StoryCorps 525: The Good, Right, Honest Thing

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Michael Garofalo (MG): There are risks to speaking up. What if nobody believes you, what if someone tries to retaliate, or what if you lose your social standing or your job because what you have to say is hard to hear  or takes powerful people to task?

In this episode of the StoryCorps podcast from NPR, three women who have had to ask themselves these questions and all made the same decision

Ashley Judd (AJ): You know, I’m going to go ahead and swear, I don’t give a shit what it costs me. All I can do is the next good right honest thing and let go of the results.

These are stories of abuse. What it does to your spirit…

Tara Cummings (TC): I used to wish that I would come back as a cotton ball or a Coke can, completely inanimate so I could feel nothing.

And how you find the courage to come forward.

I’m Michael Garofalo. We’ll be back after a short break with these stories and an announcement of a new partnership and project. Stay with us.

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MG: Welcome back. In this episode we’re listening to stories from three women. Women who spoke up about the way they were treated, regardless of the cost.

Our first story starts in Louisiana, about an hour outside of Shreveport in a small town called Arcadia, where scores of young girls were kept under lock and key and fenced in with barbed wire.

But this wasn’t a prison: it was a religious reform school called New Bethany, and was known as a home for “wayward girls”

During the 30 years it was open, law enforcement repeatedly investigated claims of child abuse at the school.

When Joanna Wright arrived there she was 16. She says she had already been sexually assaulted at home and hoped the school would be an escape.

But when she got there, the man who ran the school raped her.

She thought she was the only one until as an adult she met others who were physically and psychologically abused by the founder of the school.

Tara Cummings was one of them.

And they spoke at StoryCorps. Joanna begins.

Joanna Wright (JW): I thought something was really wrong with me, that I must be a really bad person because this keeps happening to me in life. I started to think, How could I dismember my body and spread the pieces around so that God couldn’t find me and put me back together to punish me?

Tara Cummings (TC): I used to wish that I would come back as a cotton ball or a Coke can, completely inanimate so I could feel nothing. Who was the first person that you told?

JW: My father.

TC: What did he do?

JW: Had me take a lie detector test. I always wondered, What do people see in me that makes them think it’s okay to abuse me? And that was something that I carried even into adulthood. I wonder what I would have been like. I think I would’ve been a free spirit. But it put a fear in me that I–I’ve never shaken. I don’t know that I ever will. You know, I always thought, There has to be other girls, I can’t be the only one. And so I’ve always blabbed about it, but you managed to keep it a secret. And I–I guess I’ve wondered why.

TC: I was a really good liar. Always being the preacher’s kid and putting on a perfect front. I think I was trying to move on. But to get out of the hiding was a game changer for me. And I learned that from you. I know you don’t believe in divine path, but I was at a fork in the road. And knowing you has changed my life.

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MG: That’s Tara Cummings with Joanna Wright in Cypress, Texas. And joining me now is the producer of the story, Liyna Anwar. Hi Liyna.

Liyna Anwar (LA): Hi Michael.

MG: So, this is a tough piece to hear, and I’m hoping you can tell us a bit more about it. First, do you know how Tara and Joanna ended up at New Bethany?

LA: So, like a lot of the girls there, Tara came from a strict religious family – specifically an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist family. Like Tara said, her dad was a preacher even.

Joanna is a little older than Tara and so they didn’t attend the school at the same time. Joanna was there in the 70s, Tara in the 80s, but it was the same situation for Joanna – she came from a pretty conservative Independent Fundamentalist Baptist family.

And if you look back at brochures from the place, they have these pictures of horses in fields; you could think it was like a summer camp. So a lot of the young girls who were sent there by their parents even came optimistically, like Joanna did.

MG: So, we know the school was investigated a bunch of times right?

LA: Yeah, so in the fact checking for this story we talked to the current and former sheriff who both confirmed that the place was investigated many times by state and local authorities.

We spoke with a former state worker who was one of the investigators she said – and this is a quote – the place gave her “nightmares for a very long time.”

A former police chief remembers seeing about fifty runaways from New Bethany over a decade. One cop we spoke to said he once picked up a girl along the highway who was all scratched up from climbing over barbed wire. And he let her go without reporting it.

But despite all that, the school would always find a way to dodge questioning. Like the founder would do this thing where he would temporarily shut the school down before investigators got to the premises. So, you know, officials couldn’t look into anything if the school was technically closed. And he would get away with other things citing violations of religious freedom. It was a religious center, so he had some protections because of it. He just would always find a way around it. And this happened over and over for 30 years.

MG: So what was the founder’s response to all the allegations?

LA: He denied all of them.

In 2014 a group of women with many different claims of abuse perpetrated by this man – physical, psychological, sexual – all came forward to tell their story to a grand jury.

But the next year that grand jury declined to indict him. And then just over a month later, the founder died.

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Joanna told me she felt such a deep sense of anger about that. “How dare he die,” is what she said to me.

MG: And the group who came forward, how did they all find each other?

LA: They connected online, through Facebook actually. It would start as small groups of women messaging each other.

MG: And that’s how Tara and Joanna met, too?

LA: Yeah, they had exchanged messages but never met face-to-face until Tara decided to move out of state and needed a place to live.

TC: “When I moved to Texas, I called you. You’re about the only person I knew. I left all of my family and friends in New Orleans. I was supposed to only come to your house for two days and it ended up being a year.”

And then they became roommates for a while. They were actually living together when I recorded their story. And it was during that time as roommates that they became really close friends. They became a support system for each other as more and more of their story was coming out.

It’s obviously hard for these women to share their stories with people. It brings back up a lot of memories. But over time they’ve created a network of survivors that they can lean on, which they told me helps a lot. Joanna is one of the oldest survivors from New Bethany, and she has often taken on a maternal role with the others. Some of them call her “Mama Jo” actually.

And part of Tara’s participation in even doing a StoryCorps recording, was about passing it on and being able to spread that courage to others.

I was on the phone with her last week and she told me, “This may just be a two-minute blip on the radio, just a drop in the water… but it’ll mean something to somebody.” And she was happy about that.

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MG: Liyna, thanks for sharing this story with us…

LA: Of course, thanks for having me. And I want to acknowledge the work of Rebecca Catalanello and Kathleen Flynn. They were the Times-Picayune reporters who chronicled the story of New Bethany and its survivors.

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MG: The Oscars are this weekend, and the biggest story out of Hollywood right now – in fact in many years – is the Harvey Weinstein scandal that sparked a national conversation about sexual misconduct in the workplace.

And while you almost never hear the voices of celebrities on StoryCorps, we’re now going to hear from one of the first actresses to speak out: Ashley Judd.

She sat down to have this conversation with her friend Ted Klontz in Nashville…

Ted Klontz (TK): About six months or so ago, you called me and you said, “I’m going to do it.” And that meant, allow The New York Times to use your name specifically.

Ashley Judd (AJ): Yes. I remember, I told my mom and she said, “Go get ‘em, honey.” Ad then when I spoke with my attorney, of course she had concerns about lawsuits raining down on my head. But she also said, “Ashley if you can’t do this, who can?”

TK: I was scared, by the way. I had a bit of a, I think fatherly protective thing. And I–I wonder if you could tell me where you think that courage came from.

AJ: I think the courage comes from the little girl inside of me and my commitment to doing right by her. You know, I was sexually molested for the first time that I remember when I was seven years old. And, I immediately went and told two adults. They said, “Oh, he’s a nice old man, that’s not what he meant.” But that seed in me was planted that I knew when something felt wrong. And, you know, the greatness of this moment is that finally the world was able to hear.

You know, I’m going to go ahead and swear, I don’t give a shit what it costs me. All I can do is the next good right honest thing and let go of the results.

TK: It’s almost as if you’re concerned about what it costs you not to speak up.

AJ: Yes, and that would be my integrity. And I guess I really believe that in the long term there is a payoff for that.

Harvey in his own way has given us a great gift. His decades of abuse–it was the funeral pyre. It was the funeral pyre to what hopefully will have been the old ways.

TK: It, um, you–I remember you telling me.

AJ: Yeah.

TK: And I didn’t do anything about it either. And so, uh, right here now I’ll make amends for that. Because I had an opportunity to do something with it too.

AJ: I appreciate the amends and… you’re off the hook. None of us knew what to do. None of us knew what to do.

TK: This thing that you did, by allowing your name to be used, sort of pulled the last little plug out of the dam.

AJ: We’ve just flung the barn doors wide open and the horses have run out. And the joy of the stampede has surprised me. I didn’t know that it would be so joyous.

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MG: That’s actress Ashley Judd with her friend Ted Klontz in Nashville, Tennessee.

And with that conversation, we’re announcing a partnership with Time’s Up, the movement that you may have heard of, created by women in the entertainment industry in response to ‘The Weinstein Effect.’

StoryCorps and Time’s Up are launching an effort to document the experiences and stories of working women past and present all across America, and we want to do it using the StoryCorps app. To learn how you can interview someone or record your own story, you can go to StoryCorps.org.

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And that’s all for this episode. These stories were produced by Liyna Anwar, Martha Perez-Sanz, and Jasmyn Belcher Morris. This episode of the StoryCorps podcast was produced by David Herman and edited by me.

Thanks for the new reviews on Apple podcasts – keep them coming – we do read them all! And remember if you ever want to send a message to someone you hear on the show, call our voicemail line at 301-744-TALK, that’s 301-744-T-A-L-K, and we’ll pass your message on.

I’m Michael Garofalo and this has been the StoryCorps podcast. Thanks for listening.