It would often happen late at night.
A father, respected as a professional and family man, would awaken his two toddler daughters and take them to his back office, away from the bedrooms where their mother and siblings slept.
Groggy and confused, the girls would follow his instructions and pose naked against a studio backdrop or with props such as boas and coconut bras and hula skirts.
As they grew older, strange men would arrive when their mother was away. Under their father’s guidance, the girls would reluctantly agree to do what they were told.
“I would see him over me and we were both naked,” recalls Odette, now 23, one of three sisters speaking publicly for the first time about the abuse their father inflicted. “He would tell me it was a special bond for us.”
The father would post their special bond with parents and abusers across the U.S. and Europe as a central player in an international child exploitation ring involving more than a million images.
Odette and her sisters Rosemary and Lucy (pseudonyms they chose) are among the victims of what a new international survey conducted by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection suggests is a widespread tragedy — child exploitation rings led by parents of the abused.
Responses from 128 child abuse survivors across North America and Europe found 52 per cent were victimized by a network of abusers, overwhelmingly involving their own parents, who shared images and even their children themselves with others. In most cases — nearly 70 per cent — images were then shared with millions more strangers online.
Most survivors are haunted by the online life of the imagery. More than 70 per cent surveyed said that the imagery never ends and makes them feel vulnerable to being recognized. About 90 per cent said their abuse affected both their education and professional success, in part because they know their victimization continues online.
About 30 per cent said they had been recognized by someone who saw their images online. Of those, 64 per cent said they were “targeted” — either blackmailed or propositioned.
“We were definitely most shocked about the extent of organized child sexual abuse in our survey,” says executive director Lianna McDonald. “We learned that often those closest and most trusted by children were responsible for not only abusing their children, but sadly, also orchestrating and facilitating the abuse by many others.”
The survey defines organized sexual abuse as involving multiple offenders, primarily parents and relatives, creating and sharing child sexual abuse images, exchanging children for sexual purposes or engaging in “sadistic, torture-related and ritualistic abuse.”
The story of the three sisters is the story of most child abuse victims. Their abuse, like 60 per cent of survey respondents, involved a parent, most often a father. Like the more than 80 per cent of respondents, they are female.
The exploitation of the sisters began, like nearly 90 per cent of survey respondents, before age 12. Like all respondents in the survey, their abuse was recorded.
Not all respondents answered all questions. The findings reflect the responses of those who answered each question.
The names and locations of the sisters are being withheld to protect their privacy. The Star interviewed them over two days in Seattle, where their lawyer is based. Lucy, the eldest sister, did not suffer the same physical abuse as her sisters but carried the weight of a young child trying to protect her siblings from a father she instinctively knew was evil.
That father, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of the women, is in prison. He was sentenced more than a decade ago, along with more than 20 others, to 30 years for conspiracies to sexually exploit children and produce and distribute sexually explicit material.
Dozens of children were victimized by the group, court records show.
Several U.S. enforcement officials at the time called it one of the most disturbing cases they’d seen in their careers.
In separate interviews, Rosemary and Odette recalled their father abusing them and bringing men home or taking them to the homes and offices of others.
All three remember a trip to another city where their father took them to the home of one of his friends who had two children of his own.
Odette and Rosemary were separated into different rooms, they recall.
“I remember screaming and her screaming that we didn’t want to be separated,” Odette says through tears.
She was taken into a room with a photographic backdrop where the man’s older daughter was.
“She would comfort me and tell me everything is going to be OK . . . . All we have to do is smile . . . . I remember it being really uncomfortable and scary. And my dad wasn’t there.”
Rosemary, one year younger, also has clear recollections of the day.
“I remember them molesting us, taking pictures, undressing us. I remember always trying to get out, scream or kick.”
Lucy, aged 10 at the time, was on the other side of the locked door, desperately trying to help, but unable.
“I could hear them crying and trying to touch the doorknob to get out. That was just a horrific moment for me . . . . Now I know they were being raped.”
Most often, the abuse would happen at home, on a flowered couch in the father’s office.
“(My father) would wake me up in the middle of the night. He would undress me when I was half asleep and do things,” said 22-year-old Rosemary. “I will always remember the flash of the camera and being woken up from it. Every year, to take a photo ID for school it was really hard because they would have all of those flashes . . . . It would take me back to that.”
Lucy recounts the abuse from a different perspective — that of an uneasy observer of her father’s appetite for taking photographs of his daughters and neighbourhood children.
Even before she had words, she recalls feeling that something was wrong
“I would stay with my sisters all the time to protect them,” says Lucy, who says her father had access to at least 10 children. “His friends who would come to visit were from around the world. I guess they were in some type of club. They would all take pictures all day with the children.”
She recalls trying her best to thwart his plans by breaking his cameras or computer equipment in an act of defiance.
The sisters, who live in the U.S. West, say their mother knew nothing of the abuse. Mourning the death of her own mother, the sisters recall her being depressed and distracted, often travelling to another city and leaving them with their father.
“He had full access to us,” says Lucy.
All three say memories of that betrayal intrude on their lives daily, challenging their current relationships. Rosemary and Odette live with the knowledge that countless images of their exploitation continue to circulate online.
“It’s a constant issue knowing that I can’t take those down and keep them down,” says Odette.
“It’s just so much bigger than me and out of my control so it makes it really hard to live, knowing that someone out there is doing something with those photos at any time of the day.”
None of the women want to be married or have children.
“The thought of having kids scares me,” says Odette, who, like her sisters, has a boyfriend. “You can’t control horrible things from happening . . . I think that plays a big part in marriage, too. I always wanted my dad to walk me down the aisle and have that support and authority in a positive way. I’ll just never have that.”
“I think of the problems that I know Rosemary and Odette have had in school and the problems they have in trying to have a regular job, and you just can’t do it when you’re always looking over your shoulder,” says attorney Carol Hepburn.
Stephen BrashearCarol Hepburn, their Seattle lawyer, says their story is representative of so many others.
“We have three beautiful women who don’t want to get married or have kids who have so much to give but whose ability to give is stunted. I think of the problems that I know Rosemary and Odette have had in school and the problems they have in trying to have a regular job, and you just can’t do it when you’re always looking over your shoulder and triggered by worries that this person in front of me was looking at pictures of me as a little girl on a computer getting raped or molested.”
The U.S. Department of Justice sends notifications to victims alerting them that their images were identified in child pornography investigations. Over the past two years, Hepburn’s law firm has received more than 500 such notices informing them that images of Rosemary and Odette have turned up.
The sisters’ shared nightmare has forged a bond, one that has carried them through depression, severe anxiety, alienation from friends and family and the discovery of their faith.
“(Faith in God) was my relief, my way of finding happiness,” says Odette. “It felt like I did have a dad, it was just a spiritual one. I struggle with that, even to this day. It’s hard to know that I had a dad who didn’t love me like he should have.”
Without that new-found spirituality, “we probably would have killed ourselves,” says Rosemary, who now works as a caregiver after bouts with drugs and alcohol in school. “I think that’s how we all felt.”
During a walk through a Seattle park, a dozen small children wandered past, escorted by a daycare teacher. For Rosemary, the scene triggered a chilling thought.
“I was thinking, there are three or four that might be being molested and we don’t know,” she said through tears. “When I walk down the street or I’m at the mall . . . it’s always on my mind.”
When she was waitressing a few years ago, a male customer approached.
“(He) told me, ‘Hey I know you, you look like someone who’s been on the computer,’ ” she recalls. “He gave me a weird look. I just cried. My mouth fell open. I ran away.”
Lucy, 27, was watching Rocky recently and she had to stop.
“I flashed back to when my dad paid us to wrestle,” she recalls. “It just made me feel gross inside.”
“(Faith in God) was my relief, my way of finding happiness,” says Odette. Without that new-found spirituality, “we probably would have killed ourselves,” says Rosemary.
Stephen BrashearIt was a late January evening when the sisters saw their father for the last time. Rosemary and Odette had gone with him to their brother’s hockey game. Their brother’s team won so Dad took them for milkshakes on the way home.
Twelve-year-old Lucy was at home cooking, watching The Brady Bunch on TV and signing Valentine’s Day cards for her classmates.
When she answered a knock at the door, about 10 plain-clothed police officers entered and began asking questions and rooting through the house.
When their father pulled into the driveway, they could see the flashing police lights.
“My mom was crying. My sister was crying. There was like FBI and search dogs. They pulled us separately into different rooms and asked us questions,” Rosemary recalls.
Just remembering the moment brings anxiety for Odette.
“I remember my mom crying and crying saying, ‘I don’t want to lose you, I love you.’ And I remember thinking, this is all my fault . . . I felt like because of me, I didn’t have a family anymore.”
The sisters don’t feel such guilt anymore.
Their father has written to them but rather than being remorseful or contrite, the letters are angry and accusatory.
“He was mad because I didn’t live up to his standards,” says Odette of a letter she received from him at age 18. “I remember reading the letter and screaming, cursing . . . . I just remember reading it and ripping it up.”
The sisters have remained silent so long because they felt humiliated and embarrassed. Now, they wish to have a voice.
“I know something good can come out of this in the end,” says Rosemary. “This is why God put this in our lives. We had to go through it for a reason — so we could help other people.”
Sitting and speaking candidly, says Odette, is about “keeping the fire inside me lit, the fire that tells me I can make a difference and help people like me. I want to be able to do that with sophistication, with grace, with love.”
