One afternoon two years ago, I received a flurry of texts, Facebook messages and phone calls that Rick Curl, a prominent swim coach in the same Washington, D.C., area league as my childhood team, had been arrested for sexual abuse of a minor that had occurred decades earlier.
While to my friends the story was little more than shocking gossip, it disturbed me in a different way. I felt unsettled, but wasn’t sure why. The next year, as I was pursuing a new career in clinical mental health counseling, I was assigned to write the story of my life. Suspicious details, along with troubling memory gaps, helped me to eventually pinpoint why I had been so disturbed by the Curl story. As it turned out, I had been the victim of a similar crime.
For nearly 30 years I’d been carrying a secret – one I’d kept from even myself.
In 1984, shortly after my parents got divorced, my swim coach and family friend, Christopher Huott, moved into my house under the guise of helping us, assuming many of the primary tasks of caregiving as my mom worked full-time and adjusted to single parenthood. He packed my lunches, provided transportation and entertained me with “Metroid,” “Tetris” and “The Legend of Zelda.” He introduced my family to the national parks, and chose Latin as my foreign language in middle school, which ended up being my college major.
He also sexually abused me from the ages of 7 to 12. As an 8-year-old, I remember worrying I could become pregnant by what my abuser was doing. At 9, I thought I would have to marry him.
[For more of this story, written by Danielle Bostick, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/11/13/27365/]
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