total time: 55.68 minutes
total words: 5966
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks for being here with me today. If you could just introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a bit about who you are.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Sure. Let me just click OK that it's being recorded. Yeah, my name is Melanie Perkins McLaughlin, and my pronouns are she, her, hers.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great. Thanks, Melanie. So I'll ask you just our same question that you have answered a few times already, but maybe it's updated with all the new kind of restaurants we're seeing in Medford. But what is your favorite place to eat in Medford? What do you like to eat there?
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Well, it's funny because we don't get off and it's funny because we don't get out often enough, and it's not one of the newer restaurants, but honestly, we love Amici's in West Medford. And I have to tell you, One of the reasons that we love Amici so much besides their delicious pizza and great chicken Caesar salad is they are so inclusive of our daughter with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Gracie. They just make Gracie and her friends feel so welcome there. They're always talking with her. She feels like, you know, she's part of the community when she goes there and that's a huge plus for us.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's great. Yeah, we like to stop there and know that soccer practices at playstead and hope that they have slices for the day.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Totally.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. I feel like I maybe saw your holiday card up there one time, too.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Yeah, definitely. He used to put my campaign, you know, stuff in the window. He's great, Mario. And also Mario is a dead ringer, in my opinion, for Robert De Niro. So, you know, bonus with your pizza, you get a. Robert De Niro lookalike.
[Danielle Balocca]: Nice. Well, yeah. And you did mention, you mentioned this, so I want to make sure to mention it too. But, you know, I think in the past we've had you on the podcast to talk about school committee and, you know, just wanted to make sure that we thank you for your service. I know that's not, it's not a role that you're currently in, but, you know, thank you for all that you've done. I think a big part of that I noticed about your role was to your dedication to kind of the more vulnerable children in our community. and I do think there's maybe a connection to what we're going to talk about today with your podcast and the preceding documentary, Have You Seen Andy? So yeah, hopefully you're going to continue to highlight the needs of the community's children just in a different way, and I'm sure same way you've been doing.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate your gratitude for the service and it is it is a service. The job's hard and the people that are in those positions are doing it because they really do want to improve the community. And I think that even when you leave a role like that, you never really leave your heart still in the city and in the outcomes and invested in the outcomes. And, you know, my life my life's work is advocacy and child advocacy and has been since I was a child myself. And so that doesn't change with whatever role I'm in, it's in all aspects of my life. So that will certainly continue.
[Danielle Balocca]: Right, and something that I am really struck by in listening to your podcast and having watched the documentary is how dedicated you've been to the search for your childhood friend. And so I don't want to give too much away, but do you want to tell us a little bit about your podcast?
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which at the time was the 23rd poorest city in the country. I'm sure it's not much higher at this point or lower, however you look at it. the demographics are really marginalized population. And of marginalized populations, the most marginalized are individuals like children or people with disabilities, right? So we were children in this community that was already pretty marginalized growing up in a, what we called at the time, you know, projects, housing projects. And some of the words, just to be clear that I'm gonna use are very specific to the 1970s. And I'll explain why that's important, but I'll also maybe use the contemporary word as well. But when you don't understand the word and you don't have a lexicon, it kind of makes things more ambiguous. And so that'll come up a little bit in this, and you'll see why. But Andy and I grew up in a housing project in Lawrence. And he moved in the March before he disappeared. He disappeared in August of 1976. And a few years earlier, we had had a municipal pool built right across the street from the stadium projects. And so that was a huge bonus for us. We thought that was the best thing ever. And it was pretty much like our vacation. A lot of us didn't get to take vacations. And so we were at the at the municipal pool every day. And it was, it was a gift really. It was great, great program, great project. And Andy's house, you could see the pool from his front door. I mean, he was that close and the units were all like, they were six unit dwellings, like one building with six units in it straight across. And we just all really knew each other. We're a community. And I like to say that for the kids, it was part stand by me and part Lord of the Flies. So people who know those movies and those books might get it. It sort of was, you know, nobody messes with us. We take care of each other. We have each other's backs, but also amongst each other, it was survival of the fittest, right? Like we also had a pecking order. But anyway, Andy moved in that March and he was my brother's friend, you know, initially. And then he and I, the first time I met, he was outside playing football. with my brother and I asked if I could play. And I'm the only girl with three older brothers and I was often being chewed away as a pest. And they didn't want, he didn't, my brother didn't want me to play. And Andy stopped the game and said that he wouldn't play unless I could play too, which I thought was super sweet. And I developed kind of an instant crush and he was already pretty cute. You know, he had like olive skin and just big brown eyes. And he had like his hair is kind of, over one of his eyes, floppy hair over one of his eyes and he'd like flip his head back to get it out of his eyes when he was talking to you. And he was just, it was like that prepubescent crush that we have, I guess. And so we started to become friends and we hung out even without my brother around and little things like, you know, he was always taking care of his siblings. He was the oldest of five and he was very paternal in the family. His mom was a single mom. And so Andy would do a lot of the childcare. And I remember one time he was handing cookies out to his siblings and after he had handed them all out to me. And he came back to me and offered me another cookie, which just like little things that kids do to show you that they like you. And he had gotten some walkie talkies right before he disappeared. His birthday was coming up. He disappeared just a week and a half before his 11th birthday. And we went to the pool that Sunday. I remember it was just super hot. Sunday in August before school was gonna start. It was one of the last Sundays before school would start. And we went to the pool and we had been hanging out and just swimming and swimming. And we're kids with a lot of energy. So we just would swim every chance we got and they would have breaks occasionally to just make us rest. And so they had a 10 minute whistle break or whatever. And we were all sitting together outside of the locker room and my brothers and his friend and Andy and me, And I just had this feeling that day that then I didn't know what it was, but today I do. It was intuition. And I didn't want to walk home alone. And I asked Andy if he would walk home with me. And he said he didn't want to. He was going to stay at the pool longer. And I asked my brother if he would walk home with me. And he said he didn't want to. And I turned on my heel and said I was going to tell on him. and walked out of the pool and my brother ended up deciding it would be better for him to walk me home. So he sort of jumped up and walked out with me. And literally all it took was crossing the street, crossing a little tiny project parking lot. going past Andy's house and down a little tiny hill and my house was right there. My grandmother's was right there. I mean, we were so close to the pool. And so my brother and I went home and it was around late afternoon lunchtime. We were hungry. That's the reason that I wanted to go home. And I had intended to come back to the pool, which I would normally do, but I think after, The whole morning I was tired, I didn't go back to the pool. And sometime later, around five-ish or so, you know, people started asking, you know, if Andy's mother was looking for him because, you know, it was the free-range kid days, right? You could go wherever all day long and nobody knew where the heck you were, but when it came to dinner time, you had to be home and that was just the rule. And so it was dinnertime and Andy wasn't home. And so, you know, we sort of heard whispers like, oh, Andy's in trouble. You know, we didn't really think much of it. And then, you know, went to sleep that night like any other night and ended up being woken up in the middle of the night, early morning hours with the police banging on the front door. And my mother brought my brother, Jeff and I down to the kitchen table and they were asking us if we had been with Andy, when was the last time we had seen him? And then it became real. And the next day, probably later that day, Monday or maybe Tuesday, a search team was set up. They set up like a CB radio trucker, 18 wheeler thing over at the stadium parking lot. The football stadium was right next to the project. It was named after the stadium project was named after the football stadium. So they set up a searching rescue team there and they had a lot of CB radio enthusiasts searching and, you know, the kids were searching and the parents were searching and you would hear helicopters and low flying planes and it was just complete. cacophony of sound and just surreal, and looking for Andy. And just as quickly as all that started, it stopped. After just six days, they stopped looking. And for whatever reason, I don't know, none of it was explained to us children. There was no sort of sitting us down. There was no school counseling. There was none of that back then. It was just sort of pretend nothing happened. Life is normal. We got these really ambiguous warnings like, you know, if somebody is asking you to look for their dog, don't help them, stay away from white vans, just like really ambiguous things. You didn't know what was what. And I just remember being so heartbroken and just really bewildered by, how the search could stop. And I have this very vivid memory of standing outside of my unit in the projects underneath this tree that was like one of my favorite places. And I was pondering this and I just, with all this conviction of a nine-year-old, I told myself and Andy that when I grew up, I would try to find him. And I realize now that that was super naive, but it was also sort of a moment in life when, you know, I guess my destiny was defined and I didn't realize it, you know, part of my destiny was defined and I didn't realize it. And so then I went away to college and, you know, ended up, I mean, there was, there's a lot in between there, but, you know, I, I, I became a ward of the state. I was a foster kid as well. So I was a really marginalized kid and I can understand kids being in systems where they're further marginalized. And so I had that experience, but I was very fortunate to have an aunt that could take me in and she took me in and she nurtured me back to health and really helped get me back on my feet and sent me to college. And unfortunately when I was 18, she died. So I went with her when I was 14. And then by the time I was 18, she passed away. So I was on my own again, but I was able to finish college and I majored in human services and communications media. And I had an advisor, as I was talking about these dual majors and what I should do with them, suggest that I should make social justice documentaries, or social justice films. And I was like, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I'll do that. And I got an internship at WGBH in Boston and I loved, I went to Fitchburg State undergrad and they were the only university at the time that required a full-time internship before you could graduate. So that really put me ahead of a lot of the more elite colleges. And I ended up being hired by WGBH because I was the intern that was there every day and was working. And so my first job, I was a production assistant there and then an associate producer and then became a segment producer and just sort of went up the chain. And after about 15 years of doing that, I decided it was time to make my own film. I wanted to make my own film. I had been helping independent filmmakers and I thought I could be, you know, maybe I could do this as an independent. And I thought long and hard about it. And I knew seeing other independents and how they worked that if I was going to do this, it was going to have to be something that I would do whether I got paid for it or not, like that I would want to do whether I got paid for it or not. And I thought, what is that? And maybe there were two or three things that I thought I would want to do. And one of them was to find out what happened to Andy. And so in 1998, I decided I would make a documentary about Andy, again, very naively. But I had some experience. I knew how to do research as an associate producer. I knew how to coordinate my research and organize it and that sort of stuff. So the first call I made was to Andy's mom and we talked and the first thing Andy's mother said to me on that phone call was, this is way bigger than you understand or that you can realize. I remember at the time not quite knowing what that meant, but also thinking that maybe it was sort of the musings of a bereft mother that like, of course her child's disappearance is bigger than anything anyone could imagine, but I didn't realize that she wasn't talking just figuratively, she was speaking literally. And I would find that out as the years went by. And so it took me probably, I don't know, five to seven years making that documentary, primarily self-funded with some seed money from WGBH, which was super helpful. And from friends that would do quid pro quo gigs, like my sound man and cameraman would trade services to do the shoots and stuff like that. So that was great. And after a while of working on it and getting it into good shape with a fantastic editor, Rachel Clark, we pitched it to HBO. We had pitched it to HBO very early and they were like, yeah, make it and then come back to us. And so we did and they didn't respond for a couple of months. I remember that. And then finally it was like Labor Day weekend. And I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna call them and essentially be like, do you want it or not? Cause I'm gonna start shopping it elsewhere. And they said, I promise we'll watch it this weekend. And on Monday they contacted me and said, you know, when can you come to New York? So my editor and I flew out to New York and the head of HBO documentary, who was a legend in her own time, Sheila Nevins, met with us with her team and spent four hours with us going over the film. And I remember walking out that day and we didn't have a signed deal or anything, but we got outside of the building and I started jumping up and down. And my editor was like, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh my God, HBO is going to take the film. And she's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, Sheila Nevins doesn't spend four hours with anybody if she's not going to take what they have. I went and bought what I considered to be an expensive pair of shoes, which was a hundred dollars at the time, a hundred dollar pair of shoes. And that was my treat to myself. And we were off, you know, when we made this documentary and it was so validating and it was so important and it was such hard work. And honestly, I should have been in therapy when I was doing it. And I wasn't, instead I was raising, you know, birthing and raising two kids and doing all these things, but it was a really hard film to make. you know, the day that it broadcast, it was June, 2007. And they had asked, HBO had asked if we wanted a party in New York or California. And I said, no, I want a party in Lawrence. And we had it at the theater that Andy and I used to go to as kids. And I remember the night that it was shown, it was like 400 people, the theater was packed. It was people from kindergarten to college and, you know, everywhere in between and Andy's family, of course. all of the important people that matter to me to hear this story, this communal tragedy, right? Like it was also all the kids I had grown up with who never really knew what happened and would be able to see this, you know? And I remember taking a moment and looking out at this audience and thinking, oh my God, like, what am I gonna do next that's gonna feel this important? You know, which is kind of was a character flaw of my own at the time. Instead of just being able to be in the moment and just enjoy this accomplishment, it was like, okay, what's next? And I'm getting better at that. And I would find out what was next. Six months later, I was pregnant. I would find out that I was pregnant with our third child. who we would learn prenatally had down syndrome and a congenital heart defect and would require open heart surgery after she was born. And so the film came out in June and Gracie was born in December. So it was, I got my answer pretty quickly from the universe about what I was doing next. Yeah. And, you know, I took 10 years of caring for my family and learning about disability and becoming a disability advocate and, you know, taking a year long fellowship and, you know, just all of the things that I did, you know, advocating for her in school and all of those things during that 10 years. And I say that I was a child advocate from the time I was a child because I did, you know, go into DSS of my own volition, like I wanted to leave what have you, but Gracie professionalized my advocacy. She gave me a masterclass in advocacy, and I learned how to truly become a child advocate and how to build relationships to create effective systemic change. And I ended up deciding to go to Harvard to get a master's in education policy, because again, I wanna change systems for marginalized kids. And the movement was going a little too slow for me. And I thought maybe if I could just get a master's at Harvard with the mentor who does inclusive education, I'd be able to fix it all. Which again, I don't know, I always look back at how naive I was at all these things. And I'm like, I hope I'm not as naive as I was, but I'm sure I'll look back years from now and think the same. I ended up getting a master's at Harvard and it was 2017. And a lot of things were happening that year. It was the Me Too movement. I had learned about adverse childhood experience study, ACEs, and how childhood trauma affects our outcomes in our life. And was having a lot of that experience myself and was recognizing it in myself. And the Me Too movement was triggering a lot of that as well. And then, you know, one day I was driving down the street and listening to NPR and on the radio came this story about how the FBI were digging in the backyard of a man in Georgetown, Mass. And they were allegedly looking for a child, a victim of homicide. And I had been trying to get the police to listen to that story for 10 years. The victim who had gone to the police 10 years earlier, one of the alleged victims of this man who said he witnessed this child murder had come to me shortly after he had seen the film. I suspect the film probably triggered some things for him. He came to me and was exploring because he was trying to find out who the child might be that he said he had witnessed the murder of. And I, advocated for him and tried to get him in touch with state police and local police and others, you know, the attorney general's office and others. And people, you know, for the most part just sort of pushed him along. And part of it was because he had his own trauma and, you know, he had some things going on. And I think for some of law enforcement that discredited him or, you know, in their eyes and, I think the opposite. I think that when we find people who have that kind of trauma that say that they've witnessed these kinds of things, it's usually evidence that they did witness these kinds of things, as opposed to otherwise. But he was sort of not seen as credible in their eyes for a long time. And then the this man that he had accused had passed away and the police had to go into his home for a check to rule out foul play, which was just standard procedure in Massachusetts if someone dies in their home. And when they went into this man's house, they saw all kinds of incriminating evidence. There were boy mannequins dressed up in soccer uniforms, and there were hundreds of identifications of children. This man had been a soccer coach for years in Beverly and Averill. and I think Georgetown and all sorts of videotapes with questionable titles on them. And it just, it was, it reminded me, I've seen some of the pictures and honestly, it reminded me of like the scene in Silence of the Lambs when you see Buffalo Bill's house, right? Like it literally looked like that. It was just like, and I think they were like, uh-oh, we should have paid attention to that victim. who they refer to as witness X, who I refer to as witness X or whatever. But I was driving down the road and I was triggered by this trauma and I came home and I recognized the trauma trigger, thankfully, but I came home and I pulled out all of my material from the documentary and the police reports and the files and the tapes and everything out of my closet. And I was sitting in the middle of this pile of stuff And I thought, what do I do with this? And I knew when I was finishing Andy's documentary that instead of coming to a conclusion, I was coming to another chapter in the story, but I had to stop at that point. The film was due. And I think also life was calling me to do other things. And frankly, I'm grateful that I stopped at that point, because I think had I kept going, I probably would not have, my mental health probably wouldn't have survived. So I needed that break and I needed that time to become trauma informed really, and to be able to put supports in place before I could go back into it. But in 2017, I decided, all right, I'm going back in. I liken it to that scene in the Godfather with Michael Corleone, when he's like, every time I try to get out, they pull me back in. And I say, like, that's how trauma is, right? Like every time you think you're out, you get pulled back in. But the way that I, cope with my own childhood trauma is through advocacy and through truth telling. And I didn't realize that that's actually a very effective way to cope with trauma. In fact, I have a trauma expert that's on my podcast. and she just wrote a book, her name is Judy Herman, and she just wrote a book called Truth and Repair. Her second book, yeah, at 84. After a long time of. Her own trauma, she was in a lot of pain. She had an accident, was in a lot of pain, and had to derail her career for a while. But at 84, she just wrote her second book. And she's considered the mother of trauma. Her and Bessel van der Kolk started out together. He's sort of, I guess, the father of trauma, if you would say it. But they were the ones who named trauma. Speaking of naming things, there wasn't a name for trauma in the 90s, and they named, or if there was, it was PTSD, and it was very specific to veterans. And Judy Carmen named trauma as being something that's also in our homes and in our lives. And her and Bessel, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, just changed the landscape for trauma survivors. And when I interviewed Judy, she was amazing, because she said she did a lot of work on incest. She said, you know, the data at that point was saying that, you know, incest survivors were 2 million to one. And she said, and I got my doctorate from Harvard and I set up my shingle and I, you know, started my private practice. She said, and in that very week, I had three incest survivors come in to see me. And I was like, there's something wrong with the data. And, you know, she knew. And so she wrote, she specialized in that and she wrote a book back then. of trauma and resilience. Oh, trauma and recovery, right. And then 84 is truth and repair. And her book, truth and repair was really, you know, a revelation to me as I read it, because what she talks about in this book is that we heal trauma through advocacy and through empowerment. But the way that that happens is that it has to be supported by community. We have to have upstanders in our community who are willing to support the truth and allow for the advocacy. and then the empowerment and the healing can happen, which was really a big deal, is really a big deal for me. And it really was like, oh my God, this is the whole purpose of this podcast. And in some ways it's been like the whole purpose of my life. And Bessel's book had that same effect on me. Like I read Bessel's book on, you know, the body keeps the score and I was blown away by how much it related to my life and to the life of so many people I know and so many people who don't know about ACEs and childhood trauma and trauma in general. So I decided the cost effective way for me to do this and tell this story and do a deeper dive would be to do a podcast. I mean, my experience was in documentary filmmaking and it's quite expensive, you know, and it's a lot of work and you have to have a lot of crew and there's just a lot. And I thought, okay, you know, I like this new genre. I think it's a deep dive into materials. I had been listening to a couple of podcasts that really affected me, like Barebrook and crime town and just a few. And I, you know, so I started to, to listen to them and to basically educate myself and try to learn how to, to make them. And so, but I've been working on this project sort of off and on since 2017. And finally, you know, with the help of a lot of people, just to be clear, nobody does this work alone. And I have an incredible composer who I think just really brings the stories to life and editor and, you know, coordinating producer who's really helped me to, just understand what the FRSS feed is and how to get it loaded. But just like basic things and just a great team, researchers both volunteer and paid that have come up along the line. And this is tough work. I mean, this is hard work looking at unsolved missing and murdered children's cases and really looking at them. And so I had this hypothesis that While I was at Harvard, I had to take a statistics class. And speaking of data, and Judy's story about data and the two million to one, I had to take a statistics class. And as I was contemplating this idea, I had to tell this story again, I thought, why not use data to tell this story? I've had so many people sort of be disbelieving in where my research has been leading me. Why don't I use qualitative and quantitative data and prove what I'm finding? And so I did. I had a hypothesis that perhaps murdered children, recovered homicide victims from the 1970s might be able to inform missing children's cases. Because I thought before this, I thought Andy's case was an anomaly. But as I started to research through the film, And otherwise, I found that Andy's case wasn't an anomaly, that Andy was one of several children who went missing in Massachusetts in the 1970s, and that it was far more common than, frankly, any of us realized. And I wanted to know why. And so I wanted to see if the same was true with homicide. So I ended up, you know, getting vital statistics from DPH and, you know, all deaths, zero to 19, and then finding out about how they code deaths, you know, deaths and, you know, disaggregating homicide data. I started, you know, putting together this data and it really, in my opinion, it really supports the hypothesis. There are dozens of unsolved missing and murdered children's cases from the 1970s, unsolved. And so I started to dig into those cases as well. And I started to bring my research to law enforcement. I would meet with district attorneys. I met with the attorney general and anybody, frankly, that would listen to say, look it, something was going on in the 70s. Like this data doesn't, make, you know, it adds up to something more. And, and several of the victims also had, were, you know, the homicide victims had died in the same manner, you know, and again, they were all unsolved. They're still all unsolved.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: And so this was a big deal. And, and so I just was doing the data and making the podcast and, In September, on September 7th of this year, finally, the day after, well, yeah, close to the day after Andy's birthday, we launched the podcast. And it's one, it's an eight-part investigative series that is looking at the unsolved missing and murdered children's cases in Massachusetts in the 1970s. the history of human trafficking of children in Massachusetts and across the country, which is a big and heavy topic. But again, getting to the vocabulary thing, there wasn't even a name for it back then. There was no word human trafficking. That didn't come into the lexicon until the 90s. In fact, like we say in the podcast too, there was no word for pedophile. That wasn't even a regular word. And children were to be seen and not heard. They were rarely, if ever, believed. And certainly poor and marginalized children who might accuse or have been abused by wealthy or privileged men would not be believed. And as we all know now, in 2001, the Boston Globe broke the clergy abuse scandal in Spotlight and the famous movie Spotlight, which also won an Academy Award, the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer, movie won an Academy Award and it revealed this whole culture of clergy sex abuse in Massachusetts in the 1970s, but not just Massachusetts, right? Around the country, around the world. I mean, the final title card in that film is just like the listing of all the different places that this was happening. And I don't know, I don't see how anyone could watch that film or read these series and think that these are one bad apple. that this is just one incidence of one priest in one parish that was doing this to, you know, X amount of children. I mean, this was a culture and climate of systemic child sex abuse. And people don't like to talk about that.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, and I think that was a very comprehensive story. And it sounds like childhood, you went through a lot of trauma, right? And that you came up with something to tell yourself to get through that, which is like, I'm going to look into this. I'm going to find Andy. And I think that's something turned into a whole, like, you know, a whole much, like a much bigger project and much different outcomes. And, you know, I think in my, professionally, I work at a rape crisis center, and we, you know, with victims of and survivors of sexual trauma, and what you're saying about, like, justice, I think it's like we have this idea that if these things are happening, the criminal legal system is going to take care of them. And that's just not the case, right? I think that we take for granted that maybe the criminal legal system is set up in such a way that it's going to prioritize not the needs of the vulnerable, but the needs of those in power. I think that, you know, it sounds like the messages that the children in your life are receiving at the time when you were a child were that you're not important. We're not going to look into this. We're going to spend six days like, you know, caring about this and then we're going to move on. And I think, you know, the work it sounds like the work that you're doing now is coming up with a way to, you know, show your your past self, but also all the other kids and vulnerable people that they do matter and that their lives are worth looking into and you know one thing that that stuck with me from Judith Herman's new book is like You know, it's not necessarily about Punishing the perpetrators. Obviously, we don't you know, we don't want them to continue doing what they're doing, but it's like this idea that People should be believed and that what happened to them is important and that you know, we don't want that to continue happening and And so like it sounds like this documentary, your documentary and the podcast are really, you know, I've been struck, you know, at least I look like I listen to folks like talk about their trauma every day. And the first episode, when you play like the tapes of that pedophile, like talking about his talking about young boys was like deeply disturbing. And also like that's the reality, right? I think it's a these are important things for us to talk about because they're happening, right? We can't ignore them.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: But yeah, I guess- Yeah, that's a big part of it, Danielle, is I sometimes hear from people, in the one sense, well, first of all, you just gave me chills with what you said, because the most important thing, the most important thing anyone can say to a survivor is, I believe you. And I'll never forget, you know, when I was bringing this to bringing attention to these cases and these issues. And now, you know, again, I had, you know, yeah, I grew up in the projects and I was from Lawrence and I'm, you know, proud of that fact. And I, you know, it's, it taught me a lot. And I also won an Emmy and went to Harvard, right? So maybe I have a little bit of whatever, even if I have credibility, in my opinion, from growing up in the projects, my street cred and all the things that I survived and everything else, I love that part of me and that's a huge part of my advocacy. And I also went these other routes to be able to quote unquote prove myself, right? So that maybe I could have this quote unquote credibility, right? And people would believe whatever the mass media that I was trying to get it out, right? And the truth is that even with those credentials, I would still get dismissed. I mean, I had been going to people like, oh my God, you're not gonna believe this. Like I have some materials that are just really, frankly, mind blowing that people would just not believe. Some of the court documents or police records I have that I'm just still stunned by them. And they're such incredible stories. And I would try to share them with either other members of the media or potential funders or just anybody. And I would get things like, oh, maybe you're a hammer looking for a nail. Or I literally had somebody say to me, well, maybe maybe your credibility is in question. And I was like, what? And it was like this reporter who had won a big award and it was like in a 15 minute conversation, like this came out, it was like, where did that come? What is that? And it was interesting because I think part of it's like also the misogyny, right? And the women piece, like there's a whole bunch of things, but it's been really interesting trying to convince people. But on a positive note, there were people that believed and one of them, was the Suffolk County District Attorney at the time, Rachel Rollins, who ended up becoming the United States Attorney. And she reopened several of the cases that we brought to them. She had her team reopen several of these unsolved homicides, and they continue to work on them. And they brought families in, and it's made a big difference in these families' lives. And it was remarkable. that that happened and that she did that. And I think part of that was also because she was a woman, and she was more sensitive to these things. And she was also a foster parent to her nieces. And so I think understood some things on a personal level as well. And, you know, but I also went into one of her forensic teams who is working with a local police department when I was going in to try to, and I would bring these PowerPoints with the data to prove to them, you know, and all this stuff. And I was like trying to get my PowerPoint up and it wasn't working and I was getting a little cotton mouth and I was probably triggered and all this other stuff because that's the other thing. It's like authority triggers me, right? Like law enforcement triggers me, right? You know what I mean? Being in these places. But I'll never forget it. I'll never forget this forensic interviewer and she stopped me and she gave me a drink of water and she said, can I stop you for a minute? And I said, yeah. She said, I believe you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it's so powerful and discouraging that people don't hear it more or that there's only these very few places that they get that.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: That's the first thing I say to people when they tell me their story, I believe you. And I say it in the podcast, I said it in episode two, I believe you. And that's so important. And if you hear in like the Me Too movement and the other people that were trying to tell their stories for years and would be given NDAs or paid off or anything, it's just like all of that trauma and then it doesn't go away. But the mass media for me has been helpful in like feeling some validation in the truth-telling and also some vindication. Some of it's like, the documentary went out to 35 million people. I've had people from China and Thailand and I had this lovely woman from China contact me and she made this huge, I have it on my wall back here, but she made this huge, I don't know, 10 by 12, no, bigger, big poster size, puzzle, which is a picture of Andy, but each of the individual puzzle pieces are children in China holding up Andy's picture. And she promised me that she would be sure to teach children in China about child safety and how to protect themselves. And it's like that kind of thing that you're like, oh my God, like this does matter. It makes a difference. The podcast is on episode three. It's been downloaded 25,000 times at this point. We've been trending on Apple podcasts. We were in the top 30 the first week of Apple true crime category. That's unheard of for an independent podcast. And that's the other thing. This podcast is independent. Nobody would pick it up. Same thing. It's like nobody... And I know it's a tough subject. I get it. People are like, oh, but there's lots of tough subjects out there and lots of people cover them. And so it's like... I mean, I think that certainly eight years ago when I was pitching it, it also sort of... There was this whole Pizzagate thing, which was terrible. No, but really it was terrible to the movement of prevention of child sexual abuse because people can just dismiss things like, oh, that's not true. That's a conspiracy. And they just dismiss things in our society because it's hard to hear or they don't want to talk about it. So I kind of say to people, when you hear the word witch hunt, make your ears perk up a little bit more and just sort of say, what's that about? Because you'll see in the episode that's coming out this Tuesday, which is a very powerful episode called The Other Boston Sex Scandal, that there was a group of men who were trafficking boys in the city and around the city, and they formed and became the first widely known pedophile organization in the country called NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association. And this was right here in Revere, Massachusetts, just months after Andy disappeared and many other boys just like Andy disappeared. And, um, you know, they were doctors and millionaires and, you know, assistant headmasters at private elite schools and, you know, all of these sort of privileged people. But what people don't know is that even just two years before that, and I cover this in this podcast in next episode, you know, there was a supervisor of social work who had, you know, set up a fake foster home and was trafficking boys to pedophiles. And, you know, and they created a task force to investigate because thank God, you know, this Boston homicide detective would not let it go. And he just, you know, didn't believe what was alleged to be a suicide of one of the boys and just kept, you know, like a, you know, dog with a bone, he wouldn't get off the case. And finally, His investigation led to this interagency task force between the attorney general's office and Boston police and DCF, which was then called Department of Public Welfare. And they were supposed to be investigating 5,000 placements of foster children and 3,200 foster homes to determine how many of the children had actually been placed with what they called known homosexual single men at the time, because there was a lot of conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia at the time, because it was, you know, there was still this was the gay rights movement era, and people were still, as they are today, very much discriminated against. And, but there's a big history in Boston of the gay rights movement. And it's really amazing, like, I'm hoping to get an interview about this, because You know, these pedophiles tried to attach themselves to the legitimate gay rights movement in Massachusetts in the 1970s. And it was homosexual or it was gay women, you know, lesbian women who, who put the stop to that. They were like, no, you know, Representative Elaine Noble, who was really widely known and just a huge gay rights advocate said, no, you don't march with us. We're not, you know, we're not with you, we don't believe that children, that this is part of that. And so it was really remarkable, but they did try to attach themselves to the gay rights movement. And so they were conflating a lot of this with gay rights. But the way that it's recorded in the day is that they were placed with known homosexual single men. But in fact, these men were pedophiles and foster children were being placed by a supervisor of social work in the Roxbury office, at least allegedly 100, maybe more children. But, you know, I did a FOIA, which is a Freedom of Information Act request on the records for this task force because I wanted to know what the outcome was like, well, what was the report like? What did they decide? How many? You know, what was the answer? Nothing, like nothing to be found. Nobody seems to remember that there was a task force. The AG's office says there's no files. If I talk to people, this is living history. This is not like, I mean, I was alive when it happened. And so there's a lot of people still alive when it happened. And amazingly, they don't seem to remember or don't wanna talk about it. It's really, really incredible. And it was just two years later that this Revere ring was broken up, which was the creation of the organization NAMBLA. So there were, you know, these child trafficking rings around the country and around in Massachusetts and nobody really realized this was happening. And, you know, we didn't have mass media in the way we do now. We didn't have. internet. We weren't able to learn things in an instant. We had a couple of channels and that was it. And if it was reported, it was reported. And if it wasn't, it wasn't. And we didn't know. And come to find out, you'll find out in the podcast as well that this was a national issue. And finally, there was congressional hearings that were held to create the first ever laws preventing child pornography because it wasn't even illegal. This is crazy. But it's sort of like the big picture and it comes from a very personal place. And then we go back to the very personal place, which is advocacy and a call to action. And what I really want this podcast, what I hope this podcast will achieve are a few things. One is I want a task force investigation in Massachusetts of these unsolved cases of missing and murdered children from the 1970s. I would love to see that happen. I would love to see a missing persons database created, which does not exist right now. I do do legislative advocacy. We've worked with Senator Joan Lovely, who's done a lot of work on ending the statute of limitations, which we're very much for that. That's another call to action. But I also suspect, I don't suspect, I know that there are dozens, if not hundreds of other children from Lawrence, Massachusetts, from that time, that were part of this organized and coordinated abuse, and that have not come forward, that either they haven't come forward because their community won't represent them or believe them, or because they're men who are expected to be strong, or women who are expected to not talk, or, you know, suffering from addiction and unable to, or have died because of the trauma. But I suspect there's so many more victims in Lawrence and survivors in Lawrence. And I hope that they'll hear this podcast and that they'll know that there's a community, that there's an army of survivors that are trying to change outcomes for future generations and that we believe them and we want to help.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, thank you. And yeah, it sounds like this, the process of making the documentary and the podcast have had some helpful sort of healing elements for you. And it sounds like to some goals around how this can impact locally. So like how, you know, how we can acknowledge this as like a real thing and a problem and something that we want to maybe give some more attention to.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: And I think one thing- Yeah, well, one of the things sort of, yeah, thank you for bringing it to the local piece too, because one of the things is, yes, I did, this has made me have to really look at not just communal trauma and community trauma, but personal trauma. And so I very highly recommend trauma therapy. I think it's really important. I don't think people should explore this issue without qualified support. I think it's a difficult issue. I think that this podcast can be triggering for some people and I understand that. But I also think it's really important, like somebody was like, oh, I don't know if I can listen to that because it's hard to listen to. And I was like, well, yeah, no, I'm sure. And I said, imagine how hard it is for the children not to be heard or not to be listened to. So it's like, I think it's the least we can do is listen to these stories and try to do something for these kids, survivors and kids that it's still happening to today. I was able to get the United States attorney to meet with, you know, some survivors and Mitch Garabedian who played, you know, was played by Stanley Tucci in the Spotlight movie. And I remember one of the people at the table said to Mitch Garabedian, well, you know, this is from a long time ago. Is any of this happening today? Mitch was like, are you kidding? You know, and also, like, we don't even know because most people don't talk about their child sexual abuse till they're 40 or 50 years old. So talk to them in 30 years, you know. But locally, getting to the local piece, you know, Carmen Durso, who is another attorney who's a huge activist in this work. And full disclosure, I'm on a board with Carmen Durso called, it's, you know, was formerly named Masked Kids, it's now the organization, nonprofit organization, it's now the Children's Justice Campaign and Enough Abuse Campaign. Carmen does a lot of work there really targeting abuse in schools, because you know what happens a lot of times in schools, when abuse occurs, is that the perpetrator is quietly let go not unlike the Catholic Church, so they'll be offered, you know, the opportunity to leave the position, as opposed to being fired. and charges being filed or whatever. And so what happens is they can go to the school right down the street or in another district and, you know, get hired again and who knows what happens after that, right? So it's kind of the same thing. They call it past the trash in the, you know, CSA prevention community. But Carmen's working a lot on that. And so is the Masks, Kids and Enough Abuse. And so after getting on their board, the executive director Jetta Bernier shared with me a curriculum that they had around training for staff members to identify grooming behavior and other behavior. And so we were able, thank goodness, you know, Superintendent Maurice-Edouard Vincent took the curriculum and it is a mandatory training now in our district. And that was a result of a Cummings grant that was, you know, that MassKids had long before I was on the board. You know, they've been doing this work in other districts and It was just something that we were able to bring to Medford just by connecting the superintendent and MassKids. And to her credit and her administration's credit, they brought it forward. And what we've heard from the evaluations, it's said it's been remarkably helpful and it's made a huge difference. And so there's another step in that curriculum and MassKids is hoping to work with the Medford public schools to enhance that. And we're trying to set up another meeting with them as well. And so it's really, really important work. And it's the responsibility of the community to do this work.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, no, and I think one of the things I think about a lot with this type of abuse is the element of power, right? So a lot of the, I think that In any type of sexual crime, there's usually, even when it's an adult victim, there's much more concern for protecting the perpetrator. And if they're not convicted of something, it doesn't tend to follow them. And we know it's really hard to convict people of this. But also with children, when children are the victim, You know, it seems like it would make logical sense that we would like want to think about protecting children, but that most like most often we're thinking about the rights and the needs of the adult and like, like you're saying about like that past the trash like it's. It's like really true and it's just awful. Like the way that we talk, like, you know, we can't reveal what this person did or we can't talk about it. And it's like- Right?
[Melanie McLaughlin]: I know, it's crazy. Well, and the long-term ramifications, that's the thing. It's like people, you know, this is not a one-off instance. I mean, the effect that this has on children's lives is something that impacts them for the entirety of their life. And so, you know, that's the other piece of it. And it's generational and it's, you know, so many other things, also around sort of protecting the children and giving names to things. I think the other thing is that, you know, one of the things I said, the best part of going to Harvard, and honestly, this is true, the most important thing I learned at Harvard was that there is a word for everything. And once you understand what the word is, then you can start to potentially attack the problem, right? And so that's why I do get into this podcast about the fact that like known, single homosexual men does not equate pedophile, right? But pedophile is this, right? Or, you know, there was no word for human trafficking at the time. You know what they called it? I'm sure you do. You know what they called it at the time? No, I don't. Child prostitution. Oh, great. Child prostitution. Like, are you kidding me? And this coming episode, we have a survivor who was, you know, self-identifies as a quote-unquote child prostitute, but children can't prostitute themselves. They don't have the ability to consent. So there's that. But the other piece is, getting back to the words, there's a word for everything. I didn't know that what Andy and I didn't have back in the day is something called social capital. And I knew enough to know that whatever that was, my kids were going to have it. And I was going to be there for them. And I was going to advocate for them. And people were going to know that these are not the kids you mess with. These are whatever. And I was going to do whatever it took, run for school committee, do whatever. But the other piece of it is not just doing it for my kid, doing it for the system as a whole and for the other kids. Because I was that kid that the teacher might not have paid as much attention to because My mother wasn't gonna show up for the PTO meetings. My mother wasn't gonna ask if, why I got detention or any of those things. So I would have been, a lot of the abuse frankly that I experienced as a kid was ignored by systems. And part of it is, I don't wanna get involved and a whole bunch of things and people have their reasons, but the first, in my own experience, the first 51A, which is a complaint of child abuse, was filed for me, I guess I could say, in kindergarten. And I left of my own volition when I was 14. And so if you think about how that's complicated, that child abuse and stuff is complicated also through language barriers, through poverty, through all of these things. So we have so many kids here in Medford, this beautiful city, whose real estate values are going off the chart, and we still have those kids that like me and Lawrence that were literally malnourished. And people couldn't tell by looking at me that that was what was going on. And we can't see who those kids are. We don't know by looking at them that these are the kids that aren't getting food or that getting abused or whatever. But I'll just say this, one in four children, one in four girls will experience CSA. And it said between one in eight and one in 10 boys is the statistic. I think the boys actually is probably higher, but boys, again, don't often report. But those statistics are really high. So if one in four girls has experienced CSA and one in eight or one in 10 boys, how many pedophiles does that make? Right. Yeah. Chilling, yeah. Wow. I know it's intense. So let's end on a happy note. How do we transfer this into a happy note? I don't know. Let's see. Well, the way we transfer this into a happy note is that, you know, there are a lot of advocates in this city. There are a lot of people that want to do the right thing by kids. There's a lot of good people in this city. And I would encourage them to, you know, look beyond, you know, the families that are always showing up to the meetings and, you know, and really think about how we're reaching these kids that aren't being reached. We have a huge Haitian Creole community. We have a huge Portuguese speaking community. We have multiple public housing units in the city. And yeah, it's incredible. And it was so ironic, Danielle. I remember when my kids were in school and I would be like, they would be friends with kids you know, that might be in the housing authority, whatever. And I would be like, invite them over, have them come over, whatever. And they would be like, no, I'm not inviting them over, mom. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And they'd be like, I'm embarrassed to invite them over our house. And I'm like, what? And it was the weirdest experience, Danielle. They were embarrassed to invite them over to our house because we had a nice house, because they might think we were rich. And I was like, the irony, right? Like the effing irony in my life. I was like, what? Like, it was just crazy, but it's true. It's like, you can just get comfortable in your own environment and forget that this is happening and that these are, you know, this is real and these kids are experiencing this and we're obligated to help.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, and I do think good news is that this podcast is coming out. I think I met with you several years ago and you were really trying to get it out there and it's finally out there. And you mentioned Harvard a few times and I will say this about Harvard is that they do a great job of, or I mean, I don't know, great job, but they have a system in which students report sexual trauma, right? And like, I think a lot of schools have shied away from that because if we acknowledge a problem is a problem, then we have to acknowledge that it's a problem, right? And what Harvard does and what I think you're doing in this podcast is like putting a name to things and getting them out there so we can acknowledge them and then we can, you know, help to help to work on it, right? Yeah, exactly.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: When you ignore it, it's just whatever. But I will also say Harvard has done that because they've been sued multiple times. So lawsuits make change, right? Lawsuits create systemic change. Oh, really? It's like, you know, well, how do you create change? It's like, unfortunately, a lot of times it's lawsuits, it's the law, you know, and it's changing that. But there's a lot of different ways to do it. But usually, and it's the same thing with these cases from the 1970s. What happened? Why were all of these child pornography and pedophile rings, frankly, being broken up around the country in 1978. Well, that happened because there were a spate of missing children around the country. And so they had congressional hearings and they created laws. The first Child Sex Exploitation Act was created in 1978. And then the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was created in 1984. And in the National Center's own history, they'll say they were created because of a spate of missing children's cases. They'll say they were created because of a spate of missing children's cases across the country. I had one of Andy's caseworkers tell me that the highest decade for children going missing still to this day is the 1970s in America, in modern history. And nobody has gone back retrospectively to be like, all right, maybe we should look at this and see what is this data? I mean, I would love to see an institution really do a a case analysis, institutional study about what was really this, how did this industry, this billion already, billion dollar industry affect these outcomes. But that's another conversation for another day. We won't start another podcast at the end of this one, but I hope people will listen. You can find us, our website is openinvestigationpodcast.com. You can find us anywhere you listen. Like I said, we've gotten almost 200 five-star reviews And if you read the comments and the reviews, you'll hear why. And this is a very fact-based, data-driven podcast, but it also has heart and empathy and passion. So I think that's what helps.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, very well made. It's like, you know, heavy content and very pleasing to listen to.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: I know. So it's funny that you say that, because somebody else said that they were like, the music's really great. And somebody, I think, wrote on one of the Apple podcast reviews or something like that, like I could listen to this host, you know, forever, her voice or whatever, forever. And I was like, it's kind of a weird thing to say when you're talking about, you know what I mean? Like, but it's true. But I guess that maybe offsets it. Like maybe you need a soothing voice to be able to tell you these horrible stories, you know. And if there are any survivors out there, Danielle, listening, I just want to say, you know, you're not alone. We believe you. You know, there's the National Sexual Abuse Hotline, which is RAINN. And I don't have the number in front of me, but I think it's 1-800-656-HOPE. But maybe you can include that as part of your ending here. Yeah. And that, you know, the body does keep the score and, you know, trauma does stay with us. But, you know, I love, I think it's a quote from, I don't remember who, but you can help me out with this too. But I love that, you know, the world is full of suffering, but it's also full of the overcoming of it.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's a great place to end. And thank you, Melanie. I look forward to hearing the rest of the podcast.
[Melanie McLaughlin]: Thank you. Let me know what you think. Feel free to send me a text anytime. It helps.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Kisherman. Music is made by Hendrik Irenys. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites!
|
total time: 55.68 minutes total words: 5966 |
|||