Prosecuting The Victim, Gender Biases, and The Psychological Impact of Injustice

Chapter 9: Homelessness and Abandonment by My So-Called Family

Shortly after moving to Durham, I was essentially homeless. David and Quillpen were only offering a place to stay temporarily.

I had dated two different people in Wilmington before I left and after the life I had with Lynn. These were not meaningful relationships because I was still in shock from the life I had known with Lynn. You just can't move on that fast. Not having a "home" any longer had not sunk in yet and so I didn't fully sink to the depths of despair and low self-esteem that would follow. I was too shocked.

I was still in love with Lynn and that would NEVER seem to end for decades... decades later, literally, saying goodbye would seem like a radical idea. In fact, in 2024, 24 years after the life we had known ended, saying goodbye seemed like a radical idea that I had to accept.

Somewhere after the events of 9/11, I was asked to leave the residence of David and Quillpen. It had no relationship to the American tragedy. I might have otherwise helped people cope with a traumatic event. However, I was in shock. I couldn't process the events that had happened in my life when I lost Lynn, our home, the life we built and knew, my career.

It wasn't that I didn't care. I just couldn't register these events as events in the way that I had experienced life previously.

How could my life be destroyed by a fraudster pretending to be a therapist and calling himself just a support person?

The best way to characterize my life that began when I moved in with David and Quillpen was that I was couch surfing. For the next few years, I would be couch surfing with different friends and/or living in a homeless shelter. Technically, I had beds in the homes of the friends with whom I resided. They had extra rooms or an extra bed.

At some point, after 9/11/2001, I had been working at the cash register at Eckerd Drugs in Durham. They sold alcohol and I mostly worked in the photo department. Back then people still used film and brought that in for processing. One day I was asked to work the main register.

I was a good target for someone underage wanting to pull one over on someone. I was dealing with extreme anxiety and could barely focus on the date on the license that a young woman showed to me. I assumed that if she was showing a license than she must be confident that she is over 21. You would think that I purposefully bought her alcohol! Yet, I didn't know her and just was over-stressed.

I was given a citation and asked to show up in court. Somehow, I missed the court date. I showed up just slightly late. A warrant was issued for "failure to appear." This should have been at most a fine and then I would move on with my life. Instead, I was put in jail.

This was my first time in jail. It was in Durham. For me, it was traumatic.

I also learned that the "appeal" that I demanded from my lawyer for the matter in Wilmington, when John Freifeld falsely claimed I made several harassing phone calls, had come before the court down in Wilmington, which is included in the New Hanover County Court system.

The public defender had appealed the conviction because I demanded that he do so. It never happened. I never called to harass Freifeld! This public defender couldn't get a continuation until he could locate me. I had been dealing with so much and I was in shock as I have tried to describe. So, informing the lawyer who appealed a guilty conviction that should never have happened, somehow had not occurred to me.

Neither had the citation for selling alcohol accidentally to a minor. I don't want to justify selling to a minor, but I was just blurry-eyed due to stress and made an honest mistake.

Because I still had a relationship with my so-called family, I reached out to them for some kind of support. I had lost Lynn, the home we had, my career, the life I had known. Now, for the first time in my life, the unimaginable happened. I was in jail! Of all the things that I thought could happen in life, being put in jail was not on my radar as something I could imagine in my worst nightmares.