Note: This investigation involves childhood sexual abuse, has strong language, and may not be suitable for all readers.
On May 15, 2022, long-time pediatrician Dr. Charles Ray Jones died in Brooklyn, Connecticut, at 93. Jones practiced pediatric medicine for nearly his entire adult life, starting in the early 1960s with an office in Hamden before moving shop to New Haven in 1996, where he worked until he retired in 2021.
Jones was best known for his controversial treatment methods for Lyme disease; he was revered by patients’ families, who travelled far and wide seeking treatment, but reprimanded by the state’s medical establishment. In 2010, Connecticut’s Medical Examining Board fined him $10,000, placed his license on probation, and ordered his practice to be monitored.
When he died, he was commemorated for his work by several Lyme disease organizations; LymeDisease.org called him a “trailblazing” doctor who “treated more than 15,000 children from around the world.” Project Lyme called his death “a profound loss for the Lyme community.” Under an online obituary posted by his family, numerous former patients and supporters offered their condolences, praising his work and crediting him with saving children’s lives.
In the year leading up to his death, his daughter, Martha Jones, received a series of phone calls from her father’s employees, telling her that he was “deteriorating” and “really shouldn’t be practicing.” Martha successfully convinced him to move into her home in Brooklyn, Connecticut, under the pretense that he could continue working via telehealth appointments.
“As I was going through his belongings, trying to decide what to keep and what not to, I came across a very thick photo album of Polaroids, and — I knew who this child was,” said Martha. “It was under the guise of medical photographs, very thick, and these photos were dated over the years of, I believe, like, 1978 to ’82.”
Martha struggled to get the words out as she recalled the details of her earth-shattering discovery. The album contained revealing photos of young boys, former patients of his, aged four to eleven. The album was the first of three she would later discover, altogether containing thousands of illicit photographs of young boys.
“It was always lips, chest, penis and buttocks,” Martha said. “The ones that I found in the initial set, I’m sorry to say, but… there was a dilated anus, and an erect penis, and you know — it was just horrific. I’m going to vomit just thinking about it; it was just so horrible.”
Shocked, Martha beckoned her son, Julian, who was 21 at the time, downstairs.
“I censored some of these photos, and I said, ‘Honey, are these what I think they are?’” Martha recalled. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, Mom.’ And he looked down, and he was shaking his head, and he said, ‘Mom’ — we called my dad Oppa — He said, ‘Oppa molested me from the ages of four to 11,’ and my whole world just shattered.”
Martha and Julian immediately confronted Jones, who was bedridden at the time, then called the police, and an officer from Troop D responded to the home. She asked the officer if the photo collection was “what I think it is.”
“He said, ‘Yes, ma’am, this is indeed child pornography,’” said Martha.
On the officers’ advice, Martha arranged her father’s arrest the next day at Northwell Putnam Hospital; she dropped him off at the ER for a wound care appointment, alerted the staff to what would transpire, and left him there for the police to collect.
“At the hospital, [he] was arrested and eventually deemed incompetent by a judge,” said Jones. “And he died four months later in a nursing home. And that’s where our hell began.”
Dr. Jones’ Double Life
While Dr. Jones attained a cult-like following among the patients he treated, his daughter saw him in a different light. Martha described her childhood years as “not a happy upbringing at all.”
“It was hard,” said Martha. “My dad was out cheating; my mom was really drunk.”
Martha described her father as being a “complete philanderer” and physically abusive to her mother, factors which she believes worsened her mother’s alcoholism. Around the age of 11 or 12, her father also made Martha “his confidant.”
“I knew all the women he cheated with; they were my friends’ moms,” said Martha. “I was the confidant, which is sick, and I had to carry all this, and do well in school, and be in sports, and my father was so abusive to me like I was never good enough.”
By her teenage years, Martha said she became “very confrontational” with both her parents. She noted her younger brother, Christopher, was “a lot more passive.”
“I left at 17,” said Martha. “The minute I graduated high school, I went out to L.A. I went to USC. I was like, ‘Get me the heck out of here!’”
At USC, Martha studied English and pre-law, a cover for what she said was ultimately a study in “sororities and boyfriends.” The experiences she shared with her boyfriend’s family there are what first made her aware of the abnormality and dysfunction in her own family.
“We were together all four years, and his family was actually extraordinarily wealthy, but also extremely down to earth,” said Martha. “I realized, ‘Look at that, they have money, but they do things as a family and they are very happy.’ It was a totally different way of life, and that’s when my mindset changed.”
Despite her touch-and-go relationship with her parents, Martha felt closest to her father, whom she called “her rock.”
“I could rely on him financially; I could rely on him, I thought, emotionally, but I think a lot of all that was really manipulation because he had all these secrets,” said Martha. “He embraced my adopting Julian not because he was happy for me, but because he wanted a victim, and that’s why it’s been so hard to get my head around all of this.”
Martha remained in Los Angeles for the next 20 years. She worked as a high-end realtor, married her first husband, and ultimately developed a drinking problem of her own. Facing a crumbling marriage, worsening alcoholism, and a mother losing a battle with breast cancer, Martha decided it was “time to come home.” She moved back to the East Coast in 1994, first spending six months with her family in Cheshire before settling in New York City.
“I was commuting back-and-forth every weekend, to and from New York and Connecticut, to take care of my mom,” said Martha. “I’ve always been the caretaker of my family.”
She remained close to console her father in the year after her mother’s death. She continued working as a realtor until July 1997, when she joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
“By August, I was in social work school,” said Martha. “Switched careers, switched everything, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”
She worked as a substance abuse counselor until 2001. In 2000, she began considering options for adopting a child. While living in New York, her father called and asked her to help him run his office “many times,” but she refused each time because she “didn’t want to leave.”
“I knew his management style was horrible,” said Martha. “The only person who could really take control of that office was my mother, you know, but she died.”
In late 2001 or early 2002, Martha finally relented to her father’s pleas and agreed to help him manage his staff and oversee his finances after he told her that one of his nurses was embezzling money. In March 2002, the same month she adopted Julian from Guatemala, she moved into her father’s house.
“The job with my dad was perfect, because I was able to, kind of, be home with Julian,” said Martha.
Martha, Julian, and her second husband, Adam Greenblatt, lived in her father’s New Haven apartment until February 2017, when she split with him, found her current partner, and moved into her current home in Brooklyn, CT. The move was prompted by a significant decline in her father’s mental health.
“He was getting really nuts,” said Martha. “In 2015, I got a call from the doorman of our building. It was a Sunday, and he was like, ‘Your dad is totally losing it.’”
The doorman told her he was “screaming” and “banging around” his office and asked Martha, who was out at the time, to come back and check on him. She recalled finding him half-naked, in a “puddle of urine,” and “drunk as a skunk” at 11 a.m.
“I put a towel over him,” said Martha. “He’s screaming, ‘Don’t call 911!’ and I have two thoughts; I’m like, if I don’t call 911, you’re going to die. And if I do call 911, you’re going to lose your license.”
Martha ultimately opted for the latter option, thinking, “screw it, I’m calling 911.” Her father was “loaded,” and she couldn’t physically get him to stand. He was ultimately carted off to the hospital, where his attending nurse told Martha that her father had a blood alcohol content of “almost a 0.30.”
As a result of the incident, her father was put in the HAVEN program, the only wellness program statutorily authorized to confidentially assist licensed health professionals suffering from mental illness or substance use disorders. Those placed in the program must complete it satisfactorily before returning to work, and HAVEN must report those who fail or refuse the program to the state’s Department of Public Health for disciplinary action.
“He’s gone for six months, his license is suspended, he had to follow all these steps to retain his license, et cetera,” said Martha. “He hoodwinks all of the psychiatrists and psychologists and, you know, it was just ridiculous.”
Her father’s mental deterioration was “an eye-opening thing” for Martha, who knew then that she didn’t want Julian to be around him in such a state. It also caused a significant rift between her and her father, who she said was “very angry, very rebellious” towards her for calling 911, even though she continued to watch over his medical practice while he was gone. Martha said she continued to do so until her father appointed a “totally corrupt person” to oversee the clinic’s finances, barring her from her previous oversight.
“He just blew it all and installed these corrupt people to oversee it, and I’m just like, ‘I’m out of here’” said Martha. “I could have moved even before then. It was horrible. He basically just chewed me up and spit me out.”
Jones’ health “deteriorated drastically as time went on, physically and mentally,” said Martha. She and her son found “bottles of vodka everywhere, pills everywhere,” when they began packing up her father’s office in 2022 to move him back in with them. Martha said she saw both her father and her mother take pills as a child but didn’t understand the depth of her father’s drug use until she was an adult.
“We also found out that his medical assistant was prescribing herself Valium,” said Martha. “I mean, I could just go on. I had to have the DEA investigate her. It was just a nightmare. This was all after I left, so I had no oversight.”
Both Martha and Julian described Jones as a narcissist, cunning manipulator, and ego-centric man whose public presentation differed greatly from the person they knew privately.
“He didn’t care about us; he didn’t care about anyone or anything,” said Martha. “He was a narcissist and a sociopath. He didn’t care about anything but his work and all the adulation it brought him.”
Julian’s Road to Recognition
Julian agreed to speak with Inside Investigator to share his perspective about his own life and his grandfather’s. Regarding his childhood, Julian said it was “more average than not,” and altogether described it as a “pretty good, normal childhood.”
“Obviously the abuse happened,” said Julian. “But generally, I went to school, I had my social life; Things were pretty normal when looking at it from an outside perspective.”
He was unable to recall exactly when the abuse began but estimated it started around four to six years old, occurring “at least weekly.”
“It would happen late at night, especially when I was younger, adjusting right after adoption, because I would sleep in the same bed as my parents, so either my mom or my grandfather,” said Julian. “And when I saw my grandfather, then those were the times he would abuse me. Or he would bring me downstairs into his office, and he would do it there. Or if my mom was away, and we’d be in the bathroom together, he’d bring me into there.”
“‘I’m just checking up on you, making sure you’re OK,’” Julian recalled him saying. “Basically, sexually assaulting me under the guise of medical practice.”
Julian said his grandfather never explicitly threatened him, instead making the abuse appear nonchalant or normal.
“He just said, you know, ‘Oh, you don’t need to tell mom about this,’” said Julian. “He knew how to play it up to where, basically, he made it seem like I don’t have to tell my mom about what’s going on, but not in a threatening way.”
Growing up, Julian said his brain did a good job at compartmentalizing the abuse, discarding it from his memory. Psychiatrists call this phenomenon “dissociative amnesia.” Julian said he would experience “recollections of moments here and there” but didn’t understand them as being “explicitly a bad thing” until he was older.
“As I grow older, my brain starts to remember more because I’m more prepared for it now,” said Julian. “Unfortunately, when I was younger, it probably would have been better to know about it, that way I could have gotten help quicker. But you know, I think my body and brain were really protecting me at that time.”
Julian recalled one instance when he was “eight or nine,” when he kicked his grandfather off him, and told him, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” He said that stopped “the major sexual abuse” from then on.
“I think that that’s really where I found my voice and, you know, even if I didn’t understand it, I knew that, like — this is not right, I don’t want to keep doing this,” said Julian.
It also marked the beginning of Julian’s realization that he is “strong as a person,” and that he “wasn’t going to be the one to let him overpower me.” Despite finding his voice and understanding that his grandfather’s abuse was wrong, it took a long time for Julian to realize the significance of what occurred, understand how it impacted him psychologically, or recognize it as abuse.
Julian recalled being “depressed before I even really understood what depression was” and said that around the age of ten, he started noticing feelings of unease, a sense that “something doesn’t feel right.”
“There was just something in me where it was almost like my homeostasis was off, and I could tell that before I could even comprehend it,” said Julian. “Age 13 was really where I began to demonstrate a lot of the depressive feelings and everything, and I could actually understand it.”
It was around this time that Julian first began therapy. At the time, therapists thought that Greenblatt’s abuse of Julian was the cause of his depression. Julian described his relationship with his dad as being “harder” when he was younger, chalking it up to his father’s own history of sexual abuse.
“When I was younger, he just – he didn’t know how to be a dad because my dad was actually sexually abused as a child as well,” said Julian. “He had no idea how to raise a kid, and he tried his best but, I think he repeated a lot of what his dad did.”
Greenblatt never sexually abused Julian but was “emotionally abusive” and struggled with bipolar disorder, making their relationship “very on and off,” Julian said. Their relationship improved as they aged, however.
“As I got older, you know, he had grown up too and done more introspection and everything,” said Julian. “As I kept getting older and more of an adult too, I think it was easier for him to kind of connect with me in general as well. So, it was definitely better in that sense, but [it was] very hard growing up with him when I was younger.”
It was because of Greenblatt’s experience with child sexual abuse that he recognized the signs in Julian before anybody else. Julian believes Greenblatt’s suspicions were raised by him “shutting down instead of talking to people” as a teenager, despite being an outgoing and social child. Julian recalls Greenblatt accusing Jones of abuse but said that Jones knew how to shut it down effectively.
“Anytime my dad had confronted my grandfather, my grandfather would manipulate my mom into abandoning my father and ultimately shutting those accusations down too,” said Julian.
Julian gave several reasons why he never told his mother about what happened to him until she discovered the photos. Chief among them was the fact that his psychological repression of the episodes, and his innocence, made him unsure and unaware that what he experienced was sexual abuse.
“I would have therapists ask me like, ‘Oh, is there any sexual abuse at home?’” Julian recalled. “[I would say] like, ‘No, no, that’s crazy to think about.’ It’s not like I was researching either; it’s not like I was watching documentaries on childhood sex abuse or anything, so it’s not like I could see patterns or signs.”
Julian’s long road to recognition and reporting is not uncommon; studies have found that anywhere from 50-70% of people who experience child sexual abuse do not disclose their abuse until adulthood. Julian admitted that denial also likely played a role in his delay.
“I think definitely there had to be some denial,” Julian said. “You know, whether it was conscious or subconscious, there was definitely denial in my head going about it, so that definitely plays a part as well.”
While Julian believes he would have eventually realized what occurred as abuse on his own and reported it, he said his mother’s discovery of the photos is what “opened the floodgates.”
“I was looking over them with her like, ‘Oh, this is a lot of what happened to me,’” said Julian. “And then, as my mom was describing it all, like, that child pornography basically is what it was, I was like, ‘Oh, so what happened to me wasn’t normal. It wasn’t good.’”
Julian’s memory of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the discovery was foggy, and he remembers “distancing” himself and “going through the motions,” focusing on his work and increasing his therapy sessions.
“I remember definitely increasing my therapy, calling my therapist almost daily,” Julian said. “I think my mom took care of a lot of stuff in the background with the authorities. But for me, I was just mainly trying to focus on my own mental health and just trying to keep myself stable.”
More than anything, Julian wanted to understand why the abuse happened and “judge it from there.” After the discovery, he and his mother confronted his grandfather, and Julian was disappointed by his lack of accountability.
“He said the same excuses of, ‘Oh, I was just checking for hernias,’ or ‘Just doing checkups on you, making sure you’re OK,’” said Julian. “He continued to deny it afterwards, even shifting the blame onto me, because he said, ‘I’m sorry you interpreted it that way,’ which is, you know, classic narcissist talk.”
Julian wanted “not to have to abandon him,” going as far as to say that if Jones had just taken accountability, he could “probably have managed a relationship with him” and “handled it domestically,” regardless of “whatever his mom did in the background” with the police.
“Had the police still got involved and all that, obviously I would have cooperated,” said Julian. “But in my own mind, I just didn’t want to have to abandon my family. But I knew I had to.”
Ultimately, the police were involved, and Julian gave his testimony. After coming to terms with the fact that he was sexually abused, he finally disclosed it to his therapist, and at that point was diagnosed with PTSD.
“It was almost relief for me,” Julian said. “Finally, I have this answer as to everything I’ve been feeling, everything I’ve been going through in life,” said Julian. “It’s like I finally understand why I feel this way.”
The Aftermath: Looking Back on a Life of Lies
Julian also felt relieved by Jones’ death.
“It was relief that I don’t have to handle this anymore or feel bad about not talking to him anymore,” said Julian. “It was a sense of relief that I could just go on with my life now.”
When asked how he felt about the outpouring of support for his grandfather after he died, Julian said it felt “surreal.”
“It’s funny because these people, they don’t know what happened, or if they do know, just want to put on this nice face,” said Julian. “I just remember seeing one of the comments was like, ‘Heaven just gained a new angel,’ or ‘He’s the angel at the forefront’ and all this stuff and it’s just, when I was processing everything at the time, it was like, ‘That’s not exactly how it is.’”
Julian likened the public response to being “almost like a fairytale ending they were giving him.” He didn’t blame anyone for praising his grandfather, because few knew the truth. Julian acknowledged that as a pediatrician, he undoubtedly helped “a lot of kids medically, but who knows at what cost?”
Jones’ death left Martha feeling “disgusted, shattered” and “devastated.” She was angry at the so many questions he had left her that she knew could never be answered.
“It’s interesting because I always thought that my world would be completely shattered when my dad died because, you know, not only was I his daughter but I managed his practice, and our lives were very enmeshed in so many ways,” said Martha. “And I was so thoroughly, utterly disgusted with him and everything that, more than anything, I wanted answers, and the finality of it left me completely bereft of what I wanted and needed.”
Julian said that although his relationship with his mother was good, he still experiences “moments of resentment.”
“I feel like, ‘You’re my mom, you should have been there,’ and I’ve worked through this in therapy a lot of the time too,” said Julian. “Unfortunately, I feel like there were plenty of signs, really.”
Martha shared a few of those signs with Inside Investigator. Throughout the years she worked for her father, she recalled that on two separate occasions, there were employees at his office who had been caught in possession of child pornography. The first was a doctor, who was fired right as she moved to New Haven. The second was the bookkeeper her father installed to oversee the clinic after being placed in the HAVEN program. He was let go three weeks after being appointed when staff found the pornography in his briefcase. Martha is unsure if anybody ever reported them to the police.
“I mean, how many medical offices have three pedophiles?” Martha asked incredulously.
She recalled her brother telling her in the mid-90s, after their mother passed, that while visiting Jones, he walked into their Cheshire home one day and saw a young patient sitting on Jones’ lap. The boy was wearing only underwear.
“My brother walked in, and he was like, just shocked,” Martha said.
In total, Martha recalled at least three patients who would occasionally “spend the night” with him. In addition to the boy her brother walked in on, Martha recalled a young boy and girl spending nights at her father’s home in Cheshire in 1995. This was during the short period she stayed with her father immediately after leaving Los Angeles.
“My dad just had a way with people,” said Martha. “I don’t know. It’s just uncanny. I would have lost my mind if my son’s pediatrician had asked Julian to spend the night at their house, but he had a way.”
After Jones’ death, Martha learned that other family members had known his secret for years.
“I also was told by a cousin that when he married my mother, she knew he was a pedophile, and she asked her sister, who has since passed away, whether she should marry my father and — my aunt, her sister — said no, and she married anyway,” Martha said.
From the photos Martha found, both before and since her father’s death, it appears the abuse spanned decades. Martha believes it ended as late as the early 2000s, as “parents were more savvy” by that time. Unfortunately, she found evidence suggesting he was acting on his urges as soon as he got into medicine.
“The last picture I found was a slide from Memorial Sloan Kettering of him with a nude baby,” said Jones. “So that means that he was doing this back in his residency. This slide was dated 1958.”
Since his death, she’s also heard stories suggesting he acted on them even earlier, when he was a counselor at Camp DeWitt, an all-boys camp in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. Opening in 1924, the camp closed in the mid-1990s.
“He had some kind of incident where, I don’t know what happened, but he got fired, he had some accusation,” said Martha. “I have tried to internet sleuth it; there’s nothing about it. I assume that was somewhere [during the] late 50s, early 60s.”
Martha has cooperated with authorities, sending off the evidence she’s found to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Internet Crimes Against Children task force (ICAC), and the New Haven FBI office, in hopes they might be able to identify some of the victims. Martha learned that one of his former patients, who she believes was the boy her brother found on their father’s lap, later died of an overdose. Approximately a year ago, Martha said she received a particularly devastating call from NCMEC.
“They asked me if I had a clothed picture of Julian at around the age of six that I could send them, and my heart just sunk,” Martha said. “I asked why, and they said they think he’s on the dark web.”
Jones was “completely computer illiterate,” and was “actually scared of the internet,” Martha said. She recalled transitioning his office to use electronic health records while her father continued using paper medical charts. She thinks it’s likely her father was “part of some kind of pedophile ring,” and believed it could explain the other pedophiles who worked at the clinic, and the fact he left the family so little money when he died.
“That terrifies me, because my father, I think, was being blackmailed,” Martha said. “He died with nothing. He died leaving us in debt; he died with 6,000 patients with nowhere to go.”
In 1996, when helping move her father from his Hamden office into his office in New Haven, Martha said she found a “shit ton of photos in the attic of the office in Hamden” that “were, in retrospect, borderline.”
“They were rashes and things; they were like a precursor to the ones I found for sure,” said Martha. “Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of, you know, rashes on buttocks, everything but the disgusting ones that I found, they were like precursors to the ones that I found in Brooklyn. These were probably like the rejects from the real pictures, right?”
Martha recalled feeling gross after viewing the photos, and said that had she been sober at the time, she probably would have done more. She said she felt “so upset about” them that she “threw them all in the trash.”
“I talked to my dad about them like three months later, and he asked me what I did with them, and I said I threw them away,” said Martha. “They made me feel so queasy, like, I thought I was going to throw up based upon the ones that I found in the attic. I threw away probably three bags’ worth, and I went home, and I opened up that Chardonnay. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I just had to drink my sorrows away that night.”
Julian believes his grandfather’s ability to manipulate others was his key to escaping justice. While he acknowledges that signs were present, he doesn’t blame others for not knowing what to do with them.
“You can look at times and say, ‘This person should have done that,’ but you can’t expect reality to follow a fantasy,” said Julian.
Martha still struggles with immense guilt over her inability to recognize the signs. She said guilt has been “the most predominant emotion that I have.”
“It makes me cry every day that I did not see that my father was doing this right under my nose,” said Martha. “How can I not?”
Martha said she knew something was seriously wrong when Julian began to gain “an enormous amount of weight” around age 8.
“I took him to every doctor; he was stuffing his feelings,” Martha said. “He was suicidal at about 12. I did everything I could for that child; I took him to specialists, Yale Child Study Center, you know, anything I could do to help my baby, anything, you know? I had the best psychiatrists.”
She remembers asking him “a million times” if anybody was touching him, telling him she knew something was and that she wished he would just tell her.
“I’ve said that a thousand times to him, I said, ‘You can tell me honey, you can tell me anything and I will be there to help you, I just want to help you’,” said Martha. “And he just wasn’t ready.”
Ultimately, just as Julian did, she chalked things up to her dad’s mastery of manipulation, admitting “he had me hoodwinked forever.”
“You know, I thought I had the best built-in babysitter in the world, the world-renowned pediatrician!” Martha said. “I brought this beautiful child from Guatemala to my home thinking, ‘I’ve been sober for four and a half years, and I’m doing everything right,’ and in the meantime, this evil, motherfucking asshole is doing the most wretched, cruel things to not only Julian but to me, right in front of my face.”
When asked to look back and see if there were any “gotcha” moments where she believes it could have all come crashing down for her father had someone called the police, she feared that even if the police were called, they would be limited in what they could do.
“If Chris had walked in, and there’s [the boy’s name] in his underwear, and Chris had called Cheshire PD; what could they have done?” Martha asked. “I don’t know the answer to that. I suppose if they had done a search warrant and then found that album, that would have been another story.”
Martha thought that even if charges ever were pressed against her father at any point, he would have “bullshitted his way through and hired a million-dollar lawyer,” like he did when he faced legal scrutiny for his medical practices.
Looking Forward
For a few years now, Julian has worked a steady job in a field he’s passionate about and plans to go back to college to advance further. When asked how he has been able to overcome his past and maintain a normal life, Julian owed it to his extensive therapy and the fact that his needs are being met; he has a home to stay, a close group of friends he’s known since grade school, close relationships with his mother and dog, and a job he enjoys.
“It’s really just knowing who I am as a person, therapy, and the people I surround myself with, mainly,” Julian explained.
While Julian said he remains close to his mother, Martha said she’s noticed a change in Julian and believes he’s still “very bitter.”
“He has a flat affect,” said Martha. “He’s not the same; he’s just not. He’s not the same, and it makes me really sad.”
Martha described him as “forgiving,” “loving,” and “very sweet,” but said she knows he’s still processing everything.
“I reach over for a hug, and he’s like, ‘I just don’t want to be touched, mom,’” said Martha. “To hear him say that, I know why, and that’s because of my father.”
Martha said the two have gradually moved closer to each other since Julian moved away in 2023, and that soon, she will be in Hamden, close to where he’s currently staying in Branford. She recognized they needed time apart but feels they’re now ready to begin moving forward together.
“I know he needs me, even though he’s an adult,” Martha said. “We agreed that once a week, we’re going to go have a cheat meal and a movie, or some kind of entertainment.”
Martha thought it was important to share the family’s story because she thought it might be able to help other victims of her father come forward. She recalls many sessions at AA in which she shared her struggles and was met with a positive response by others in attendance.
“I’ve spent the last four plus years, not so much recently, but especially in the beginning, crying and sobbing in my 12-step meetings, just letting it out, and I felt kind of bad because it’s not a topic that is great for some newcomers,” said Martha. “But I’ve had people come up to me saying, ‘Thank you so much for sharing that. I was molested; I’ve never talked about it until you brought it up and I appreciate you’re saying it, and now I’m talking about it too.’ So, if maybe somebody can talk about it because I talked about it, then that will be a good thing.”
Julian thought the sharing of his story might be a “double-edged sword,” as he does worry that it could potentially make those who aren’t ready to confront their past do so prematurely. He asked, “Who am I to open the floodgates?” Despite this trepidation, Julian believes that ultimately, people should confront their trauma.
“If they’re repressing it, then it would be better for them to understand what happened and acknowledge it, especially if they know something’s not right within themselves and they’re not telling anyone,” said Julian.
Julian was open to the idea of others who had been afflicted by abuse reaching out to him, saying you “almost feel safer” talking about your trauma with others who have experienced it because “they know exactly what you went through or what you might be feeling.”
“Especially if it’s someone who experienced that and is okay now, it gives you that hope that you’ll be okay as well,” said Julian.
Julian acknowledged that he still struggles; his experience has made it harder for him to pursue romantic relationships, which he said has been the preeminent issue he is looking to overcome with his therapist currently. He also acknowledged that it took a long time to build his sense of self-worth.
“I actually had this thinking for the longest time that I was, quote unquote ‘tainted’, because of what had happened to me,” said Julian. “I have been working through everything for so long, I can’t even recall a certain point where it [that feeling] faded away, but I just know that as I kept working through everything and just kind of learning to live my own life, that feeling went away because I realized that I’m just another person.”
Julian doesn’t want to be defined by his past and said he doesn’t want to be seen as either a survivor or a victim. He believes everyone has their own battles and doesn’t think his should be treated as any more or less valid than anyone else’s. Julian hopes his story could show others who have experienced childhood trauma that there is a path forward.
“I think the main thing is that if anyone has gone through — any abuse, really, as a child —that it doesn’t have to control them,” said Julian. “You’re not binded by it. Just like anything else, if you really have that determination, you can free yourself, and you can be the person you want to be without being held down by your past, and that’s really something amazing.”
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