The memories come to her in fragments. The bed creaking late at night after one of her brothers snuck into her room and pulled her to the edge of her mattress. Her underwear shoved to the side as his body hovered over hers, one of his feet still on the floor.
Her ripped dresses, the clothespins that bent apart on her apron as another brother grabbed her at dusk by the hogpen after they finished feeding the pigs. Sometimes she'd pry herself free and sprint toward the house, but "they were bigger and stronger," she says. They usually got what they wanted.
As a child, Sadie was carefully shielded from outside influences, never allowed to watch TV or listen to pop music or get her learner's permit. Instead, she attended a one-room Amish schoolhouse and rode a horse and buggy to church—a life designed to be humble and disciplined and godly.
By age 9, she says, she'd been raped by one of her older brothers. By 12, she'd been abused by her father, Abner*, a chiropractor who penetrated her with his fingers on the same table where he saw patients, telling her he was "flipping her uterus" to ensure her fertility. By 14, she says, three more brothers had raped her and she was being attacked in the hayloft or in her own bed multiple times a week. She would roll over afterward, ashamed and confused. The sisters who shared Sadie's room (and even her bed) never woke up—or if they did, never said anything, although some later confided that they were being raped too.
Sadie's small world was built around adherence to rules—and keeping quiet was one of them. "There was no love or support," she says. "We didn't feel that we had anywhere to go to say anything."
So she didn't.
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