He’s dirtier than you and I know. But a US army veteran (of the Iraq war) named Sascha Riley knows from terrible experience just how dirty he could be:
The first 15 minutes or so are the crucial part. According to Lisa Voldeng’s Substack, this is a summary of the events he describes here:
During the years SR was trafficked within the Trump/Epstein ring, he was forced to perform sexual acts during the filming of several child pornography films, including a snuff film. He recalls at least 10-12 such films. During the snuff film shoot, SR saw a girl child shot and killed during filming. After another film shoot, a girl child was taken to another room. SR recalls hearing gunshots. He said that when he heard the gunshots, he was scared. He said that another perpetrator still in the room with him, sensing his fear, said, “Don’t worry. Boys are hard to find.” The films were produced within the Trump/Epstein ring.
There was a time when I would have had a lot of trouble believing accounts like this, but that was before I read Elly Danica’s book, Don’t: A Woman’s Word, in which she describes similar events from her own childhood. Like Sascha, Elly was abused and trafficked by her own father, photographed and even filmed in grossly abusive ways, and pimped to wealthy and prominent men in and around the Saskatchewan town where she lived. All of them were sadistic and enjoyed seeing her suffer, much as the abusers Sascha Riley describes getting their sick jollies off the suffering of his friend Patricia.
The only difference between the two girls is that Elly survived; her abusers stopped short of murder, probably because it’s a lot harder to hide or explain away the violent death of a girl in a Canadian prairie town. She could not be made to simply disappear. Blame would have been difficult to deflect elsewhere. Even with the complicity of wealthy doctors and judges, like the ones who abused her, it would have been well-nigh impossible. They could have been implicated at any time, and the conspiracy would have fallen apart like a moth-eaten scarf. The circuit of abusers in that time and place was too small; all the men knew her father, and the guilty ones were friends of his.
And it was a lot harder to procure children for what those perverts had in mind. The films and photos, too, would have required a darkroom to process in that pre-Internet era; there were no servers, and you couldn’t just upload the materials, which would have been distributed either via postal mail or passed in secret from hand to hand. The entire operation was too lucrative, and also too costly, for them to just dispose of their victim like a sack of trash when they were done with her. She had to be controlled, physically and mentally, with silence and shame.
And for many years, she was.
But even when Elly came out with her story at last, and the book was national news, it was still not received the way she’d hoped it would be.
“The reception took me by surprise in the sense that I wanted to change people’s perceptions about the issue of child sexual abuse, wanted to have it taken seriously, wanted to make the extent of the impact of such experiences clear—it is never just an event, but so much more. Primarily I wanted it stopped, want children and women to be safe and feel safe. Instead I became as one journalist described me: ‘Canada’s most famous victim.’”
Danica further tells me the window of interest for her story was a very narrow one, and that in the space of a mere eighteen months post-publication she went from responding to the upset reactions to incidents in the book, to having to defend her memories, and then to accusations that her memories were ‘false.’ In her follow-up memoir, Beyond Don’t, published eight years later, she frankly discloses the toll the publication took on her, that though an exercise in recovery, it was merely a first step. “I had underestimated both how long it would take to get there and what I would have to come to terms with to make a better life possible,” she writes. “I began to abuse drugs and alcohol. At the time I could not explain to myself or to anyone else why I was in so much pain, and so focused on walking oblivion or suicide.”
I hope that Sascha Riley doesn’t have to go through what Elly Danica did in her efforts to raise awareness. I hope that things really have changed in the decades since Don’t came out. And that people are ready to hear the worst, and believe the victims. Because even though the sexual abuse and trafficking of children is a lot more common than we all would like to think, and victims are everywhere among us, there is a huge effort to keep sweeping those horrors under the rug. Victims are frequently dismissed as “crazy”, because they can’t just coherently string together a narrative that immediately makes sense and is easy to verify. Their memories come in flashes because the whole is too awful to bear.
Even when a victim does manage to come forward with an account that makes sense, there is still a huge resistance to the truth. Nobody wants to believe that anybody socially prominent is this evil, this capable of these things. Much less if that “anybody” is not just some rich doctor or judge in Saskatchewan, but the president of the United States himself.
And he has a vast network of fixers to make sure that the spotlight is turned everywhere except upon himself.
