50 Years Ago, A Sexual Predator Roamed My Town. It Was Only Recently That I Realised How Intimately I Knew Him.

In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s ”Jaws” hunted in the shallow waters off the fictional New England town of Amity while a sexual predator, pastor and father roamed undetected in my small town using his daughter, my friend, as bait.My friend, let’s call her Gwen, was soft-spoken and pretty. I was hyper and dorky. We became close in the summer between fifth and sixth grade over our love of all things scary, so when “Jaws” came out, we were obsessed and inseparable. We sat in the air-conditioned theatrw and stuffed ourselves with Milk Duds, popcorn and Tab, and every time the shark attacked, we roared with laughter. The night I slept over at Gwen’s, we watched a “Jaws” double-feature and I was too amped to sleep. At 2 a.m., Gwen and I were doing gymnastics in her living room when her mother appeared, furious about her “wild friend.”I felt guilty.If you believe in deeply personal journalism — the kind that connects us in our hardest, most honest moments — please consider becoming a HuffPost member today.Everyone knows you make up for bad sleepover behaviour by playing with your friend’s younger siblings, so the next morning, I offered to play bucking bronco with Gwen’s little brother, Chuck. Chuck, like Gwen, is a fake name for a real person. All of the people’s names in this story are fake, even the villain because, if I name the villain, I name his innocent kids, and haven’t they suffered enough?“Chuck, you get on my back and hold on, and I give you a ride like I’m a wild bronco,” I told him.Chuck climbed on, squeezing my waist with his legs, holding tight onto my shoulders. I whinnied and reared up.Chuck’s dad came into the room. I’ll call him Mr. D. Pravity for reasons that will become obvious. He worked at the local church. He ran a youth group where a lot of kids in my grade went. “Hey Mr. Pravity,” I said, pausing on all fours, Chuck still on my back. “I’m just playing bucking bronco with Chuck.”I smiled, wanting him to forgive me for my late-night shenanigans.“What fun!” he said, “But Chuck, you’re doing it wrong.”I was surprised that Mr. Pravity knew how to play bucking broncos since I had made it up. He dropped to one knee beside me.“You put your foot here.”He grabbed Chuck’s foot and moved it from my waist to my armpit. “Here,” he said, sliding his hand under me, the weight of my emerging breasts dragging along his wrist, his forearm. I pinned his arm between my upper arm and ribs to stop him because he couldn’t have meant to do that.“No Chuck,” he said again for no reason. “Right here.”He reached underneath me, not even pretending to adjust Chuck’s foot. He rubbed his hand, his wrist, his forearm back and forth along my chest. He cupped my brand new breasts. The author, a few weeks after the incident, building a sandcastle at the Jersey Shore in her favorite "Jaws" T-shirt.At 11, I was still very much a child — climbing trees, wrestling my brothers, riding my Stingray bike with the tassels in the handlebars. I wore cut-offs, tube socks and Converse All-Stars. I wore my hair long, parted on the left, and didn’t brush it. I slouched. And though my breasts were growing, it would be two years before I got my period.I don’t remember shedding Chuck off my back, packing my things, and leaving that house, but I do have a sense memory of moving slowly, deliberately, aware not to draw suspicion or attention to myself in any way. I had experienced something unnamed and wrong, and I felt marked. I didn’t tell anyone — I wasn’t sure what there was to tell — was it an accident? I knew it wasn’t. But what was it? We all learned about “stranger danger” — men who would tempt you into their car with candy or a puppy and then you’d end up on a five-cent milk carton. But those were bad men. Mr. Pravity wasn’t a bad man. He was a dad. A pastor. He led the youth group that my religious friends attended.My friendship with Gwen died swiftly and silently, though at the time, I couldn’t have told you why. The details of that morning were inaccessible to me, filed in the far reaches of my brain under Bad and cross-referenced with Shame, but not so far that I didn’t notice the hair on the back of my neck stand up when Mr. Pravity appeared at the community pool in his red Speedo. One day, that memory came out.In 1982, I was a senior in high school hosting a slumber party of eight friends. We sat on the floor in my bedroom telling funny stories when someone mentioned Mr. Pravity.“He’s a pedophile!” my friend Amy said. “He showed me his thing when our family went with the Pravitys to the beach.”She rolled backward and covered her eyes.“He said, ‘Come look at my tan line,’ so like an idiot I went over and he pulled the front of his Speedo down!”Everyone awkward-laughed except for me. I sat staring, the world around me shrinking to a pinhole. Was I not the only one?“When I was at their house, he tried to put his hand down my pants by ‘helping me tuck in my shirt,’” my friend Alison said.“My older sister wouldn’t babysit the Pravitys after he grabbed her hand and put it on his boner.” Sarah covered her mouth and screamed. One by one, all eight of us shared our Mr. Pravity story — we had all been sexually harassed or molested by him. We were shocked. We were appalled. We were bonded by a common experience. What we weren’t, however, was alarmed. We were just kids connected through our mutual friendship with Gwen. Not once did we think that the eight of us were symptomatic of something broader and even more sinister. "After the incident, I always wore T-shirts over my bathing suit to hide my chest," the author writes.In 2017, 35 years after the slumber party at my house, long after I graduated high school, went to college, married and had three kids, Ashley Judd publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct. My Facebook page blew up with #MeToo, and it seemed like everyone I knew had a story. I thought about my experience. Did it count if you were only 11 and your friend’s dad rubbed your boobs? I didn’t think my story worthy, so I didn’t type #MeToo. But Beth Miller did. She was the younger sister of a guy in my grade. In the comments under her #MeToo post, people spoke of her bravery, of how sorry they were, of how revolted they were by Mr. Pravity.I wrote her. “I just wanted to say hello and to let you know we share something from our past: nasty old Mr. Pravity.”I wanted her to know she was not alone. She wrote me back.“Kathy, I’m afraid I’m not surprised at this; it was clearly an open secret to some degree. I’m so sorry you were victimised as well.”Victimised. Was I victimised? I didn’t think so. And what did she mean by “open secret”? I Googled Mr. Pravity’s name. I saw the grainy photo — thinning blond wisps over a tanned skull, a slit of a mouth. It was him, all right. Below that, there were several articles discussing his arrest following an investigation after 12 women in a nearby town contacted police to say he had raped or sexually assaulted them.I called my old slumber party friend Amy, the one he flashed with his red Speedo. I shared the article and the information about Beth Miller and asked if, back in our day, anyone had told their parents. She said she had, in fact, told her mother the night it happened and was told simply to avoid him. She said, “He was sort of a flasher. There were streakers back in the day. Everyone thought that he was disgusting and harmless. A dirty old man.”I called another friend to ask what she knew. She said her mother had heard about Beth Miller when it happened and immediately confronted Mrs. Pravity. Mrs. Pravity, apparently, already knew about her husband’s proclivities. In the movie “Jaws,” Mrs. Kintner, the grieving mother of the boy who is attacked and killed by the shark while on his raft, walks up to Chief Brody in her mourning clothes: a black dress with netting in front of her face. She slaps him and says, “You knew it. ... You knew there was a shark out there. You knew it was dangerous, but you let people go swimming anyway ….”Enter a woman I’ll call Nicole Marie, the hero of our story. I learned that it was she who eventually brought Mr. Pravity to justice. I wrote her through LinkedIn, and she called me back. She was gracious, candid and brutally honest. She told me she had grown up in the adjacent town, attended his church, was active in the youth group. In 1975, while Mr. Pravity was fondling and flashing me and my friends, he was raping 13-year-old Nicole in his church office, the back of his Volvo station wagon, his marital bed.Though he threatened Nicole if she told anyone, she told anyway. She told her friend, her friend’s mother. She told church leaders. She told a deacon of the church, a lawyer specialising in child abuse who said, “I’m going to tell you what they tell you in the Army when you see horrible things. FIDO — forget it and drive on.” She told everyone she knew.She told enough people that eventually the church exported Mr. Pravity to another state. His circle of assault grew wider until, five years later, he was forced to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct. Nearly two decades after he first molested me and raped Nicole, the church revoked his ordination credentials.The author in 1975. "Here I am posing in my fancy clothes with a new haircut," she writes.Nicole Marie never stopped telling people about Mr. Pravity, and 30 years after he first attacked her, she was finally believed. A new pastor arrived at the church and heard rumblings of a former pastor’s sexual misconduct. He sent an inquiry to all congregants asking if they had had experiences with Pastor Pravity. Twelve women responded, four spoke to police, and, due to a serendipitous glitch in the state law, 15 charges were brought against him. He pleaded to two counts and was sentenced to a decade of probation, a year of house arrest, hours of community service, and pocket change in restitution for Nicole’s therapy — a paltry sentence for the scale of his crimes — but he was old and sickly, unlikely to be on this earth for long, so they settled to end the agony of retelling. At the sentencing, the judge asked those affected by Mr. Pravity directly or indirectly to stand. An ocean of women, their families and their friends, inside the courtroom and flowing out into the halls, stood up.When you’re young, you think monsters look like giant, man-eating sharks, grotesque and frightening, but no one ever mentions that these monsters can be disguised as someone you know, like Mr. Pravity, the cool dad, the amiable pastor who works with the church youth group. And when you do have a brush with one, like I did, you might tell yourself it’s not that big of a deal, or maybe you were the only one, so you carry your shame like an ulcer until you hear about someone else, and then a few more. And still you think that’s all it is. But it never is. There’s no such thing as a “harmless” dirty old man. These predators, they never attack just one. They keep going until they are stopped.It’s been 50 years since “Jaws” came out — half a century since sweet Gwen and I laughed at the fake danger of a mechanical shark lurking beneath the ocean’s surface. We were innocent and naive, never fully understanding how the real danger lived among us, how quietly it moved and how long it stayed hidden in plain sight.Note: Names and some identifying details in this essay have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals mentioned.Kathryn Smith has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Philadelphia Stories, poetry in Apiary, and twice won an honorable mention from Glimmer Train. She graduated with a B.S. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently working on a memoir, “Stories of an Uncouth Girl.” You can reach her on Instagram @KathrynSmithStories.Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected] Husband Told Me He Couldn't Be Married Anymore – So I Made A Decision I've Kept Secret For 12 YearsMy Mum Dropped A Shocking Family Secret In My Lap. I Never Looked At My Father The Same Way Again.My Mom Abused Me For Years. After She Died, I Was Overwhelmed By What I Discovered In Her Diaries.

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