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Chapter 4: Rush

October 12, 2020

The Jeub Family 2015
The Jeub Family in 2015. We were holding it together, suffering through the online smear, which continued for months. But we sure missed our estranged children.
Keep up with all the chapters at the book page of Facing Hate: Overcoming Social Smearing, Recovering Relationships, and Rebuilding Your Reputation.
https://chrisjeub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/20201011172848/Chapter-4-Reading.mp3

You need to watch The Shawshank Redemption more than once to fully grasp its conclusion. The movie follows banker Andy Dufresne, sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the murder of his adulterous wife and her lover, of which Andy is innocent. Throughout this poignant tale, you wonder if he will ever be freed, you question whether he will convince the warden to request a retrial and you balk at the immense injustice of being forced to live out two decades of his life in a maximum security prison. Andy’s mountain is truly impossible to move. At the moment of utter desperation, when you think Andy is at his end and won’t be able to claw his way through this unfair tribulation, you discover that he can indeed conquer the impossible. For twenty years Andy had not depressingly succumbed to life’s circumstances, as it appeared. He had been planning his escape.

Without commenting on the ethics and morality of plotting a prison break or the events that led to receiving his unjust sentence, I want to proclaim that at least Andy Dufresne got a trial. The socially smeared don’t get such privilege. But like all the prisoners in Shawshank, we are ripped of so much that we sink deep into our miserable circumstances. The obvious for me was losing my oldest children, three of whom still held fast to the online narrative that I was an abuser who deserved a lifetime of humiliating shame. Though untrue, the public accusation alone nearly ruined me. Social smearing cripples people emotionally, financially and (of course) socially. Going through the shock of a social smearing is overwhelming, truly a mountain impossible to budge.

Emotionally, I was a wreck. I had never been prone to depression before, but I sure was now, at times unwilling to even drag myself out of bed to do the most basic tasks. As a father and business owner, I still had much to do. But my legs were tired and my mind numb, especially at the darkest moments of my family’s struggles. I had to give myself pep talks to get out of bed, follow-up pep talks to take on the day’s duties, and I even recall counting the minutes till bedtime, sleep being my only true escape from my sorrow. I never understood depression before this dark time, judging it to be a sign of weakness or simply a negative attitude. It’s not! And it eventually led me to seek professional help.

Financially, I nearly went bankrupt. I’m a solopreneur, meaning I run a business of which I’m the sole employee, but I depend on several others to make the whole thing work. My writers and private contractors sensed my melancholy. My business — providing source material and curriculum to academic speakers and debaters participating in various high school leagues — was a small market but had provided an income for my family for the previous dozen years. After my social smear began, revenue dropped, and Wendy and I had to provide for the family through refinancing our home and slowly sinking into debt to pay the bills.

Socially, I found myself very alone, and though most people eventually realized my innocence, no one enjoyed being close. I was a depressing presence to be around, always thinking of my daughters, their latest public jab against me and my family, not at all the “Jeub”-ulent life of the party I used to be. I wasn’t invited to graduations that spring when usually my refrigerator had dozens taped to its door. Two former students of mine married the following summer, and I couldn’t help but think that I should have gotten invitations. A distant cousin, whom I had developed a budding relationship with two years prior to my social smear, ended up falling off into silence. The business would have been sold that year, but it involved a three-year contract to carry its success past the acquisition. I was such a wreck that I suspect they saw its inevitable failure, so they abandoned the purchase.

The previous chapter shares a few breaks in the clouds, but those of us who suffer a significant social smear experience unfathomable losses. I believe personal ruin must be at least part of the intent of the social smearer. They either deliberately or passionately imagine your emotional depletion, financial poverty and social humiliation. Indeed, my situation appeared hopeless, an impossible mountain to move, and I could see no way out. Like Andy Dufresne, I was locked up for life, and I was doomed to fill my term for the rest of my days.


I missed my daughters, especially the one who spearheaded the blogging aspect of the smear. She was my blossoming writer, the one I helped set up her own blogging platform, the one whose skills paralleled mine in her young adult life. She was always cheerful and interested in her family, particularly her father; my one child who would explore my old vinyl records and even shared a liking for my favorite bands. Our spiritual discussions were often deep waters, and she sometimes challenged my understanding of faith in growth-minded ways. I had done what I could through my social media channels to promote her writing, even when it was edgy and might evoke pushback from my customers. Her blogging eventually turned on me, but I still would not want to dim the light she was to the world as she launched into adulthood.

This had always been the focus of my business, the one that provided an income for my growing family for years. Monument Publishing was the curriculum-selling business that published source material for speakers and debaters (and it still runs today), but the ministry — Training Minds Ministry — had been depleted to near ruin. The ministry was based on 1 Peter 1:13, which simply says, “Train the mind for action.” Action was what I taught as the ultimate goal for anyone mastering the art of speech and debate. I wanted to see what God would do with the incredible talent that speech and debate activities produced. My disappointment was so immense that I doubted the fundamental roots of my ministry.

Today my daughter still blogs about my alleged abuse of her and her siblings. I have spent countless futile hours trying to understand her sharp turn to become the cruelest adversary of all that she used to proclaim as love and truth. Of my three daughters who still — after Australia — created the strong online bond of an untrue narrative, this one was the most vocal, the author of the blog posts and the aggressive campaigning that followed. To this day, six years later, she still holds to the initial social smearing narrative that I abuse my children. None of her family validates this.

I did have one opportunity to indirectly peer into her mind when I ran into a counterpart of hers at a debate tournament. Recall that my home business caters largely to homeschool debaters, and an alumnus of my Training Minds camps was a vocal advocate for my daughter’s social smear. In the judges’ lounge at a national tournament in South Carolina — a large room full of tables and chairs set up for alumni, coaches and community judges to fill out their ballots — my daughter’s comrade and I coincidentally sat back to back at two separate tables. I tried to avoid her, consumed in a conversation with an extremely annoying dad of 10 children who would not shut up about his perfect kids!

Okay. I don’t mean that. I truly don’t. I harbor no disrespect for this dad who had ivy league adult children and was enjoying his first grandchildren. (His smile was ear to ear when he talked of his grandkids.) But my heart at the time was bleeding on the floor. I’m not sure he knew of my situation, but I don’t know if he could have empathized with me even if he had. How could he? Ordinarily I would have welcomed the pleasant exchange of family updates, but my adult children weren’t calling home with news of college degrees or the blessing of grandchildren — they were shaming me online and accusing me of evils I had nothing to do with. While he gushed about his joyous life, my stomach ached over my failing effort to pull my family back together.

I excused myself as cordially as I could, stood, and pushed in my chair. I turned around to leave, but my eyes met those of my daughter’s online advocate, my former debate student. My body tensed. “Hi,” was all I could say, “how are you?”

Please understand that at the time I desperately wanted to understand my estranged daughter with the ultimate goal of persuading her to abandon this “Dad abused me” nonsense. But she had shut me out; I wasn’t able to talk with her. Here before me was her figurative twin. This young adult likewise rattled off fabrications about her mother online, also declaring herself a victim of felony-level abuse, and she saw herself as a vindicator of her younger brothers and sisters. So went her narrative, almost a perfect mirror of my daughter’s narrative of me. I wanted to run, but I also realized the incredible opportunity this was to crawl inside the head of a social smearer — someone who likewise unabashedly and unapologetically ravaged her parent’s reputation online, just like my daughter — and understand how she saw the world.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked. She consented.

What followed was an hour-long conversation about her hatred for her mother. She did virtually all of the talking. “I absolutely hate my mother,” she insisted, followed with a litany of reasons justifying such a superlative emotion. I knew her mother, a former supporter of my business and the director of a debate tournament my children had attended in the past. I listened attentively to this young woman’s seething hatred, seeing my daughter in her words and stories. I managed to ask a few probing questions, hardly able to get in a word or two, always trying to bring her back to my story. “You do realize that my daughter is not telling the truth, don’t you?” I inquired.

“Don’t you get it, Mr. Jeub?” she returned, as if I wasn’t understanding that which was so obvious to her. “The truth doesn’t matter. Who cares what the truth is? She needs to tell her story, no matter what the truth is.”

This was the shell-shock bomb that triggers me to this day. The truth doesn’t matter. I keep repeating it in my mind. The truth doesn’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Really? My daughter’s online counterpart apparently was not going to be persuaded and was never going to waver from her support for my daughter, no matter what the truth was. I had thought that perhaps she and her friends might drop their affirmation for my daughter’s online smearing once they knew of its deceit. But now I realized that was never going to happen. “Who cares what the truth is?” The narratives of online smearers, true or untrue, support one another. Like the warden and the guards in The Shawshank Redemption, the truth that could vindicate and free me from my prison was getting in the way of their greater agenda. My daughter’s advocate would have none of it. The truth doesn’t matter.

This was enlightening yet utterly demoralizing. I have always taught my students to seek the truth and to defend it. Yet here was my daughter’s friend, just like my daughter herself, unapologetically advocating untruth for the sake of an emotionally personal “story” designed to ravage the lives of those with whom they held a grievance. Yet I also left awkwardly satisfied. This conversation helped me understand the sinister spell online smearers are under. Rational victims of smears — especially loving parents — naively believe that the truth will help mend their estranged relationships. It rarely does. Now that I understood how little objective, measurable, quantitative truth mattered in these online tirades, I likewise understood how little any appeal to that truth mattered. As a debate coach, I resolved to think of some higher level persuasion that I hadn’t yet discovered, one that would convince my adversaries — even adversaries who are returning my love with hate — to abandon their coarse campaign.

The next month I attended a second national championship of a different debate league, which brought me back to my home state of Minnesota. I took the opportunity to reconnect with another friend from my high school years. The last connection we had was a year prior. He had just gone through a bitter divorce following his wife’s extramarital affair. If that wasn’t bad enough, his ex-wife made wild allegations about him being an abusive threat to their children. My friend fought the charges, persuading the court that there was no substance to them, and he eventually gained partial custody of his children. Even so, he suffered tremendous humiliation from the mere accusations brought against him, and the court battle was a drain to him financially as well as emotionally. You can see how I now related to my old friend, particularly from the unfair hatred my friend suffered during his divorce.

My friend had since gotten his life back together, rented an apartment close to the tournament I was attending, and had an extra room for me to stay in for the weekend. We talked late into our evenings together sharing our stories. He brought much hope back into my life when I witnessed how he had come through his version of public shaming. He was not a social media guy at all, living largely “off the grid” with no social presence to speak of. So I had to fill him in quite a bit on how that part of my world had caved in on me. He identified more than any of my other friends back home, even close family. “Guys like us are ripped to shreds,” my friend empathized, “and no one seems to care what the truth is.”

There was that strange new reality again: the truth doesn’t matter. What’s a guy to do with that? My friend had some answers that helped immensely. “I’ve learned a lot since my divorce, Jeuby,” he said, using my high school nickname. “Looking back I realize that I pushed my wife away. I wasn’t the best husband. If I knew then what I know now about how to treat a woman properly, she would have never cheated on me. My bitter divorce should have never happened, and I carry much of the blame.”

As old friends do, I pushed back a bit. “Yeah, okay, maybe you were a bad husband. But you’re no abuser,” I said. “The truth is that she lied about you to gain custody of your children. That was wrong, it nearly ruined your life, and she should be ashamed of herself.”

My friend smiled, as if knowing some deeper truth that I hadn’t discovered yet. “Yeah, Jeuby, that attitude helped drive my wife away.”

My friend then explained some specialized counseling he was receiving, tailored for men who had faced bitter divorces like his. Our conversation lasted late into the night, turning to my trials with my daughters. He listened intently, then asked a pointed question. “What is your relationship like with your sons?” I said they were great. I had only had trouble with my daughters, especially the three wrapped up in the online smearing.

I resisted. I grew up with three sisters, and my wife loved me! My friend laughed. “No, you think you know women. You don’t. I made the same stupid mistakes with my wife, turning her against me to the point that she tried to turn the courts against me, even our own kids away from their father. Truth is, that’s evil, but that truth doesn’t really matter when you’re fighting for your life. I’ve learned a lot through my divorce. I think you have a lot to learn, too, Jeuby.”

I was so desperately eager to understand my daughters, struggling to find my way through the mess I was in, that I was more open to rebuke than usual. I had to admit, the rational world of persuasion and debate — that which I was an expert in — meant nothing to my daughters nor the online court of public opinion. Remember, the truth doesn’t matter to social smearers. I wondered if perhaps my friend had discovered some secret, advanced persuasion strategy that I hadn’t yet figured out in my years of studying argumentation and debate.

“Tell me,” my friend inquired again, seeming to know the focal point to discuss, “in more detail, how did you treat your oldest daughter when she started to rebel against you and the family?”

This brought back ancient history, way back to the TLC television days, eight years prior. There was no online smearing at the time. I’d simply term my oldest daughter as a prodigal — a biblical reference to the story of the Prodigal Son. She was secretly sneaking out and partying, and when we discovered it, her mother and I confronted her, just like parents should. I explained this to my friend: “I told her that she needed to repent of her sin and reconcile with her parents.” My friend shook his head in disapproval. “Jeuby, Jeuby, Jeuby. You truly do not understand. The next time you see your daughter, you need to do the exact opposite of how you think you should act. If you want to win the hearts of your daughters, you need to start treating them like women, not men.”

This was new advice for me, different than the “rational” ideas I’d been hearing from most friends and family, even different from what the professional counselor was saying to me back home. My friend reminded me that men had the innate desire to fix; women the desire to feel. In the heat of conflict, don’t rationalize or persuade, as I naturally would in a tournament debate round. Instead, charm and romanticize. Make the moment magical, not logical. “Allurement is the skill to fulfill the opportunity,” he told me, “not rectify a trauma.” I remember arguing with my friend for a short while, explaining to him the logical problems my daughters had. “Chris, I understand that that’s how you see it, but as badly as you want to straighten out that truth with your girls, you need to avoid it completely. Don’t bring up the hard feelings or resentments at all. Ignore them.” I held onto his words cautiously, but with extreme curiosity. He was challenging the way I processed the solutions to my problems. He encouraged me to consider a different approach to dealing with my daughters. “The next time you see one of your estranged daughters,” he said, “open your arms and welcome them back, pretend the family trauma never existed, and have fun with them. You’ll find that approach much more persuasive than your debate tactics.”

My friend seemed to see a blindness in me, a blindness that is particularly typical in divorce situations. First, I needed to surrender my old sense of how effective (not how important) truth was to my daughters. Truth still mattered, but it didn’t to my daughters, so my traditional, logical appeal to reasonable senses wouldn’t work. Second, I needed to imagine the next encounter with one of my daughters — which would come sooner or later — and reconstruct how I would react. Judgment or condemnation would definitely backfire, but even an attempt — as much as I would have loved for it to happen — to return to the offensive social smearing and attempt to sort it out would backfire. I needed to ignore it altogether and try to, in the words of my friend, “have fun.” Third, I needed to hide my desperation, my insistence to “solve” the problem. “Don’t be so eager to fix it, Jeuby,” he said. “Nothing will drive a woman away faster than your clumsy attempt to fix her.” And he gave me a fourth strategy: Give them something insignificant but meaningful. “You will think it doesn’t matter, that the truth of your situation matters more; but they will think the world of your gift and, ultimately, they will come around.” My friend was convinced that this new strategy would, in fact, win my daughters back to the family. And the more we talked about it, the more I started believing the next opportunity to follow his advice would open doors rather than close them.

That chance came a month following my time in Minnesota with my friend. Another close friend, an assistant coach of a debate club I used to run, managed to get two tickets to see Rush, the classic Canadian rock trio, at the Pepsi Center in Denver for their 40th anniversary tour. Rush is perhaps the most famous band that hardly ever got played on the radio, considered the biggest “underground” band in rock history, and my friend and I were avid fans. I still owned vinyl records from the ‘70s and ‘80s. My friend knew of my trials, knew two of my daughters personally (he used to coach them for competitions) and knew I could use a break. So, we headed to Denver for an evening rendezvous with our rock ’n’ roll past.

We walked the streets of Denver for a few hours before the concert, navigating through a flood of T-shirt wearing Rush fans. Hardly any of them were teenagers. The few we found were usually with their fathers. This evening seemed more of a family event than I expected, many fathers sharing the Rush experience of their youth with their teenage sons and daughters. This grew more and more depressing for me. You see, my daughter — the one who shared my gift in writing — also shared in my love for Rush, a nostalgia of my past when I was her age. If it wasn’t for the social smear she participated in, chances were good that I would have been attending the concert with her, not my friend. Suddenly, attending the Rush concert became a stark reminder of my estrangement from my dear daughter, a smear nearly a year old now, and I had no idea at the time that it would have lasted so long. There was no one in the world I would have liked to enjoy the concert with more than her.

My friend sensed my rising sorrow, and I appreciated the way he expressed his sympathy. We were both debate coaches, so I told him about my high school friend’s ideas of how to “persuade” my daughters back to the family. On an academic level, it was inherently interesting. The conversation lasted through dinner, our walk through Pepsi Center security, and all the way up to our third-level seats on the left side of the stage. We kicked back in our stadium chairs, still discussing my social media smear and how I planned to address my daughters when the next opportunity presented itself, waiting through those slow minutes before Neil, Alex and Geddy took the stage.

The stadium was getting close to being full when an audible, “Mr. Jeub!” was heard from the end of our row. It was the voice of a young lady, though the stadium lights were on behind her, and I was unable to make out who she was. “Sounds like one of your students,” my friend said. I smiled in her direction, waved, and started the arduous process of walking over our seatmates — I was in seat number nine — to the aisle to greet whomever it was who called my name.

Shock. Confusion.

It was my daughter, my kindred Rush fan.

Her calling out “Mr. Jeub” is sort of an inside family joke. We traveled the country together running debate camps and attending tournaments. So in an environment full of other dads, I would mentally block out any shouts of “Dad!” even from my own children. A call of “Mr. Jeub!” was always rewarded with much greater success. And my kids always seemed to get a kick out of calling me “Mr. Jeub” to get my attention.

Can you imagine? Out of nearly 20,000 Rush fans at the Pepsi Center, my daughter’s seat was about five rows behind mine. I had not seen her for nearly a year, and her online blogging of my alleged abuse continued. But here she was, smiling as if nothing bad had ever happened, stopping to say hi to her dad in Denver.

Allow me to ask you a question. How would you have acted in this situation? What would you have said? I will tell you how I would have responded before contemplating my old friend’s advice. I would have frowned at her, making sure she knew I was hurt and troubled. Perhaps I would have even blurted out, “How dare you!” I would have jumped into debate mode, challenged her smearing narrative right there in front of Rush and everyone, reminding her of all the damage she had done to me, her family and the community from which she was raised.

I would have driven her further away, much further away than she already was, and likely rationalized my right to do so.

But this was my opportunity to do something different. I was coached and primed for it, so I made my move. “You look fantastic!” I said, ignoring our conflict altogether. “What have you been up to lately?” She told me she was working at a children’s summer camp in the mountains. “Wow, that’s great,” and I followed with genuine praise, “you were always so good with children.” I asked to give her a hug. She refused.

Pause.

Pain. Sadness.

I stammered out, “That’s okay. I understand.” Then, recovering, “It’s just great to see you here. Wow, what are you doing here!?” I already knew the answer, “Dad, of course, it’s Rush,” she smiled. We laughed together. We agreed we wouldn’t miss this concert for anything, and we laughed together more.

The conversation lasted only a scant minute or two. But it lasted for years. It was both surreal and shocking to us both, and I realized that she was waiting for my move. I can only imagine what was going through her mind, but I suspect she thought, “I wonder what Dad is going to say now?” I also hoped she was pleasantly surprised, because I once more applied my friend’s pivotal coaching — to completely avoid the social smearing conflict and instead focus on what was important to her. I was aiming to form a bond, some sort of chemistry, and to connect quickly in the short opportunity I had. I was attempting a higher-level form of persuasion to reconnect with my beloved and estranged daughter.

After a bit more small talk, she closed the conversation. “Well, I guess I gotta go back to my seat.” I didn’t cling, nor did I appear desperate at all, something that I naturally would have, but would have likely killed the opportunity. “Yeah, I do, too.” I said simply. “It sure is great to see you.” I turned back to my seat. I wasn’t yet done trying to connect with her, not even close! But I knew she needed to desire her return. It seems like a game, but it was what I had prepared to do, and I was putting all my hopes and dreams into its effectiveness.

“Holy wow!” my friend exclaimed, “that was your daughter!” He had been observing the entire thing, nine seats over, in awe. The concert hadn’t yet started, and the two of us sat and wondered at the odds of such a meeting. Tens of thousands of Rush fans. Wow. Add in the fact that we had just been talking about my daughters and how I would respond if we met, and how we hoped for such an opportunity to come about. Holy wow, indeed.

I turned to see my daughter, five rows back. She was sitting by herself. I assumed she would be with friends, maybe from camp or from her social media community, but I saw her between two older people. She wasn’t talking with them at all, so she appeared to be alone. My friend suggested that he switch seats with her, which was a great idea and would create another opportunity to connect. I again crawled over sitting people, exited my row and walked up to where she sat. “My friend offered to switch seats. Do you want to?” She hesitated. So I followed with her exact words: “Come on, it’s Rush!”

Cynthia Jeub with her dad at the Rush concert, 2015.
“Open your arms and welcome them back…You’ll find that approach much more persuasive than your debate tactics.” (Photo taken at the 40th Anniversary Tour, Denver, ten months after the smear campaign began.)

She smiled and accepted my offer.

Rush is a unique rock band popularly known for its long concerts. This one lasted 3.5 hours with a full intermission, giving us a great amount of time to talk in between the songs. It was perhaps the perfect environment to begin winning my daughter back because it helped me to keep from going into our conflict. Trust me, I was tempted! But I held firm to my Minnesota friend’s advice.

At one point I managed to shoot off a quick text to that friend, and he responded. “If you can buy her something, do it, something insignificant but meaningful.” I decided on a T-shirt. When the concert ended, I reaffirmed how happy I was to see her and then offered to buy her a Rush shirt. This extended our time together as we left the stadium. I still doggedly refused to bring up our online discourse, and she avoided the subject as well. I bought two t-shirts and a poster, and, after we pulled the shirts on over our clothes, my friend took a photo of us together.

I wish I could testify that this single, amazing, even miraculous evening won my daughter over completely. But this story doesn’t end so easily or perfectly. Still, I held it dear as a small step toward resolution. In the days that followed, she stopped her most malicious attacks, at least the attacks that were so vicious at the time. I consider this concert evening divinely orchestrated, and I refused to believe it would be the last time we connected. That night in the summer of 2015 temporarily brought two estranged people — a father and a daughter — back together to enjoy a nostalgic connection that was uniquely theirs. I still hope and pray that she turns completely away from her reckless online ways, but that’s for her to do on her own. I know for certain now that I cannot persuade her in the traditional way. I let her go back to her life and respected the unspoken fact that she would not want me to post all over social media about our encounter. Instead, this is what I shared on Facebook:

The Rush concert was amazing, as I got to spend an evening with the one person in the world I had wanted to spend it with most. It wasn’t my carpool buddy, but an old acquaintance whom he graciously swapped seats with after we ran into each other at the concert. I hesitate to share with you who it was, but let’s just say we grew up together with a like minded love for this band. The night was definitely a Rush!

I shudder to think how I would have responded if I hadn’t learned so much from my friend in Minnesota and my daughter’s counterpart in South Carolina. I had been prepped and prepared for the smallest details of our conversation. Even the initial encounter, of smiling and waving to my daughter with the stadium lights blinding me behind her was a godsend. You can make the argument that she deserved to be chided, deserved to be persuaded, deserved to be shamed. But none of that would have accomplished that which I so deeply wanted, a relationship restored and renewed.

I hold a deep regret now that I had not known about this godly path to reconciliation back when I was dealing with my oldest daughter, the one I met when courting Wendy years ago, the one I adopted as my own. Her young-adult years were long past us, and the TLC show brought this conflict front and center when she faced rebuke and reprimand from her father, not patience and affection. I wish I could rewind time and recapture those moments. I had naively thought I was leading the family and being the loving dad. I had more to learn than I thought, though, and while the learning has been painful, it has caused me to be a much better parent today. It’s amazing, isn’t it? I’m a forensics coach, a professional who is paid to train others to be persuasive. But it was I who had just been taught octane-level persuasion, that which sways the unswayable, someone who hates you, to reconsider her ways and enjoy face-to-face time with the man she despises online.

Right before Andy Dufrensne breaks out of prison, he has an emotional conversation with his incarcerated comrad. By then everyone in Shawshank realizes Andy’s innocence, but the warden refuses to call a retrial so that he can continue his own illegal deeds. Andy reflects on how he pushed his wife away, that he was perhaps the cause for her adulterous relationship, and that he deserved a life sentence in prison even though he didn’t commit the murder.

I, too, often reflect on how I lacked tenderness toward my older daughters. But Andy truly was not a murderer, and I truly was not an abuser. He ultimately escaped his jail cell. I was still in my online prison. “Maybe you were a bad husband,” Andy’s friend replies, “but you were no murderer.” My thoughts exactly.

Another opportunity has not opened up with my daughter since the Rush concert in Denver. I’m hoping for that time to come. When the time is right. When she is ready. I have, however, had that time with another daughter, one of the current bond of three smearers. It came later that year right around the one-year anniversary of the initial attack. That’s another miraculous story that I will cover in the next chapter, one that helped break me from my prison.

⇐ Chapter 3: Lean In     •     Chapter 4: Rush     •      Chapter 5: The Game ⇒

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