See update below
Last night…
journalist and commentator, GoldieTaylor told a remarkable story to @CNN’s Don Lemon. She was inspired to tell it by the grotesque story of accused predator, former Penn State football coach, Jerry Sandusky.
She not only told of the horror of her own abuse, and that of other high school cheerleader classmates at the hands of a high school football coach, but even decided to “out” her tormentor’s identity, as well. This added act of courage makes her story all the more special, because so few victims ever do that. And she decided to do it knowing full well it may have serious legal consequences. She sounds fully prepared for those, even welcoming of them.
I haven’t asked Goldie whether it was planned or not, but around 1:15 pm yesterday, she just started tweeting her story on Twitter, almost as a preview of what she would discuss on @CNN last night. As so often happens on Twitter, her thread gained traction almost immediately, and many thousands were transfixed as her history unfolded like a painfully grim fairy tale. I was on the phone at the time, but was seeing random remarks pointing to the thread, and only later did I fully learn about what had happened.
While Goldie is always eloquent and insightful on TV, I thought everyone should see the original tweets as they unfolded on Twitter. So I asked my ever-useful friend @dvnix to pull the tweets together into a contiguous story, minus some extraneous tweets that didn’t seem essential to her tale. He graciously did so, and you can now see Goldie’s story unfold as so many did before she went on TV to tell it verbally, as she did again on @TheLastWord, and probably will again a few hundred more times going forward.
Goldie’s Story, as told on Twitter.
Stories like Goldie’s need telling…
and too few journalists with the skills to tell them this well ever come forward to tell them. We need more people with such courage, and not just in matters of child abuse. Whether in the form of domestic spousal abuse, rape, workplace discrimination, or even the cultural economic abuse that Occupy Wall Street is dramatizing, we’re all enduring different forms of abuse at the hands of many abusers. And we all need to find an inner strength to step up, step forward, speak out, act out, and start to change whatever status quo that abuses us. Silence is a mask that evil wears defiantly. It must be ripped away so that justice can show its face.
Thank you Goldie, for tearing one off for us.
To help Goldie’s story get out, your RT of this post using the Tweet button below is much appreciated.*
Updates
As you might imagine, the accused coach has lawyered up.
References
- About GoldieTaylor
- Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
- The Experience Project (Stories of child abuse, as told by the victims)
- For The Child. (Mose stories of child abuse in all forms)
* Note: I don’t carry any kind of advertising on this site. I ask for retweets only in the interests of promoting the issues or injustices I cover on this site from time to time. If you want to follow me on twitter, my handle is simply, @shoq.
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