of human trafficking just a couple of days ago. It was just released.
Speaker 2:I actually interviewed someone on the podcast who's survivor of human trafficking as well, a man who wrote a book. I'll put you in touch with him.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, please.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll send you the episode. So you think, a mainstream. One of the things I remember when talking with him. He said that he like there were not many people in the mainstream media who were willing to publish his story or hear his story. I was shocked, honestly, when I heard that, because for me as a you know, my background is journalism and I'm a journalist. For me that's a story that has to be told. So can you please shed light? If that is the case with you, did you feel resistance from mainstream media to tell your story? Oh, very much so.
Speaker 1:Why? The big part of that is because my story doesn't look like how it's portrayed in the movies. My story isn't sensational. My story doesn't happen when I'm 10, 11, 12 years old. I'm not kidnapped by a total stranger. It's not a stranger danger. This is a familiar danger and that to mainstream media and to media outlets, and especially to schools, is far more dangerous because they can't control interactions that people have with those who are familiar to them. They can somewhat control the interactions that people have with strangers.
Speaker 2:I see. So do you think that they did not believe you? They thought that you know you made things up or you embellished things. Is that why they did not run to publish the story?
Speaker 1:No, I think it is absolutely just. They didn't want to do it because they felt like it didn't fit the narrative of what would be sensationalized and what would carry as a big story. Because I wasn't kidnapped, because it didn't involve somebody like Jeffrey Epstein, it didn't have a famous name attached to it, so why would they cover it? I was nobody. The people who trafficked me were nobody, okay.
Speaker 2:I noticed lately some celebrities like Aston Kutcher and others have been talking a lot about human trafficking. Is that? Why is that happening? Is that you think this helped shed light on it, and what's the story with the celebrities highlighting human trafficking?
Speaker 1:I think people are starting to pay attention to things that they didn't want to see before. There were a lot of people out there that were ignoring a lot of things, and I recently saw an interview of Aston Kutcher talking about what it is that he does, and, if you've noticed, he hasn't done any movies or TV shows or anything like that and a few years now, and the reason for that is because he considers fighting human trafficking to be his day job now and he's not leaving it anytime soon.
Speaker 1:I have so much tremendous amount of respect for that he's out there doing the work because he himself has kids about the same age as those that he has seen being trafficked.
Speaker 2:And he focuses on human trafficking in the sense of local human trafficking in the US or across borders.
Speaker 1:He does both. He's done some work overseas, but he does focus on a lot of the issues right here in our backyards. And I think that's probably one of the big issues that we have here in the US is that we want to believe, because of the movies and the media and the hype, that it doesn't happen here in the US. It happens everywhere else in the world and we are too good and too proud to admit that it happens here. A lot of times it's happening right next door to or in the backyard of the same people who are saying it doesn't happen here.
Speaker 2:So what was the reaction to your books? What was the feedback the negative and the positive and just curious what the people would say.
Speaker 1:I got to say. 99% of all the feedback that I got on my autobiography was absolutely just trailblazing positive. It was incredibly supportive and uplifting. The only negative review that I've ever received on the book was from one of my traffickers, trying to debunk me and trying to call me out as a liar. That review was removed because he admitted to a personal association with me.
Speaker 2:Okay, I see. So and how are you selling these books? How are you marketing them? Like podcasts is one way. Going on podcasts speaking. But how you know, I'm an author, I'm struggling myself and you know, as all authors especially you know, we're not stiffing game or whatever. In the all public we all like struggle to market our books. So, and your story is extremely important, you know, and you know more important than whatever I write. So so how are you?
Speaker 1:marketing them. First of all, every story is important and I would love to hear your story sometime too. But some of the best marketing that I've ever done, of course, is the public speaking aspect of it. Last year, a big part of it. I hadn't quite gotten into doing a lot of public speaking yet, but I was doing farmers markets, so I was going out to the farmers market and setting out a table with all of my books lined up. At the time I think I only had 10 books I've got 13 now but I had 10 books available and I sat them all up across the table.
Speaker 1:When people came up to ask me about the books, then I would launch into this. It almost became a scripted response of what each of these books were about and how it covers different parts of my life, and it was very animated and I started to realize that if I used these animations and some of these phrases that I was using at the farmers market, I could tell what people were reacting to and I could put that, incorporate that, into public speaking. I started doing a lot more public speaking and all of a sudden my books are flying off the shelves. Another great marketing tool that I've used is, since I'm on a lot of podcasts I do interviews a lot and I do my own podcasts I make sure that I have a link to my autobiography to be able to purchase it directly from Barnes Noble in my signature line always and sometimes I change that book up, especially if I'm in the middle of a conversation with somebody.
Speaker 1:I have a supply signature. That's a different book and I've noticed that my book sales have increased from that also. The farmers market was great. Public speaking is huge. The signature line is a big thing. But I'm also a professional artist. I have a solo art exhibit coming up for the entire month of August.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I always have it in my contract that when my artwork is on display they have to have at least one of my books on display, also with literature on where people can find the rest of my books. It doesn't take up very much space that way and people learn a lot more about the artist and they want to purchase the books too.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, I didn't know you can actually sell books at the farmers market. I thought you had to sell vegetables and produce and stuff.
Speaker 1:These days, you can sell everything at the farmers market.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, that's the title of a blog how I sold my book at the farmers market. So is writing books or republishing a company? Is this your full-time job, in addition to being an art? Is that sustainable? As you know, can you sustain yourself by publishing books, and that's kind of the $1 million question.
Speaker 1:It helps. It can pay some bills. I will absolutely admit that it can pay some bills, especially if you do the marketing and everything correctly and you're selling enough. But what really is my bread and butter is the public speaking. If you've written a book, you can be a public speaker. You have to learn what your key notes are. You have to understand what your key phrases are a repeatable phrase and you have to study up on what it means to be a public speaker and how to get your message out there and how you can make this relevant to people. That's going to make them not only want to hire you for further public speaking engagements in the future, but also purchase your book and share it with other people. Hey, I saw this person talk. You need to read their book. You're going to love it.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, that's great and thank you very much. Okay, so have you ever been asked this question it might be annoying, but you know I'm sure you've been asked it like why did this happen to you three times? Like why were you trafficked three times? Like one billion, twice shy? You know I Get that a lot. Yeah, I'm sorry if this is offensive or anything, but I'm I'm sure it's in people's Mind, right yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get that a lot. One of the things that I like to compare that question to when it is brought up is, very gently, just to understand, that, I'm not offended in any way, because this is a very common question. But if you were to reframe this and talk about it as a rape survivor Three times you were raped three times Didn't you learn anything? The first time it takes on a kind of a different meaning. Correct, when you grow up in the environment where you feel like the, the people who love you are the people who hurt you and vice versa. And if they don't hurt you, then that means they don't love you.
Speaker 1:You constantly seek out these abusive, manipulative relationships, and this is what traffickers and abusers typically look for. They look for the people who are missing something in their life, who they can then promise to fill that void for them and then manipulate them and abuse them until they do exactly what they're being told and asked to do. Since that last person was a police officer, he was familiar with human trafficking at the time. He was familiar with psychology. He did know my past, my history. He was one of the first people that I ever told I had known him for seven years before he did it to me the guy in scotland right, so he knew about your history and do you think that was part of the attraction for him?
Speaker 2:Is that he saw that in?
Speaker 1:I see it's uh, it's a high Reward, low risk way for him to make a lot of money without having to care about somebody. What happened to him? I reported him once I got back to the us. After I found out that he had taken all those photos and videos and put them on photoshopping websites and different websites all over the place. There was a full investigation, they say. I wasn't there for the investigation. I wasn't really asked there very many probing questions, so I don't know how deep the Investigation went. Eventually I received a letter from his superiors there in Scotland and that letter told me that they saw no signs of visible abuse and the case was closed.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry to hear it. Um, so now you're, you moved on your marriage, you're happily married, and You're happily married. And how, like how, did you survive all of this? I mean, it takes someone very resilient to survive all of this At the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just saw it, as I didn't have much of a choice. The the options were to live or die, and I I knew that there was going to be something else around the corner that was waiting for me. I knew Life had to be better than what I had experienced and I was willing to fight for it. To make that happen. I didn't know how, but I knew I was willing to try.
Speaker 1:In 2019, when the pornography thing happened, my world was destroyed. That was the moment I truly hit rock bottom. Not the moments when I was being trafficked in scotland, because at that point survival mode had kicked on. I had mentally blocked out things that were happening to me as a form of survival. But when this happened in 2019, I no longer had a choice. I had to face it. And he had taken Any kind of social media or personal information that he could find for me and had put that on the pornography website also. So people who were finding these pornography videos Now we're able to find me and follow me in real life. They could find me on social media. They could find me in small towns in colorado. They knew where I lived. They knew everything about me.
Speaker 2:Did he use your real name? Did he use your real name? He didn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, and I knew that if people were going to continue to find me, that they needed to understand why they were finding me. This was not a video that was out there because it was consensually made. This was rape. This was not something that was supposed to be a fake rape video, and this was something that a disgusting human being put on the internet. And when I started doing that, he started backing off Because he started to realize that anything that he put out there from then on was going to come right back on him. That was when I found out that I had a lion in my lungs. That was when I started speaking up and shouting from the rooftop. This is what happened to me. This is what's happening to millions of people around the world, and we need to stand up and do something about it or nothing is ever going to change.
Speaker 2:So the books that you've been publishing, how many have you published by other authors, by other survivors?
Speaker 1:I have five other authors currently. A couple of them have several books available. The most recent is Jenny Foodle, her poetry book called Railroad, and I'm really excited about this one. It's very cool.
Speaker 2:And so you're publishing company. Do you use amazon, kdp or how do you like? What are the technicalities of your publishing company, if? If you don't mind sharing with us?
Speaker 1:Sure, I tend to go through draft to digital because I can actually break down and have the funding separations. So I'll take like a small percentage of the royalties that come in by small I mean 10 percent, very, very small and then I leave the marketing up to them, because that's not what publishers typically do. But I will make sure that their, their entire body of work is put together and I never charge anything on the top, just straight. The only thing that I take is 10 percent of the royalties. If their book does really well, that's great for me. If their book doesn't do that well, oh well, that's okay. Their voice is out there and their voice is gonna be heard because they're making sure of it.
Speaker 1:And who does the editing? I have an editor that I've known since high school who's absolutely phenomenal. She and I kind of do it together. So I'll go through it the first time and then I will pass it off to her to make sure that she Catches absolutely everything that I don't catch, and then we'll just kind of pass it back and forth once in a while, yeah, and who pays for the editing idea?
Speaker 2:Oh Okay, and has the this publishing house Got in any Attention from media outlets? Because it's it's a unique idea, it's a unique publishing house that you know deserves to be Widely known, so that other survivors can, you know, approach you and tell their stories. So how are you marketing this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really not doing marketing for it. I've got so many other things going on right now that I don't want to overwhelm my schedule. I don't want to overwhelm myself. So it's kind of a word of mouth thing a survivor of trafficking will be involved in a small group of other survivors in another city and they'll start talking about how they got their book out there and that's one person will kind of spark the bug and they will inspire other survivors to start writing about their stories so that they might think about getting them published in the future too. Then they start writing to me and we kind of communicate back and forth.
Speaker 1:And I built these personal relationships with people and having it be kind of a one-man show running everything in the background, I don't want to do. I don't want to take on too much because I don't want to lose that Authenticity. I don't want to lose that personal touch and that connection that I have with each and every individual Author who's out there wanting to get their voices heard and wanting their stories to be known. I don't want to be famous definitely not in it for that. I just want to help other people to feel like they're not alone in this world.
Speaker 2:Have you ever got any threats or many?
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:Hate mails and yeah, if you can tell us a bit about that, what are the threats?
Speaker 1:There are so many people out there who are terrified that I am threatening their industry, I'm threatening their livelihood there. A lot of the threats are things like Wanting to permanently shut, silence me. I do have some pretty major anxiety occasionally when I go out of town to do a speaking gig. If I advertise it well in advance, I know that there's a possibility some very bad people could show up. I've had to hire private security for some of these events. I did have an estranged uncle that I haven't seen for over 20 years, drive over a thousand miles to come, get in my face At a book signing event. You never know who's going to shurn up at these things, but it's really important to recognize that it. Number one it can happen I. Number two it often does happen. And number three as long as you remain calm and people know where you are and you have people around you at all times, you're pretty safe.
Speaker 1:What about your brother? I haven't talked to him in a great many years. So we didn't have much of a relationship when we were kids growing up. I really didn't want anything to do with him. For obvious reasons, he left when I was 15. That was about the time that I started running away from home. I went back and saw him. I've seen him twice since then. In my entire life I have not had any kind of relationship with my mother, my father or my brother. I haven't seen any of them since 2009. And the last time we ever exchanged any words it was an email to and from my mother in 2013.
Speaker 2:Okay, and your brother? Has he ever admitted assaulting you?
Speaker 1:No, he calls me a liar. He actually tries to contact different radio programs and TV programs when I'm on them to say that he didn't do any of these things. But in reality not only did he do them, but he himself was so traumatized because of unknown things that I'm not aware of that. He claims that he doesn't remember anything from his youth before he was 18, which is a very serious trauma response that happens in boys who grow up in abusive households.
Speaker 2:What does the future hold for you? What are your future plans?
Speaker 1:Oh, at least two books a year. I've got titles written for over 600 books that I'm hoping to write eventually. But the biggest news is that my husband's daughter and her husband are expecting their first baby in December.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to be a grandmommy. Congrats. Thank you, yeah, that's just very nice news. And you said you want to write 600 books.
Speaker 1:I have the titles for over 600 books already written down, with a basic synopsis outlined for every one of them.
Speaker 2:And there are books about your life. Or what are these books about? Are they fiction and nonfiction?
Speaker 1:I have ventured into fiction in the last few years or so. I have a science fiction series. It's a three book series. It's already completed. I have a historical fiction that's based on my grandmother's life as a wing walker of the 1930s and 40s. And then I have a historical fiction, murder and mystery series that I'm working on. I've already painted the covers for. I also have another science fiction series. It's kind of a magical realm inspired by the worlds of Pierce Anthony. These are my passions. These are what I want to write. I've written a lot of nonfiction, but I think it's time to kind of delve into the imagination now. And my science fiction series it's already done as a post-apocalyptic series. I tell people all the time who better to predict the end of the world than somebody who's already lived it?
Speaker 2:So how many hours do you write a day? You sound like a writing machine.
Speaker 1:I mean, it depends on the day. There's some days where I don't get any writing done at all, and then there's other days where I can't stop myself from writing. I write the entire time, from the moment I wake up until it is until it's time to eat, which a lot of times this means skipping two or three meals in a day.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I wish I can skip meals, that would be nice, I could skip a few more for sure. So okay, let me see, before we conclude, human trafficking. How prevalent is it these days, and you know, I have a daughter myself and you know like what are the signs that you should look for and how common is it?
Speaker 1:It's unfortunately on the rise and getting more common every day the numbers in human trafficking. Every single time you Google it or look on the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI site, wherever it is you look, the numbers are different. It's hard to get a real grasp on it and have a solid understanding of what the numbers really are, because there's so many unreported cases in the world and unreported cases right here in the US. Some of the biggest signs to look for, though, is an altering of a person's personality. Yeah, these are the same signs that you're going to see like if somebody is involved in a domestic violence relationship because they're being manipulated, they're being abused. They're going to have, maybe not physical bruises, but mental bruises. They're going to start to act differently. They're not going to have an easy time looking you in the eye anymore. They're going to stop doing the things that they love. They're going to pull back from their family and friends because they are going through this incredible amount of shame for the things that they're having to do to keep this person in their life happy, so that they don't have to pay the consequences.
Speaker 1:In the worst parts of my trafficking, I had food deprivation. I was being starved, I had sleep deprivation, I went eight and a half days without sleep and I was waterboarded for sport. These people are literally being tortured. If they don't comply with what it is that they're being told to do, that is going to absolutely cause somebody to fall into a deep depression. They're going to be dark, they're going to start to change, they're going to draw back and they're going to be angry at anybody who tries to tell them that what they're going through is abusive, because they don't want to hear it. They already know it's abusive. They don't want to hear it because they are so convinced that they love this person so much that they really would be willing to do anything for them.
Speaker 2:What about the signs of the abusers?
Speaker 1:Sometimes bruises but they try not to. As my trafficker told me, they try not to bruise the merchandise but people bruises on a person can actually detract from their monetary value.
Speaker 2:What about signs that you can detect the abuser? This is a dangerous person.
Speaker 1:Somebody who is emotionally manipulative, somebody who thinks mainly about themselves. With my trafficker, one of the things that people should have been looking for and did not is the amount of total strangers coming in and out of the house at all hours. So he would go to work and the house would be quiet. He would come home and within an hour we would have the first guest come over. The guest would stay for approximately an hour to an hour and a half and they would leave and another person would show up. It ran like clockwork and it was rarely ever the same person more than once, I see.
Speaker 2:What about in?
Speaker 1:their behavior. The biggest signs is their level of generosity will increase because they have more money. You don't know where the money is coming from, but one of the things that I have learned through all of this is that when a person doesn't earn the money for themselves, they don't value it nearly as much. They are more willing to give it away, to be generous with it, to spend it on other people, than if they have to put in several hours of hard labor or work themselves to be able to earn that same money. They're going to start to be more outgoing and gregarious. They're going to be possibly more closed off about who comes into their home.
Speaker 1:They might start to be manipulative and controlling in relationships where they take away their partner's cell phone to control who they're talking to, or they take away their computers so that they don't have internet access. These kinds of things can be really difficult to see, but one night when I was in Scotland, I made his sister start to see it because I made sure that she was there when he had too much to drink and I stepped just a little out of line when he snapped at me. It scared her. That's the kinds of things that you have to watch for when you start to see in those red flags, when you start hearing those warning bells going off in the back of your brain, listen, because those things are there for a reason. You've got to listen to your intuition.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, thank you very much, amanda, for joining me and sorry again for what you've been through the horrific experience. I salute you for your resilience and for speaking out and for telling your story and for also allowing others to tell their story through their publishing company. Please stay in touch. Any parting words you'd like to say before we conclude? Oh?
Speaker 1:absolutely. If somebody out there is going through a hard time, not knowing what resources are available to you is the same thing as not having the resources. Look up and find the organizations that are willing to help you, whether it's a National Human Trafficking hotline or if it's a suicide prevention hotline. Find the resources that you need, and revealing your weakness, revealing your vulnerabilities, is not actually a weakness. It is a strength. Find that strength within yourself to ask for the help that you need.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, and people can find your books and on Amazon and other places like bars and nobel and targets and others.
Speaker 1:Yes, and my website growthfromdarknesscom or Etsy. I sell signed copies.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you very much, amanda, for you know telling your story and for anyone who is listening or watching. Thank you for joining us today and until we meet again. Thank you so much, Natasha.
