There are lores in my family about our brief time in Reno in the early 1980s. I personally don’t remember any of it. My first memory isn’t until I’m over the age of five and back in DC. My childhood memories are not sensory memories — they are documentary memories.
Just like there are lores of the infamous Epstein Island and what was happening to children there. Now, almost seven years after the death of the man people are believing the victims. Finally. Took long enough. That was two presidential elections with names now appearing on flight rosters running and winning election to the highest post in the land. It did not matter until suddenly it did, and then everyone pretended the information had always been there in the same way.
In grad school I believe, was the first time I heard about the McMartin Pre-School Case in a child psych class. The long and short of it was that children were allegedly being taken and sexually abused out of their preschool. The case itself gained headlines and now stands as a reminder that once something becomes cultural hysteria, belief and disbelief stop being about facts and start being about which narrative survives the longest. It turned into pandemonium with reports throughout the country and then later into the opposite — a cultural punchline about false memories and panic — regardless of what any individual child experienced inside it.
One of those cases came from a Montessori preschool in Incline Village, Nevada in 1984.
Back in 1983, my mother was trying to get a quickie divorce from my father and technically kidnapped me and took us to live in Incline Village to establish residency. She was arrested. I was in foster care for a bit. It was nothing less than a clusterfuck. Custody fights, police involvement, interstate jurisdictional issues, social workers, courts — the kind of situation where a child exists entirely inside systems and paperwork before they even understand what those systems are.
Obviously, this is where my life intersects with that of the one and only god to Nevada prosecutors and boxing fans alike, Mills Lane, who I’ve been told gave me lollipops every time I was in his office. The same man who refereed order in a boxing ring was part of refereeing my life before I could even form memories of it.
While I lived in Incline Village, I attended a Montessori pre-school. The same school that was involved in the sexual abuse scandal while I was in attendance.
I will again restate that I remember nothing about any of this, just names that are familiar to me and legal documents I read as a child. My mom kept all of the motions and briefs and everything in banker's boxes, and I read the documents periodically, being an overly curious twelve-year-old who lacked the vocabulary, references, and emotional maturity needed to understand what she was reading. I think the last time I saw those boxes was probably when I was 14 or 15. It was along with the divorce and custody papers that spanned two states and a dozen years.
I know for a fact that one John Maher was involved and kept in some contact with my mother. You bring up his name, and my father, who does not use profanity at all, will call him a motherfucker. I know that Sam Basta evaluated me while I was there. He also evaluated the other children. So, reading State of Nevada v. Babayan I see a lot of names from my family lore. I see a lot of things my quasi photographic memory recalls from reading what was in those bankers' boxes. I recall names.
That case later collapsed on appeal, not because a court proved nothing happened, but because the process itself became unreliable — conflicts, missing evidence, and testimony that could no longer be separated from how it was gathered. The Nevada Supreme Court said substantial evidence helpful to the defense had not been presented to the grand jury. Once that happens, the truth becomes unknowable, and when the truth becomes unknowable, society fills in the answer it is most comfortable believing.
And that was my first interaction with Nevada Revised Statute 200.366 and the failures of the state of Nevada to take seriously the claims of victims, not always by disbelieving them outright, but by handling them in ways that ensure nobody can ever agree what happened.
Looking at Epstein and what we now believe versus what was so unbelievable before, I wonder about the preschool cases of the early 1980s and the destructive path that possibly set the victims on. How many of those victims turned into chronic sexual assault victims like myself — not because abuse creates abuse, but because disbelief creates tolerance of the intolerable.
How were our ultimate outcomes shaped by this? Were we taught that sexual assault was okay? How could victims be taught anything else? If it was just parental hysteria and the allegations were false, what exactly was planted in the minds of the children who were reporting these crimes to make them tell such graphic tales about things a child should know nothing of? And if parts of it were real, what happens to a child who learns early that truth is negotiable depending on who is speaking?
How did this ultimately affect what happened with me and {D} that night in February 2024? Point A leads to Point B. The question is why and the path it took. Not destiny, not inevitability, but conditioning — the long training that certain violations simply do not resolve into consequences.
String theory, chaos theory, butterfly effect all of these theories in physics, can be applied to human psychology as well. Physics is, after all, the study of how the universe works as a whole, and people and their minds are simply smaller universes operating under cause and effect, even when we pretend they are random.
I’m glad the Epstein survivors are finally being believed. Whether they will ever see actual justice for each individual who harmed them and stole from them their safety and their innocence is, of course, doubtful. Belief often arrives long after safety is gone.
Because who are you going to believe, the whore or the congressman? The kid or the adult? And who has the better lawyer? That’s the reality.
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