S2 Ep2. Amanda Blackwood: From Victim to Victor, A Human Trafficking Survivor's Story

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trafficking. We've all heard the word, but do we know what it is? Do you know if you have been or are you currently being trafficked? According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 14,500 men, women, girls, and boys are trafficked each year. What happens when you don't know you're being trafficked but you've been trafficked three separate times is almost taking your life.

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You even find yourself in a foreign country with someone that you believe loves you and end up being trafficked? What becomes of a person's life when you go through that? You become a warrior, you become an advocate, and you become a survivor. Join me as I talk with author Amanda Blackwood on this episode of True Crime, Authors.

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and extraordinary people.

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Welcome to True Crime, Authors and Extraordinary People, the podcast where we bring two passions together. The show that gives new meaning to the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction. And reminding you that there is an extraordinary person in all of us. Here is your host, David McClam. What's going on everybody and welcome to another episode of True Crime, Authors and Extraordinary People. Of course, I'm your man, David McClam.

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If you haven't already, make sure you follow us on all of our social media. One link to a link tree gets you every link you need to have pertaining to the show. All right. If you're looking at your calendar, you realize that at this time for yet another author, truth be told, the person that I have for you today can fit either bill, either author or for new people. So you are getting a double whammy today because there's no author I've interviewed that has quite the story that she does.

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So let me tell you who our guest is. She is an accomplished artist and author, public speaker, podcast host, trauma recovery mentor, and survivor of human trafficking. She has spoken on a multitude of stages, international summits, radio programs, and had over a dozen books. She launched two podcasts, one that focuses on interviewing other authors of trauma.

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And the other that discusses the long-term consequences of trauma and how to fight back for a better life. A portion of every book sale goes to help fight human trafficking. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her rescue cats and supportive husband who keep her sane. She is the author of Custom Justice, host of the podcast, The Survivors, A True Survivor. Please welcome Amanda Blackwood. Amanda, welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much, David. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today. I love your show. Thank you very much. It is my honor and pleasure to have you here. I know we should have had you here sooner. We had some mishaps. I'm glad that you are here now. I do know that you are in Colorado. Quoting your book, you spend a lot of time in my neck of the woods down here in LA. I don't know if you made it quite as far as me, because in your book you did reference that it didn't get very cold in California. I do live in what they consider the Antelope Valley.

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So that is Lancaster, Palmdale area where we actually get cold and hot. I was actually at George Air Force base in 1992 when the Palmdale Lancaster quake hit and half of our home on the base housing nearly fell off the side of the building. Oh, wow. So you are, you are familiar. Yeah, I am familiar. I spent most of my time there as an adult down in the Los Angeles basin area.

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But yeah, I spent quite a lot of time up in Victorville. I think we were stationed there for five years when I was a kid. Oh wow. A friend that lived in Palmdale, I'd go up and see on the weekends occasionally too. You're very versed down here in good old California. And one of my stores that I have to service for work is on Pico Boulevard, right in the heart of LA down there, very poor area, as you probably know, very heavy Japanese too, so you want good ramen and that's the place to go. All right. I'm going to ask you the hard question first.

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because for someone that has been somewhat in your shoes, I'm also a survivor of childhood abuse from my father as well as domestic abuse from a wife. Your book reads like a movie script. Have you ever been told that the things in your book is hard to believe or people just didn't believe in that or thought that you made that up? That's a really good question. I actually have not come across that. And I think the reason for that is because

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I purposefully wrote it out that way because I wanted people to see or think or feel what it was that I was seeing or thinking or feeling at that time. And as I was writing it, that's exactly what I was going through in that exact moment. So even remembering some of the abuse and stuff that happened when I was younger, if I was sitting there in the therapist's office, I wanted to be completely transparent and talk about this is what's going on right this second.

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Now, the one thing I'll ask, because I am going to ask you about therapy and see what your take is on it, because I had a slightly different experience, I think, than what you had. It's similar to you had a therapist that actually cared to get to the heart of what you needed to get to. But the name custom justice, I know you tell us about it in the book, but can you tell the audience why you chose the name custom justice for your book? So when it comes to prosecuting anybody for human trafficking, it is...

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so difficult to do it even if you're in the same city in the same state. When you're trying to prosecute somebody for human trafficking across state borders, it gets a lot more difficult. But when you break it down and you try to prosecute somebody across an international border, it's absolutely impossible. So when you have somebody who's gone through something like I have, most of the time, we don't have the voice to be able to fight back.

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And I was relentlessly attacked by this man over and over again for several years. And finally I decided that if he was going to continue attacking me, I wanted people to understand why I wanted people to know who he was also. And because I knew that I was never going to have actual legal justice, I was going to have my custom justice. So on top of that.

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Why don't you tell us a little bit about your story? You survived trafficking. The story, you guys have to go read this book. As a man, I apologize because it felt like to me that every male you came across did something that was bad to you or had other intentions or just didn't accept you for who you were. Started with your mom, some of the comments that she made, which looking at you, I totally disagree by the way. Um, can you tell us some of your story and how you got into this and then how you got out?

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With most survivors of human trafficking, with most victims, we grow up in abusive households. This sets us up for being more vulnerable to domestic violence situations later on in life, and domestic violence situations can lead absolutely to the ease into human trafficking. You're already emotionally or physically manipulated by another person. So,

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One of the best places to start is to have a solid definition of what human trafficking actually is. This is not something I suggest people go out and Google or look up on Wikipedia because these are fallible resources. You want to go to a reputable source. The Department of Homeland Security defines human trafficking as the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain commercial sex acts or labor from another person. So if you notice, there's no mention of transportation in there, even though with trafficking, we automatically think of traffic as in cars on the road.

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So human smuggling and human trafficking are two completely separate issues that both need to be addressed. And there's a huge overlap in this area. I'm not saying there's not, but one does not equate to the other. And it's the same thing with prostitution. Commercial sex acts does not mean prostitution. It does not mean sex for money. So the first time I was ever trafficked, I had already been molested and raped multiple times throughout my life, including total strangers in a parking lot, an uncle at one point, my brother.

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repeatedly. I was raped by somebody I thought was my best friend at 17. So by the time I was 18, I had already been treated as sex object for so long that I figured this is what my life was going to be. If people aren't taking it away from me, I'm either going to be alone and miserable for the rest of my life, or I can give it away in exchange for something that I need. So I was giving myself away in exchange for affection and for a roof over my head.

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and the first person who ever trafficked me was a boyfriend. When I was 18, he was more than twice my age. He was in his late 30s. And he loaned me out to a buddy of his for a birthday party. And that sounds really weird and really harsh. How do you end up in this situation and not just get up and walk away? But I was flown from Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. I was taken into the Hard Rock Hotel, which no longer is standing, by the way.

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And the front desk people were paid extra money to make sure that they didn't ask any questions about who I was or what I was doing there. It was obvious I was over the age of 18. He had my ID so that he could prove that to them so that they would not be able to ask questions about a minor. He paid them to make sure that they could bring room service to the room only once per day. And when they dropped it off, they had to walk away from the door and not wait around for any kind of response.

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because they weren't to have any interaction with me at all. And they were paid well for this. So over a period of 52 hours, I was repeatedly assaulted. This man would come up to the room, rape me, eat, sleep, and go back down and gamble. And this happened for two and a half days. I knew at the time that what was happening was absolutely inappropriate and wrong, and I wanted to get out of there, but he still had my driver's license. Everything that I owned was still back in Arizona with the boyfriend.

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I had nothing with me. If I had walked out of that hotel room, I wouldn't have been able to get back into the hotel room because I didn't have a key. I wouldn't have been able to fly back to Arizona. I didn't have a driver's license. I had nothing at the time. I had no car. I had nothing. So my mentality at the time was one that we repeat to ourselves quite frequently in this life, one that we hear quite regularly. I've been through worse. I'll make it through this too.

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When we tell ourselves this, it becomes a really dangerous game that we're playing with our brain. Because yes, I did survive that. It doesn't mean that I should have. Looking back, I absolutely see where I should have walked out of that hotel room and went to go get the police, tell them what had happened. I was just afraid that nobody would believe me. And later on, that's exactly what happened. When I was 18, I finally got back to Arizona. I got my stuff. I got out and I ran as hard as I could. Eventually, I found my way down to Florida. And when I was there...

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I was planning on staying with my grandmother and getting a knee surgery done. She'd already agreed. She was going to take me in, let me stay with her. I would get the knee surgery done and recoup at her home. And I got to Daytona Beach bus station somewhere around 1030 at night. And I called to let them know that I was there and ready to be picked up. And her husband, my dad's stepfather answered the phone and said, we're not coming to get you. You're on your own. Good luck. And I didn't understand at the time that the reason this happened.

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was because my parents had called them and said, she's running away from her problems again. And if you take her in, we'll never speak to you again. So a young couple came and found me, and they took me in, gave me a place to stay. And they told me, we've got a place for you to stay for free until you can land on your feet. But what they really meant was, we've got a place for you to stay for free until we find the highest bidder. Because these two, 22 year old male and a 15 year old female,

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sold me to a guy named Esteban, like I was scrap metal in the yard. This guy locked me up in a small room for 23 and a half hours with no food, no water, no bathroom facilities of any kind. And I skip over a lot of this in writing custom justice because I had previously told this story in a different book called detailed pieces of a shattered dream. And I went into a lot of details of this.

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But watching a TV program in the 1980s is what saved my life in this situation. I watched a lot of MacGyver, and the man could fix anything with a paperclip and a rubber band, right? It was great. And I MacGyvered my way out of this room. And I took off and did absolutely whatever I could to get out of there and get as far away as possible. And a lot of things happened that kind of watered down the situation where things just went from bad to worse.

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I stayed with different people and I was couch surfing and I worked three full-time jobs and did whatever I could just to make ends meet. I was dumped off on the side of the road in Ohio on a car ride trip to Colorado and just a bizarre series of circumstances happened. And eventually I made my way out to California. So 24 years old, I land out in California. My plan there was to become an executive assistant to somebody important because that was the closest I was ever going to get in my mind to being important.

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if I was important to somebody important. And instead I was on Alias and Will and Grace and modeled for Harley Davidson and did a lot of really cool stuff while it was there. I mean, who doesn't try to do that when you're in LA? Eventually, I got into the world of online dating in 2004 and I met this man who lived overseas. He was in Scotland and he had a pretty stable job. He had a career, he had a kid, but we knew that we were

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basically worlds apart. We weren't going to make any kind of an actual relationship happen. So we were just gonna be long distance pen pals and friends and we were gonna love each other from afar. And our lives drifted in and out of each other's lives. But we always made our way back. And during this time, I had really started to find myself. I had an established job.

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I was now a director of public safety and security for six different properties in LA County. I got an $11,000 a year raise. I got raises for all of my employees. I had my own apartment for the first time ever without somebody else's name on the lease. I didn't have any roommates. I had a cat. I was really established. I'd even gotten a second cat. My boss told me when I got that second cat, he says, you know what cats are? I said, what's that? He said, man repellent. I said, why do you think I got a second one?

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I wasn't interested in relationships. I had already been through so much at that point that I was determined that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. But this man over in Scotland, he came to visit me and I went to go and visit him. And we decided that we were in love and he asked me to get a fiancee visa and move to Scotland to go and be with him. So I left my job, sold my car, ditched my apartment and left.

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It took this man seven long years to get me there and it took him seven days to start trafficking me.

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And this time I really couldn't go to the authorities for help. He was the authorities. This man was a police officer. I had nobody who knew where I was, who knew what had happened to me. I had disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody cared. I couldn't reach out to anybody like family to ask for help. I was stuck. And after that first week there when things started going downhill and the trafficking happened and this abuse happened,

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I wanted out of there very quickly. So right away, I was trying to con him into giving me back my passport, my driver's license, my debit card. He had it all locked up in a small safe under the bed. And this was so he could control my identity, he could control who I was. If I got any help, I wouldn't be able to get into an American embassy to be able to get help if he had all of this stuff with him. And he knew this better than anybody with him being in police. So,

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I had to con him into giving me back all of my stuff. And I remembered way, way back when I was a teenager, late teens, early twenties, I had been a waitress and I knew the value of keeping a coffee cup full. So one night while the abuse was happening, I used that same trick of keeping the coffee cup full, except I did this with his whiskey glass and I got him really toasted. This man was so drunk that by the end of the night, when I conned him into giving me back my stuff,

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I told him it was so I could go down to the bank and go get my money out of my bank so we could spend it. I had a little over $2,000 and he saw that as being lucrative. So he gave me back all my stuff. And instead I jumped on the computer and I tried to look for the first flight out that I could afford. The first flight out was something like $12,000. There was no way I could afford that. And the next day and the next day and the next day, I couldn't afford any of these flights out. Then the first flight out that I could afford was something like five days out.

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So I bought the ticket, I had $11 and something leftover in my bank account and I said, I don't care. I don't care if I'm surviving on $11 when I get back home to Los Angeles. I don't care. I'll find something to do. It's gotta be better than this. And it was February, it was freezing cold. I couldn't just walk out the door and go live on the streets for five days waiting for this flight.

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That wasn't gonna happen. There was nowhere safe for me to go. Again, I adopted this classic mentality of, I've been through worse, I can get through this too. And it nearly ended my life. I ended up, because of the abuse, I had a kidney infection that was so severe that I was in the hospital when the flight took off and I don't remember. I don't remember the flight taking off. I don't remember being disappointed. I remember the pain. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing that my face was completely gray and my.

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lips were cracked and bleeding. I looked like death. I remember his sister coming over and saying there's something wrong, but I didn't make it out. And it was a non-refundable flight. So I lost all of that money. I couldn't ask for help still because the people that he was bringing over were other police and lawyers and judges and random people he met at the grocery store and friends that he didn't really know. I had no idea who I could and couldn't trust anymore.

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He was advertising me on a dating website, Plenty of Fish. These people were well aware of what was going on and what he was doing to me. I met other women who had the same things happening to them and they were the only people who were truly kind to me. At one point I tried to kill myself. I tried to take myself out suicide by train and I got really dark. And it was the eyes of a small child that saved my life.

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And I know you've read the book, but I cannot impress enough how important it was to have that child look at me that day. And all it did was look at me, but this child saw me. And I had been begging all day long. I had sat in the graveyard and prayed. I had sat on the steps of the church and prayed, please somebody just see me. And when he looked at me, he didn't just look at me. He saw me.

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And it scared me and it made me really uncomfortable because when he saw me, he knew me. And at that point, I didn't even know myself anymore. And my plan had been to smoke that cigarette and to go out on the tracks and to jump in front of the train. And I knew at that point that I could not do to that four-year-old's child what had been done to me when I was four. I could not take away his innocence like that.

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So I changed my mind and I went back to my prison and I started making another plan. I can do this, I can get out of this. There's gotta be another way. And I started using psychology against this man. And I made him believe that I had what we used to call Stockholm Syndrome, we now call trauma bonding, and that I would do anything for him. And I told him one day, I said, you know, the day that we had lined up that we were supposed to get married is come and gone and we haven't gotten married.

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And if I overstay my visa, I could get kicked out of the UK forever and never be allowed back, according to UK law. And you could lose your job as a police officer. But if you send me back, I could come back in six months and it would be just in time for Christmas. And wouldn't that be wonderful? And within a couple of hours, he bought a round trip flight to get me out of there. And I got back to California and did what I could to disappear.

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But just because I disappeared doesn't mean that he stopped looking for me or attacking me. You can get out of a domestic violence situation, you can get out of a case of human trafficking, and still be hunted, sometimes for the rest of your life. You've got an uphill battle. And it wasn't until 2019 when I had moved away from California, I was in Colorado, that was when I discovered that he made me famous on a pornography website. By putting all these photos and videos up.

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and linking it to my social media and giving out any and all personal information he had for me. That was when I decided that it was time to start fighting back. I got a therapist. The first therapist. I traumatized her so bad that I'm pretty sure that she left the industry. She's described in the book as the lady who just went, hmm, pretty sure she's gone forever. So they gave me another therapist and she was phenomenal.

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But I went in with this mentality of, I'm ready to do the hard work. I need to fix this. But when I first met her, I told her, so first of all, don't come at me with prescription medications right off the bat. I don't want a band-aid. I want a shovel. And second, don't pull any punches. Don't step on eggshells. And don't treat me like I'm some fragile porcelain doll. If I was gonna break, I'd have done it already. And going in and knowing that I was ready to do this hard work,

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It set us both up for success. I'd had a therapist when I was a 15-year-old kid. My mother had illegally put me on Ritalin for a while and then took me off of it for a few days to take me back into the doctor and got me my very own prescription. And I was on it until I was 15 and started running away from home. It all started illegally. I was on speed for all these years, turning me into an absolute zombie.

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And this therapist when I was 15, she didn't know I was going through drug withdrawals. Nobody did. And she gave me Klonopin and Paxil and Prozac and all these other cocktail drugs to try and fix what was wrong with me. Rather than treating the underlying cause, she was treating the symptoms. And she also told me something that damaged me for many, many years. She said, if you want to have a relationship with your father or with any man.

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You have to pretend to like what they like. You have to draw interest in what they like so that you can have some common ground. And that therapist set me up for failure. I didn't know how to be me anymore. Enough years of that, and suddenly you don't like anything that you like. You like whatever they like. It ruined me. But this new therapist, I told her this. I told her right off the bat, I said, this is why I don't trust therapists.

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And she said, we're gonna work on that too. By the end of our therapy, it was November of 2020. She said, what are you gonna do with yourself now? She said, I don't think there's much more that I can do to help you. You've made huge progress, but I know you well enough to know that you're not going to end your journey here. So what are you gonna do? And I said, I think I'm gonna write my book. And she said, oh, great. I'll check in with you in January and see how it's going. She reached out to me in January and she said, so how's it going? I said, I'm doing great. How are you doing? She said, that's not what I asked.

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I said, how's it going? How's the book going? And I said, oh, it's done. And she said, wait a second, is it a short? No, it's 350 pages. Some pictures in there, but it's decent size. She said, how did you do that while working? Aren't you still working two full-time jobs? Yeah. Going through medical treatments, yeah. How did you do it? And I said, when it's ready to come out of you and when you already know the story.

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How do you not? The one thing I will say when I read that part of the book, when the therapist told you, you have to do whatever he likes, I'm like, this isn't coming to America. Cause we've already been back to that scene where, you know, he didn't want to marry the girl that was arranged for him. And he's talking to her and he's like, what did you like? Whatever you like. And he's, why ask you to hop on one leg? You gonna do it? Yes. I'm like, this ain't cool. Like a dog. Right. I'm like, that's the worst advice. I do think it's important now, people, you gotta go read this book.

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The story Amanda told you is probably brief. I do want to point these pieces out. This proves you I read your book. The guy she said she was in love with for seven years gets her over there. He automatically starts this whole entire regimen of alcohol right away. The first night that happens to her, you don't even know what's going on. You black out because he's serving these drinks down. The old adage that men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love is far proven.

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in your book because that's what this guy kept repeating. If you love me enough, you would do this. All you gotta do is just do this for me one time and then you don't ever have to do it again. But then one time turns into two because as you probably figured out now, while he's setting you up for the first time, he's already setting up new clients, right? For the second, third, fourth, all the way down. Yeah. The most horrific part of that is you brought up the kidney infection.

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One part you didn't touch on, which I won't give too much away, but you end up getting assists in the back of the head that he told you wasn't. This thing ends up bursting in the middle of one of your clients. And the client was the one that said, you need to get her out of here. She has a problem. Take her to the hospital. It's not a zit. I bring this up because my next topic is young girls, right? You did not know you were even being traffic as early as you were. I agree with you.

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There's a lot of people that thinks that trafficking has to do with being in a car, moving over state lines. It can't be domestic. There's a course I'm going to ask you later because I was listening to another podcast and what this lady said about trafficking, I was like, I have an expert coming on, so we going to ask her because what she's saying is totally not true. But I wanted to point all that out to show young girls that if your boyfriend is simply asking you, Hey, this is my man. It's okay. Go over here and do this to him. That's trafficking.

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He's gaining something from that, even if it's not money, whatever, friendship, ride to the store, whatever that it is. And you're right, back in the time that started happening to you, there was no law that said anything or there wasn't anything called trafficking at the time. Right. This wasn't something we talked about at all. Right. And we had to define that. But parents are afraid nowadays to talk to their kids about this. I show my kids Web of Lies. There's a show called Undercover Under A's that deals with this. But we don't talk about these things.

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then our kids get trapped into that. And then on top of that, you mentioned therapy. Here's where me and you kind of mess up. Because of the abuse I went through with my father, my father was very abusive. I've seen my mom whipped, I've been whipped, I've been thrown from room to room, my mom's been raped forcefully, I've seen her tied to beds. You name it, I've seen it. I was even raped by my own father. The first thing my mom would do is give me the third B because she wanted me to get some help. And I ran into this third person, the first thing they said, and you guys have to understand this audience that

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For those of us that go to any kind of abuse, this is always an uneducated psychologist answer. Here's a bunch of drugs, take them, you'll be fine. So they threw me on lithium, which was the worst drug at the time in the late 80s, early 90s, because it made you lethargic. What that drug was meant to do was made you not feel, right? It wants to put you in a state of euphoria so that you can't react. So I started falling asleep in school because they're like, give me these whole tablets, and then go find and say, give me half a tablet.

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At 15, I dismissed my therapist. And I told my mom, I said, all I need is you and God, because this man or woman doesn't know anything he's talking about. They have a piece of paper that says, we know how you feel, but you don't know how I feel. And in one session, I remember that we took all of our chairs and we turned them around to everybody else in the group and we kicked the therapist out because we were like, we are really the only people here that knows what it's like to be hit or raped.

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or shunned or whatever we're going through, this guy and this woman don't really know that. So I don't know if your therapist been doing it like that, but I read your book, I'm like, man, there is good therapists out there who's gonna pull her out of this. So what do you say to the young girls out there that don't know that they're being trafficked that currently are right now? If you feel like you're being manipulated in any way, this is an unhealthy relationship, even if you're not being trafficked yet.

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it can easily lead to that. You have to learn to start setting healthy boundaries for yourself. And healthy boundaries can be something like, I'm not going to go to that party. And if somebody is trying to talk me into doing it, even when I've already expressed that I'm not interested in going, this is not a healthy relationship. This is not somebody who respects you. This is not somebody who actually wants to be your friend. This is somebody who wants to manipulate, use and abuse you to varying degrees.

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You have to learn to start to spot those red flag warnings. This can set you up for success to be able to step away from those relationships before they go down that tunnel. And if you are being trafficked, not knowing what resources are available to you is the same as not having those resources. We live in the age of the internet. We have a national human trafficking hotline, and there are anti-trafficking organizations in every single state across the US.

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Almost every country across the world. Find the resources available to you. The reason they exist is for you. Find them, contact them, and get the help you need. Asking for help is not a weakness, it is a strength. I will tell you that I ate with you when you didn't make that flight. And then when you came with this idea, I was in here going, yeah, don't know if he gonna fall for this one. But then when he started gaslighting you, I'm like,

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is don't work because when you brought up the marriage situation, he's like, I can't marry you. You've been with way too many men. I'm like, wait a minute. You're the reason why she's been with all these dudes. She came wanting to be with you. So now the guy's like, let me begin. It's all your fault why we can't get married. And I'm like, okay, you may have a way out, which, you know, I always say criminals are stupid. And sometimes dudes as in there's a lot of businesses too, because my first thought would have been, wait a minute.

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She's asked me to send her back. If I send her back, she's probably never going to come back. And he even admitted, I haven't been the best boyfriend to you, but he knows that he was abusive, so when I'm like, it's going to work, she's going to finally get out. So I was very happy to overjoy. Here's the question that's probably, I don't know, going to make you frown. I'm not going to name the podcast or the person, but I recently listened to a podcast episode and the person they had on was an expert on the dark web. A question about trafficking came up.

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And that I heard an expert on the dark web says that the trafficking and how it works, that we've done it all wrong or we think of it wrong. They stated that trafficking trade actually works by tricking pretty much weak individuals into believing they have a job than taking their passports and making them join the sex trade to get them back. And they claimed that nothing like that was ever happening over there. I didn't see that in your story, but then further went on to say.

32:56
that they believe that trafficking does not exist in third world countries. And if it does, it's only by organized crime. What do you say to that? Oh my gosh. I would love to have a conversation with this person, first of all. It absolutely happens in third world countries. In fact, there are many third world countries in the African continent that have forced child slavery, child soldiers.

33:22
That is a form of human trafficking. It's not sex trafficking, it is labor trafficking. Absolutely, it happens. There is not a nation on this planet that is not affected in some way by human trafficking. There's not a place out there where it doesn't exist. And if you get down to the basic root of why it exists and how it happens, it totally makes sense that it's going to happen everywhere. And as for that first part, oh my gosh.

33:50
So this is where we get into where human smuggling and human trafficking overlap in a big way. When somebody, let's say from China, decides that they want to be smuggled into the United States, this is very common. This happens in a lot of our ports. People will get smuggled in, and then they are forced into servitude to pay off what they call a debt bondage.

34:19
debt bondage is human trafficking. So these people are now forced to work in kitchens or they're forced to work in nail salons or hair salons to be able to pay back their debt. They are given pennies on the dollar of what they earn. Everything else that they earn goes to the person that they owe this money to, the person that is holding their passport and refusing to allow them to have their own sense of identity. When they do finally pay off this debt, whether it's in a massage parlor with sex trafficking,

34:49
or nail salon or kitchen, then they're wanting to get somebody else from their family over to the country. Now, both of those people are going to be in debt bondage. It's not the largest percentage of people who are in human trafficking, but this is still a very big percentage of what's going on. And I get

35:13
that they're probably trying to bring more awareness to the actual larger percentage of what happens, like what happened to me. The majority of people that are trafficked by people they know and trust and love, people with a sense of authority over their lives already, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. The kidnapping scenario that we most often see on social media where somebody says they were followed through the grocery store parking lot and this must be human trafficking.

35:41
Human trafficking by way of kidnapping makes up about one to 2% of all cases. That is still a possibility in the world of human trafficking. This person is out there spreading a lot of very false, very dangerous information. It scares me that people like this think they can speak on this issue. I know the person who...

36:05
interviewed this person. So I actually reached out and said, there was a lot of things with your guests that I did not agree on. Because they spent a lot of time saying hit men really don't exist on the dark web. They're all fake. And you can read that by going in the back of, you know, you have, you are savvy enough with technology, you can look at the source code of the website and tell that nothing's going to happen. I'm very versed in the technology. I work in it all the time. And I do know that if there's something I don't want you to see.

36:32
you're not going to see why I'm doing other things in the background. And so just listening to that episode, this person is an expert, written several books on it, getting out of it now. But most of it was around CSAM, which is child sexual abuse material and how that's discovered over there. But everything that was asked of this person that dealt with trafficking or serious child abuse sex material was, it is there, but it's not as bad as he made it seem.

37:02
Yeah, there's hitman sites there, but all of them are fake. And I'm like, if all of them were fake, there would be no reason to have the dark web. And 2020, a couple of years ago, did a whole thing on the dark web where there was a guy who did make millions and he says, yes, I'm a hitman, but I am fake. He goes, but don't be mistaken by this because I am. Don't mean that the next guy you talk to is it. That's why we deal in Bitcoin because it can't be traced.

37:30
So when my friend who did the pocket reached out, I'm like, you know what? I have an expert's coming on. So I'm going to ask this question to see what she has to say. I says, because I don't agree with that. And I said, there's some other things with the dark web I don't agree on. And I said, the one thing they didn't touch on is everybody hates Apple to a degree, but there was somebody that wrote a book that said, if you're ever going to the dark web, take a Mac, because the moment you enter, you're already being hacked. And I'm like, why is that not told to people? Because you're telling them.

37:58
Basically how you can't go by traditional means. All you can do is look up how to get on the dark web and tell you how to get on there. If you don't know what you're doing, yes. And this is where I do believe Craigslist used to be the big trafficking site. And I do believe a lot of that went to plenty of fish, but it's hidden, right? It, the profiles are written in such a way, even maybe code words that other traffickers or people into that knows what it means and then the dark web becomes a big thing because nobody even goes down there. So thank you for answering that question. I appreciate it.

38:29
Yeah, absolutely. And Bitcoin is used a lot in human trafficking cases as well. But in my case specifically, he just dealt with cash. You also can't trace that. Right. Now I think another thing that your book proved, because I've talked about this many of the time you listen to any episode of my podcast, especially dealing with Christopher Dorner about the blue line of justice with cops. And the one thing when I read your book, I'm like, man, this is nationwide.

38:56
Because you've tried several times to turn this guy in and say, here's what he's doing and every time I went back and said, Hey, we don't have any proof that our officer is doing this. How did that make you feel at that point that you have this evidence that this guy is doing things totally illegally? You may not be the only woman because I'm sure the way these mentality works is when you left, he found somebody else. How did it feel at that point that you absolutely had nobody legally on your side in Scotland?

39:26
I was so scared and I had grown up constantly in that state of fear and that state of fight or flight. When I left there, the only thing that I could think about was his daughter. I had massive regrets about leaving because I didn't want to leave her there. I didn't want her to be even a remote possibility of being his next victim. When he first started attacking me and I was writing to his superior officers there, I

39:54
I did everything I could to try to remember stuff, but trauma turns our brains into Swiss cheese. There are certain parts and pieces that I can't remember, specifically like people's names. I can remember exactly what people look like and Lord help me, I wish I couldn't. But I could not tell you what their names were or what they even went by or how he found them. If they were on Plenty of Fish, I have no idea. Because I wasn't able to give them

40:21
all of these little tiny specific details that no trauma survivor really can. I was discounted and told my story didn't matter. And I believed that for a long time that if I wasn't able to recall absolutely everything that happened to me, my story didn't matter and nobody was ever going to believe me. Nobody was ever going to trust me and it took me years to learn how to talk about it again. People need to do a lot more research into how trauma affects the brains.

40:51
if they're going to start investigating crimes like this. And even as we get older, I'm 50 now, and there's still things I have to put in check because we can heal from it. We can survive from it and overcome, but we never forget it. Right. All through life, there's going to still be things that trigger us. And sometimes we may fly off the handle. You had to talk about that off the air.

41:17
You may say something that triggers me in this moment and just the reaction because of the things I've been through, that's what you're going to get. But if you don't know what I've been through or don't understand it or research that, you just like, oh my God, he's just being an ass today. What's wrong with him? But then when you go back and realize, oh, let me put this in perspective, they don't understand that. You get what victims like us have been through. And the one thing that I did like about your book is this, because I always have people who play tit for tat with me is,

41:45
It should not matter whose abuse was worse, who was less. It's all in the same realm. All that should matter is, Hey, we've all been in the same pot somehow. We need to all come together and help each other out. Doesn't matter if mine was worse, yours was worse. It was all bad. And it was bad for us in many different ways, right? Being hung out of a window, three stories may not be as bad to you as getting ran over by a car. So it hits us both right in the same vein. So I was happy when you said that.

42:16
The one I want to ask you is porn. A lot of people says that a lot of females are trafficked in the scenes of porn that we've seen or see now. Is there any way to tell that? Because there's been some that I've seen through the years where I can pretty much tell, yeah, something's going on because you have somebody in the corner and they're looking at them like what I'm supposed to do. Is there any way to tell that? Is that really a big situation still going on in the porn industry today? This is a massive problem.

42:44
It's one of those problems where I had heard about it being an issue, but even I didn't believe the numbers until I became one of them. In 2019, when I found out about the whole porn thing, I started doing a lot more research and I started speaking to special agents in the FBI who dealt with the pornography industry and its overlap with human trafficking. And that was when I discovered.

43:07
through them, through solid education and reputable resources, that more than 85% of all modern pornography is created using victims of human trafficking. You have to break that down back into the original definition, the use of force, fraud, or coercion. These people might not be held down and forced into performing for a pornography, but through fraud or coercion, as it's going to be far more common in that industry.

43:34
They can be somebody that's promised $10,000 to do a single video and they're not paid at all. That is fraud. It can be coercion. It can be somebody who, like me, is told, if you really love me, you'll do this for me one time and you'll never have to do it again. That is coercion, whether or not they did it more than once or not. So breaking it down like that and understanding that these people are here not because they want to be, but because they don't see that they have any alternatives, that's still human trafficking.

44:04
Now I have heard other podcasts of people that's trying to eradicate the pornography business altogether. And one of the females that ran the show stated that they are trying to shut down Pornhub because they feel that Pornhub is the biggest trafficking site that we don't know because they make all this for free and then she starts breaking down. But how they actually do get paid so that they're getting paid millions of what we see for free.

44:32
So if you think if you partake in pornography that people who do is adding to the trafficking situation. Absolutely. They're building more of a demand. There's a supply and demand situation going on where when you start watching pornography, at first it might be what would be considered mild pornography and your brain releases dopamine, which is very similar to a heroin addiction.

45:02
every time you get that next fix, you need something more the next time to have the same result. And your addiction gets fed into something that's more and more X-rated or controversial. And that need for that consumption, you don't want to watch the same video again, you watched that one last week, you need something new this time. So people are going to keep making these videos and they're going to keep coercing and forcing.

45:32
and frauding these people into doing pornographies. And the video of me that ended up on Pornhub was outright a rape video. I was raped on video and that video was put up on Pornhub and my former trafficker was making a lot of money off of multiple pornography websites. This is a very big problem. So with that, what is the most popular forms of human trafficking that exists in the US?

46:01
labor trafficking shockingly enough. We talk about sex trafficking here in the US, but that makes up about 14% of all trafficking worldwide. The majority of trafficking here in the US is actually labor trafficking. So we're forcing people to work out into the fields and not getting paid a livable wage or a minimum wage. They're getting paid pennies on the dollar. They're barely scraping by. This is not.

46:26
an acceptable living practice and it should not be happening here in the US, but we need to stop turning a blind eye and pretending like it doesn't. In your book, I read this excerpt that I found very interesting. You stated the average age of a child in trafficking right now is between 12 and 14 years old for girls, 10 and 13 for boys, but they only have a seven year life expectancy in traffic.

46:51
So you're telling me that if you get in, let's say at 12 years old, you only have seven years in which you're gonna live as a girl if you're stuck in this way of life? That is correct. At the end of seven years on average, they die of a drug overdose, they're beaten to death, they are drowned on purpose, murdered, they commit suicide. And suicide rates among the victims of trafficking is astronomically high. Imagine living that life for several years straight.

47:20
and thinking there's no way out except death. You welcome death. It happened to you, but your book, you also stated that you was trafficked the first time at 18, the second at 19, and the third time at 31. I'm happy that you're here. Because there were several times I read you wanted to commit suicide. Yes, the whole train incident, I was like, ain't nobody here to stop her. And then you said that child came.

47:46
And me and you feel like the same way. There was a lot of times I've thought about committing suicide because of what I've been through and because women uses that when a woman, some of them, not all, but some of them, they use the fact that the man's been abused against him because they know we're not going to hit back. Or if we do, Oh my God, his dad beat him. So he's going to beat me. And then just holding that in as a man, as men don't come out with this. That's why I've made it my mission this year.

48:12
anybody who wanted me on their podcast, how about my story, I'm gonna tell it because I'm hoping to help save some other guy out there that's held this in. Because the one thing about your book was, I read a couple of answers to somebody and they're like, man, this sounds like it would be a movie. Are you sure she's not lying to you? And I said, here's what I'm gonna tell you. First of all, you can't sit down and write this kind of book if you're gonna lie. Second of all, she's told you the parts of where she has a shortcoming. She can't remember everything. I said, but you don't have to believe me, but believe this.

48:42
And this is where my mind changed on the whole Casey Anthony case that people sent me emails because after they came out with her documentary, I watched it again and I paid attention to the things that we didn't see. Body language don't lie. And those of us that have been abused, especially sexually, that is something we just don't want to make up. Maybe we add on to it, but we're not going to lie to you about that. When I watched her documentary and she was going into...

49:09
the abuse from her brother and her father. I'm like, these are the things that we really never saw in this case. We didn't get to see her in this light. We didn't get to analyze her body language because of the fact of what she was accused of, we already hated her. So that's my mission is to go and help with that. Now, Aver, you told me a statistic. So it looks like that this is growing up for boys. Can you share with us what the percentage of boys are in trafficking right now?

49:36
Yeah, the percentage of boys and men in human trafficking now takes up 46%. Almost half. Is it hard? If men in fact being, you know, they're supposed to be the stronger being. How did you get trapped into that as a man? It depends on your background. If you have this abusive background when you're growing up and you're made to feel like less, you are taught not to fight back.

50:02
you're more vulnerable. You're looking to have a need fulfilled just like I was as an 18 year old kid. And we also have to remember that boys are considered to be men the second they turn 18 years old. If somebody is being trafficked, starting when they're 14, 15, 16 years old and they live beyond 18, that is a man that is being trafficked. So it's going to be a little bit more rare to find a 30 year old man that's trafficked. It's going to be a lot more common to find somebody who's 18, 19, 20 years old.

50:32
And another really shocking number that I found recently is that nine out of 10 homeless youths have been trafficked in some way, and that is boys and girls. Oh, wow. So I wanted to bring that up, that's important to let people know, hey, this is happening to our youth, and just because you're a man don't mean still can't go through it. The one thing that got me in your book, and maybe you can give me clarification to this, you didn't have world's greatest relationship with your parents. Your mom was downright cruel to you.

51:00
You still held on to a photograph of her and you still have some fond memories of her, but you still kind of want a relationship with your mom. Can you explain that a little bit to us? It's tough for any kid. When you have abusive relationships with your parents who also love you, it's not a one or the other. I would have given anything to have some kind of a relationship with my mother.

51:28
to have her tell me that she loves me and she's proud of me. And it was the same thing with the man in Scotland where I was constantly doing whatever I could to try to appease him so that maybe he would love me just a little bit more. It was that same relationship with my mother. I would give anything to have her love me just maybe a little bit more, maybe just enough to accept me. Maybe if I could do more and say more, I might.

51:54
be able to save and have some kind of a relationship with her because, let's get honest, that's the only mom I'll ever have. And she's not a part of my life now. And I miss her. I don't miss the cruelty. I don't miss the abuse. I miss the idea of what a mother should have been to me that I never had. My dad was very abusive. He was gone by the time I was five or sixes.

52:23
And I've tried because as a father now, I try to fulfill those gaps that my dad never did. And the thing about that is yes, I wanted my dad. I wanted the dad that went to my basketball games and showed me how to tie a tie. And I think the difference is between me and you is your mom was downright cruel. She just said what she wanted to say. You knew what you was going to get. She didn't really say I didn't do that. I didn't say that. When my dad finally.

52:52
I got a hold of him through my uncle. My uncle was like, you have to give your dad an opportunity at least. Then all these years, he had the same story. He goes, I know where your dad is. And I said, you know what? There's some things I want to say to him. Why don't you go ahead and put him through. Now my wife is sitting here, you know, after when I talked to him, she was like, why you didn't go off? You know, cause I've heard that said, if I ever see him again, I'm gonna go off. I'm a rebel new one. I'm gonna do this. You never know what you're going to do until you're there.

53:18
But he kind of gassed at the situation. I knew I was gonna get anywhere because when he talked to me, I was like, do you understand what you did to my life when you beat my mom? I don't remember beating your mom. If you said that I did that, then I did it. Really? You don't remember having her branded and throwing her, yeah, yeah. I don't remember that, man, but if I did that, I apologize. And I said to my wife, like, it wasn't even worth me losing my breath because he's just gonna gaslight the situation. He's not gonna take responsibility for that. So why am I even talking to him?

53:48
I said, well, I carry your name. And that's why I never really used my whole name was because I was a junior. My mom was the one that said, it's the man that makes the name, not the name that makes the man. You can take this name and you can make it greater than what your dad ever could. And I said, without you, I've done all these things. I've become a dad. I'm now a grandfather. I work for one of the top companies in the world. I have a successful marriage. All of this without you. And I'm giving you this opportunity, which I shouldn't.

54:16
But you want to gaslight the situation, which lets me further know that you're never going to accept responsibility. So we're just going to call it what it is and just be done. Yeah. So I'm glad you understand how I feel. Cause for the first time, I'm talking to somebody who actually understands that. And I understand when you come from your mom too, because I was like, when I was reading, I'm like, yeah, but she just wants to be accepted. And I think that if your mom would ever just came out and said, you know what, Amanda, I'm sorry, I've been a bad mom all these years. I understand. I can never make that up to you.

54:46
but I'm proud of you and let's start something. I think you'd have been acceptable to that because that's what she's looking for. It's not that we forget. Forgiveness, as you know, is for us. It's really not for the other person. People are like, you can't say that. Yeah, we can because we're the one that's carrying the hate and the hurt and the trauma. And that manifests itself into health issues. And the more we harbor on that, the worse we become. I didn't say forget.

55:15
I said, we have to forgive what that action was. Didn't say forget. We're never gonna forget that and we never should. And forgiveness is not a pardon either. It's not like stepping on somebody's foot and saying, oh, I'm sorry. And the other person going, oh no, that's cool. That's fine, whatever. It's not a pardon. It's not saying what you did to me is okay. You know, forgiveness is taking a step back and saying, I have all of this anger and hatred and resentment that is ruling my life and making me

55:43
perform different actions or think in different ways than I would if it didn't exist. So I'm going to take all of this anger and hatred and I'm going to release it and let it go. I'm a Christian by faith. And there are so many instances in the Bible where we are called to forgive. John went to Jesus and asked, am I supposed to forgive seven times? And Jesus said, no, 77 times. It never ends.

56:11
You have to let go. You have to walk away from all of that anger because it is going to absolutely tear you down and destroy you if you don't. It's not worth it. Why live your life waiting for the people who abused you to put you back together? It is not their job. It is not their responsibility. It is not their privilege. You do that. Stop waiting around for an apology from somebody who hurt you because if they hurt you,

56:40
They're going to do it again. It's okay to walk away and put two pieces together and live your life. Now, I think one of the coolest part of your story is, so you finally get out, you leave Scotland, you guys will see how she does all that and go read the book, but you make it back over into LA. You end up running into, I believe it was Lori Holden, who was an actress from The Walking Dead. Find out that she is actually advocating for trafficking.

57:09
And what I am reading and what I believe is when you met her, she was the first person to really validate what you've been through, welcomed you home, glad that you were alive and then proceeded to help. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Cause we meet actresses and actors every day and we never get to hear the good side of these people. She was amazing. In fact, just the memory is, is making me tear up a little bit. I was pretty broke at the time. I was working as a flight attendant.

57:39
And Walker Stalker, Walking Dead convention was up in San Francisco, and I was going to drive up there to go to this event. And the only reason that I wanted to go was just to meet her. I had just found out that she was part of a special operation where she herself kept the kids all safe and in a separate room away from where the traffickers were being busted. She had to wear a wig and sunglasses so nobody would recognize her because Walking Dead was such a massive hit at that time.

58:09
And I found out about it. It's like, I need to go and thank her. I need to go and just tell her thank you for what you've done. And at the time, I thought that my second incident of trafficking was the only time that I had been trafficked because that more fit with what the media was talking about rather than what the real definitions were. I didn't realize that I'd been trafficked three different times. I was still pretty new out of Scotland when this happened. And I went up and I waited in line and I waited and waited.

58:36
I finally got all the way up to her and she was taking maybe two to three minutes with each separate guest. And I walked up and I told her, I said, I came all the way here from LA to meet you just to thank you for what you've done because I'm a survivor of human trafficking myself. And she immediately reached under the desk and grabbed a back in 10 minute sign and threw it up on the counter and reached across the counter and grabbed me and hugged me.

59:05
And it was the point where both of our rib cages were smashed on the corner of this table. And it kind of hurt a little bit, but it didn't matter. And she said, come here, come here. And we came around to the side of the table and she hugged me and she said, I'm so glad you're here. I'm so proud of you. It takes so much to be able to talk about this. She says, and one of the things that a lot of people don't talk about is that when you are a part of one of these operations and you get these people out of trafficking, you don't get to find out what happens next.

59:35
You have to leave them in the hands of other people and trust that they're going to be taken care of and you don't really know. It's not very often that somebody will come forward and say, I'm a survivor and I'm doing okay. And she hugged me again and she held me for a long time. There's a couple of really great photos of that hug. Just really held me tight. And she told me, I wanna challenge you now.

01:00:03
How much of a difference can you make in somebody else's? And that has stuck with me so much. She is part of the reason that I wrote my book. She's a huge reason why I wrote my book. She's also a huge reason why I started my trauma recovery mentorship program. She inspired me with nothing more than a hug and a couple of words of encouragement, the kind of words that I had always wanted to hear from my mother and never did. This total stranger I had never met but had only ever seen on TV.

01:00:32
She's an amazing human being. And I sent her a wedding invitation, but she didn't make it. The other part of this story that's cool to me is you find yourself at a party in the house that's in between Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey at the time. Jim Carrey miraculously shows up at this party unbeknownst to anybody else, but he comes to you and asks you on a date. Now...

01:01:00
Out of all the stuff you've been through, out of all the things that people was yelled about, that you didn't look good and all this, here comes one of the most famous actors in Hollywood saying, I wanna take you out. First of all, did you go on the date and how did you feel when he came and asked you out? I was a little shocked when he asked me out. We did go on the date. I won't go into too many details about that for his own privacy and for mine at this point. He's kind of a little loopy these days.

01:01:28
When it happened, he had come over to the dividing wall between these two backyards and he was just shaking hands and saying hi to people. And I had no idea at the time that this is what was going on. He was just back there saying hello. And I heard a bunch of bustle and people going over and shaking hands and saying hi and everybody and starting to talk. I was involved in a conversation with a lady who had bedazzled her own hat. And I was very involved in this conversation. She wanted to tell me all about how much work she'd put into this cute, adorable little

01:01:59
You gotta remember, I just left Scotland on June 19th of that same year, 2011. This is July 4th, this is less than a month later. My focus was on breathing fresh air and being back and living my life and having human interactions with people. This woman that I was talking to right then was the most important woman on the planet because she was talking to me. We were having a conversation.

01:02:27
I have an adopted family. My brother Patrick tapped me on the shoulder. He said, there's somebody over here that's waiting to speak to you. And I told him, I said, okay, just a moment, Patrick. Let me finish my conversation. And I turned back and looked back at this woman with this bedazzled hat and her eyes were as big as saucers. And she was absolutely shocked that I had just put off Jim Carrey to finish a conversation with her.

01:02:55
And she said, Oh no, honey, you go ahead. And I turned around and there was Jim Carey and he was specifically asking to meet me. He had met basically everybody else at the party waiting to meet me. But the whole reason, and he, he confessed this to me later on, the whole reason he came to the wall to start meeting people at the party was because he wanted an excuse to meet me. And he was thinking that I would make it easier on him. Oh, wow.

01:03:25
One of the last questions I will ask, I think is important. You are married now from the way you look very happily. So with all of the things that happened to you with trafficking around the issue of sex, you know, you started, it was just something to give away at that point, you know, a means to an ends. How did you bounce back from that once you get into have a healthy relationship once you do get into one? Oh, that took so much therapy and counseling. It took wrapping my head around.

01:03:53
what it actually is. It took understanding that it wasn't a tool and this isn't something that my husband is going to use against me. He's not going to hurt me. These are not incidences of abuse. But it also took him understanding all of these same things. It took him reading my entire autobiography and understanding what I went through.

01:04:19
being very open and very conversational about it with me and saying, okay, if something happens, if I look at you the wrong way, or if something is triggered in you that makes you afraid, you have to tell me. You have to be able to tell me about this. And if you can't say it with words, say it with a hand motion. So just very clearly, if something triggers me and I get frightened or scared.

01:04:48
I throw a hand up like a child in school waiting to ask a question. That's all it takes. And everything stops. And it absolutely takes a strong man to be able to do that. And I applaud him for even wanting to make the effort. He knew all of this about me before we ever got engaged. You know, people like us, when you need people, it does take a lot to be with us, especially with the trauma side. So we have to give your husband a lot of credit too.

01:05:15
because I think that he proved you wrong in one part of your book, which is you say you felt like that no one would ever love you the way you needed to be loved. And if he knew all of this beforehand, but he's still saying, hey, with all of the stuff I've read and all the time you've been through, I'm willing to work through it because I want to be with you and we're still gonna get married. I hope you understand that everything that you felt was reversed, that you felt that there is someone that wants to love me for me.

01:05:45
with all of my flaws and all of my shortcomings and whatever that's gonna turn out to in the future. And a lot of people don't think that they have people like that. They do, right? And that's the first, I didn't have to ask you, you told me, but that's the first thing I say is, did you lay all your cards on the table? When I married my wife, we've been married now 21 years in about two weeks. I'm like, here's all my cards on the table. I've been married four times, been divorced because of the fact that I wanted to right the wrongs that my dad had did to me.

01:06:13
And I jumped in and married at 19 and just kept going, got abused by a partner. I'm broken in a lot of ways. I've been dealt, I've been trained to deal with things in some ways, but one day you may say something may flop the handle. If this is cool, you're going to sign up for that. Let's go. Well, my wife signed up for that and I'm not the easiest person to live with to this day, but when we find those people that wants to invest and I think if he hasn't said it, let me kind of say to you what I think of behind the lines of that. That.

01:06:42
It wasn't just about a sexual thing. There was more to you than what your body can give him. He was interested in who Amanda is and was, and how can he be a part of healing you? Sexual relationship with you becomes the cherry on top now because he's going to get from you what everybody else did not, including the guy you was in love with for seven years. He's gonna get the true, authentic Amanda.

01:07:11
the one you was willing to give in the beginning that people broke. He's now gonna help you put that back together again. And I think you guys will be together for a lifetime. So I wanted to say that to you directly because when reading your book and then reading you've been married happily, I'm like, yeah, this is the guy that wanted to put you back together. And the beautiful irony of that is we met one month after my autobiography was published. It was published on my 10 year anniversary of freedom. I knew

01:07:40
that my life was going to change the second that book came out, but I had no idea how much. He read the entire book without telling me before we ever got engaged, and then afterwards told me that if I could go through everything that I had been through and still be willing to try to have a relationship with somebody and still be willing to love and be loved, he needed a lot more of that in his life. Not less.

01:08:08
The last thing I touch on because I think this is important. I don't know how much of my show you've listened to, but I am not shy from this at all. I am a Christian. I have been my whole life. I have battled with the questions people saying, how can you serve a God that does these things to you? Reading your book, again, you and I align because there is things that I can see here and tell you right now that I believe and can prove that there is a God. I shouldn't be sitting here if the man did not exist in my life.

01:08:38
When you came out of this, you held on to your faith. Your mom was Methodist, I was raised Baptist and Methodist. But now one of those Methodists is going to come out and tell you where all the crookedness is because there's crookedness in every denomination. And the one thing I've told people, I say, name in the Bible where you see where there is a Methodist, a Baptist, a Catholic. There's one church that's named in the Bible and that's the Church of Christ. That's it. So people go, I was raised that way, but I'm a Christian. I'm just a follower of Christ.

01:09:08
I believe in what the Bible says, you can't sway me to tell me anything different because I've seen the man's hand at work. After all the trauma that you went through, what kept your faith strong in Christ to where you are now? An early foundation. I felt God calling to me when I was really young. I know you read in the book where I was running away from home.

01:09:32
to be able to go to this non-denominational church and my family was getting mad at me and I was getting punished for it because it wasn't a Methodist church. It didn't matter to me. We said prayer over dinner. I wanted to know who we were saying it to. We didn't say prayer over lunch, over breakfast, over basically anything else and never over dinner if we were going out to eat. So who was this man that only showed up at our dinner table? I wanted to know and the pastor at that non-denominational church

01:10:01
was kind and gentle and soft-spoken and very understanding. And he walked us through the basics of trying to understand who God was when I was nine, 10 years old. He did it in such a way that it gave me this lifelong desire to know God and to understand and to know that this isn't just some falsehood. This isn't a Santa Claus.

01:10:27
And I've had people come out to me since then and try to attack my faith and say, oh, I don't believe in Santa Claus. And I remind them very gently, yeah, I figured that one out when I was about four. It took me a lot longer to figure out that God is very real. He's always been real. And it's not God who puts me through these things. It's the devil who attacks. It's God who gets me through these things. And the one thing I think people don't understand is, it's written all throughout the Bible, right?

01:10:55
God has said there's gonna be trials and tribulations. He's not there to stop you from those. That's how you come out and how you trust in Him to bring you out of those. And in the book, you told the story slightly about you were very sick, died, and then went to heaven and saw your grandmother. My mom had the same story. When I was young, had scarlet fever, I think it was, and she went to die, and they came and said she ain't gonna make it. You guys didn't come and say goodbye. And to this day, before she passed away in 2020,

01:11:23
If she forgot every other verse in the Bible, she always remembered the 14th chapter of St. John, because she said, on my deathbed, a bright light walked into my room. I felt this cool hand go over my head. And on the wall, he started to write the 14th chapter of St. John, which is, let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. I'll go away to prepare a place for you to where I am you are also. And she said, the moment that that happened, the bright light walks out.

01:11:51
nurses come in and they're calling doctors. I don't know what happened, man. She was sick. She was about to die. She had a high fever and I was gone because that was God. And a lot of people can deny that and a lot of people do. But when I run into people like you and me, people say, well, because you've been through trauma, that's why you want to be with God. What they don't understand is a lot of us already believed in God beforehand is what we do after that. And you're absolutely right. The child that day was God saying,

01:12:20
It ain't your time yet. Your grandfather told you, no kid, you need to go back. It ain't your time yet. There's other things you have to do. This is it. Who else is going to speak for the people that can't speak for themselves? Your book is enough. They should be booking you on every show. I'm passing your name around. Like you need to book on every show that there is because I've never met somebody like you that has the faith that you have that survived the way you have.

01:12:47
that has this book that you're willing to lay it all on the line, regardless of what it may cost you. So you remind me a lot of a poem. Have you ever heard of the poem called Footprints in the Sand? Indeed. I used to have that on my wall. When I was reading your book, I was like, this is exactly what that poem is all about because even at the times where I felt like you probably felt like I have, I don't feel him.

01:13:17
I didn't see him. I don't know why I'm going through all of this. You know, why can't you just snap your finger right now and just pull me out of this and deliver me? As harsh as it sounds, there's a time for us to come out of that. Maybe it's because we are his stronger soldiers. And sometimes I look at this, I look at all the things I've been through and I think maybe because I was the one that God felt like I was strong enough to make it through this so I can tell this story, that I can help people that's weaker than me

01:13:47
come up. Right? Yeah. I learned recently that less than 2% of all victims actually survive trafficking. Most of them die. Of the 2% that survive, how many do you think, and there's no way we can ever have an answer for this, how many do you think are willing to speak up or write their story? I have been given the gift of being able to write. I've been given the gift of being able to speak up without fear, without anxiety.

01:14:17
It's gonna be rare. It's gotta be. God gave it to me. I need to use it as He saw fit, not as I see fit. I can't just decide to go climb in a hole and hide for the rest of my life, even if I want to. I'm an introvert, but that's not why He gave it to me. I'm gonna use it for His purpose, not mine. I will tell you this. I feel like you're wrong at this part. Some part in your book, I think you said that

01:14:45
You didn't feel that you were ever live the happily ever after. I think that's wrong. It is wrong now. Right. The moment that you escaped, you already lived it. And I just think after that guy just continuously opened doors by the people that he put in front of you. From your therapist who encouraged you to write the book all the way down to famous actresses, all the way to where you are now.

01:15:11
There was a plan and here it is. So this is it. You've written your book, you're getting your story out there. You have a good man in your life. Your child, from what I read at the end of the book, is not coming back to your life. Let's talk to him that for a moment. How are you doing with your son? I know that that was a touch and go thing. You were separated from him, not by your own will. And now, I think just about a year ago from the book was written, he reached out. Things have been a little quiet lately. I have to be understanding.

01:15:38
of that in some regard because I was out of his life for so many years, starting when he was nine, he got married in February and he and his wife had a baby on Mother's Day this year. So they've got their hands full. They've got a lot going on. I just have to understand that it's not my place to be an overbearing mother. I was the absentee mother. I have to allow him to move at his time, not mine.

01:16:07
Well, I will tell you this and I'll share something with you here on air that I haven't shared with anybody else as part of my story is don't lose hope of that. Cause this same thing kind of happened to me. I had my first child at 19 years of age, a daughter, her grandmother at the time it was the god of malight. I was just turning 18. Her mother had just turned 16. No one told me that she was pregnant with this child. I had to go back to school my senior year to find out that she was pregnant. People told me, man, you're a deadbeat. Don't you hear that she's pregnant?

01:16:37
saw her all through the summer, she was a cheerleader, but because she wore oversized clothing, you couldn't tell that she was pregnant. Go back and says, is it so true she's pregnant? They said, yes, call down and verify it. Now, her grandmother to this day says she doesn't remember this part, but basically I lived in Minnesota at the time. They didn't want to take responsibility for the kid and we said that we would. Mother was white, but they came back and said they didn't want anybody black.

01:17:06
Not the exact word, raising the child. My mother, who was a firecracker, pretty much jumped up and said, well, she had sex with one and went to go over the table. So I had to pull her out of the room. They wanted Kirby Puckett at the time, who was the twin sitter fielder to adopt her, and I'm like, he's blacker than I am. Long story short.

01:17:28
I was separated from that child. I saw her off and on because of buddies that I had to say, Hey, she's appearing here and there went to court. Did everything I was supposed to do paid oodles of money in child support. And she did everything she could to keep me away from my child. Years later. I said, I'm have to wait till she turns 18. When she did, I reached out. So who I was, there was a lot of hostility because it had been told that I had just abandoned her and I had all these other kids and I didn't want anything to do with her.

01:17:57
And I said, I have proof, I have court documents, and I have friends around here that'll tell you the truth, which one you want. Hated her grandmother for all these years. My child now is 31. Hated her grandmother for over 20 plus years. Finally, unfortunately, her mother dies. Now I've been in contact with my daughter by this time. Matter of fact, the subject of this, me and her created the first podcast I did four and a half years ago, A Day with Crump. We have a great relationship now.

01:18:24
And she came to me and says, I don't think that my grandma really knew everything that was going on. And so unfortunately her mother died about six months before my mom died. And at that point I said, I'm not willing to let somebody else die because my whole thing was I was going to get back to hold her eventually said, we needed to talk about this. This is, you know, child's grown now. And I said, I'm not going to let that go. So I wrote her grandmother and then passion letter and pretty much said, this is what was said, this is what you did. This is how I felt over all these years.

01:18:52
Maybe you should know I'm a great dad. Here's the kids I have now. Me and her grandmother became friends after we sat down and we talked about it and she apologized and she told me a lot of things I didn't know that, uh, my daughter's mom had made up and had said that wasn't true and we've talked several times since then, so I don't want you to give up hope because even though he has grown with his daughter, he knows in the back of his mind what happened.

01:19:21
If he's read your book, he thoroughly knows. And looking at you and being the person that you are and the nourisher that you are, I mean, four cats, the whole nine, I think he knows. And I think over time you're going to get that relationship that you want. It's just going to take a little time. So don't give up hope on that. Literally. You know, he's 23 now. I didn't give up hope for 23 years. I'm certainly not going to start now.

01:19:50
So in closing, my friend, what do you want people to take away from custom justice? We've grown up constantly hearing all of our lives. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And it's a lie. Frederick Nietzsche came up with this phrase in the 1800s, shortly before he died in an insane asylum, we can let that one go. It is not our abuse or abusers or traumas that make us stronger.

01:20:19
or make us who we are. We become who we are in spite of the trauma and we have the strength already within us. We just have to dig a little deeper sometimes to find it. God gave us the strength to get through these things, not the people who did these things to us. And at the end of Cousins Justice, it does point you towards your other book, Detailed Pieces of a Shattered Dream. He tells a little bit about that and why we should go ahead and read that one after we do this one.

01:20:45
So that one chronicles what happened to me in Florida with being able to MacGyver my way out of that small room. It talks about escaping an abusive relationship and being manipulated by people that I thought were peers and how a 22 year old man can, and a 15 year old girl can put you in such a vulnerable position that your life can absolutely alter.

01:21:15
immediately without you being prepared for it. Well, Amanda, I thank you for coming on the show today. It was definitely an enlightening conversation. I've learned a lot. Your book has taught me a lot about trafficking and I hope that the audience has learned a lot about that too. And if there's anybody out there that is going through this, we're going to leave some resources for you in the show notes to reach out to, to get some help. You are a survivor to.

01:21:44
the nth degree of the word. You're a great woman. Thank you for coming on the show today, I appreciate it. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate you.

01:21:55
All right guys, that was the incredible Amanda Blackwood. You can get your copy of Custom Justice and all of her books, which also does include detailed pieces of a shattered dream at Amazon and at anywhere that you buy books. Let's go out, let's get this book, let's spread the word, let's show Amanda some love. She is doing God's work out here and she can use some help. So please go out and get a copy of her book and read it today.

01:22:24
All right, so once again, thank you for joining me. I know you have many options and true crime and interview podcasts. I am glad that you guys have chosen to be here with me for the last year. This is just an inkling of the incredible people that we have coming down in season two. I hope you guys are being safe, staying dry in a rainy climate and being good to yourself and each other. And always remember, always stay humble. An act of kindness can make someone's day.

01:22:52
A little love and compassion can go a long way and remember that there is an extraordinary person in all of us. I'll catch you guys in the next.

01:23:06
Don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe. Join us on social media. One link to the link tree has it all. Feel free to drop us a line at truecrimeandauthors at gmail.com. Cover art and logo designed by Arslan. Sound mixing and editing by David McClam. Intro script by Sophie Wilde and David McClam. Theme music, legendary, by New Alchemist. Introduction and ending credits by Jackie Voice.

01:23:36
See you next time on True Crime, Authors, and Extraordinary People.