December 30, 2021 • 46 mins
Actress Maddie Corman is driving at 5:00 am to a TV soundstage to film a television show when she gets a panicked call from her children; police are at their home, seizing their father’s computer. Maddie’s husband Jace Alexander has a dark secret, now coming to light.
Warning: this episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning,
this episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion
is advised. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
(00:22):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
My guest today is actress and playwright Mattie Corman, whose
one woman show Accidentally Brave, premiered off Broadway in the spring.
Of Mattie's is a story of love and resilience when
(00:45):
faced with a bombshell of a secret. Her bravery strikes
me as anything but accidental. So in many ways, this
is a story that has a before and and after,
you know, like a really bright line. Let's start by
talking about the before. Okay, you married your best person. Yes,
(01:07):
it was a real romance, a real love. I was
swept away and madly in love and had my eyes open, thinking,
this is a really good man and a person who
really wants to be a partner, a person who more
than more than I. At the time, I was really
ready to be a dad and a husband. I had
(01:30):
been married before, actually, which I forget sometimes because it
was like a baby marriage. To my first boyfriend, my
college sweetheart, and that did not work and we got
a baby, marriage and a baby divorce. So it was
very I don't want to, you know, drag him at all,
but I knew walking down the aisle that time that
(01:51):
something was up, that it was probably not a good idea,
but the invitations had been sent, the dress was on,
let's do it. But I didn't feel that way this time.
I felt very, very good, safe, happy. How did you
and chase me? I wish it were a simple story,
but it's a little bit of a twisty road because
(02:11):
we had been He's a little bit older than I
and we had been in the same circles for years.
He's part of a theater company, started theater company called
Naked Angels, and they were the really cool kids when
I was in high school and college, and so I
kind of knew of him and was around him, but
we weren't friends until later. Um he had come to
(02:35):
a screening of a movie I was in with someone
he was dating. Like we had just kind of cross paths,
and indeed, I think one of the last auditions he
was an actor, and then he left acting to become
a director and I think we ran into each other
in l A. I mean, I know we ran into
each other, but at one of his final auditions before
(02:56):
he quit so and I remember thinking was smart and
funny and cute, and I was unavailable at the time anyway.
But then we really met when I was single and
living in l A but shooting a movie in New York.
It was the final night of filming, and I went
out with them a very good friend of mine, and
(03:17):
she took me to see a play that her friend
had written, this great play, This is Our Youth. Kenny
Lonergan and Jas had directed the play next door, and
it was I believe it was Kenny's opening night, it
was Jason's closing night. So everybody ended up at the
west Bank and which is a great New York City restaurant.
(03:39):
It was so romantic and a great New York City
theater night. And there was this guy and I spoke
to him and I thought he was adorable and funny
and smart, and I was going back to l A
in a few days. So it turned out he was
going to work in l A in a couple of weeks,
(04:00):
and we had mutual friends, and I made sure that
I was where he was. Um, that was intentional. After
a flirtatious game of basketball, yes basketball, in a friend's backyard,
Mattie and Jason go out on a date and within
a week they're crazy about one another. Jason returns to
New York and for a while they navigate the bicoastal
(04:22):
divide as. The romance becomes serious very quickly. Then about
six months in, he said, somebody's gotta move someplace, and
my whole family. I'm from New York. I love New York,
and I thought, well, I'll come there. I kept my
(04:43):
place in l A just in case, but I moved
in with him after six months. And then you began
to build this great, big, beautiful life together. Yep. We
had a big, fun, outdoor, hippie kind of wedding with
lots of friends and family celebrating. We had basically a
(05:06):
honeymoon baby. My mom had had a really hard time
getting pregnant, and I grew up with that story, so
I was very aware. I thought it could take years,
and it took. It was very after school special, like
it was the first, like the first, the first try.
So we had a baby before our first anniversary, and
(05:28):
that's my daughter, and a couple of years later, I
thought maybe I'd only have one because it was so
all encompassing and amazing and difficult and fantastic and all
of it. And then when she was about three and
a half, I thought, Okay, well I want another. I'll
be so much better at it this time, and i
won't be so scared, and I'll be the cool mom
(05:51):
with my four year old. And then another on my hip.
And then God laughed and I got pregnant with twins,
so there was no There was no cool mom with
a baby on my hip. But I had the boys.
I had twin boys who are about four and a
half years younger than my daughter. Before the twins are born,
(06:13):
Maddie and Jason moved out of Manhattan and to a
Westchester suburb. Their life in that suburb is idyllic. They
have the nice house, three great kids, a cat, and
a dog, and as Maddie calls it in her One
Woman show, she has a semi great career. Life just
kind of took over. I had been not really a
(06:37):
kid actress, but a young actress, you know, starting in
my teenage years, so I had been working. But when
I had my all these kids. My husband was a
very successful director and producer, and so he knew about
his jobs more in advance, and he was well compensated.
So I was very lucky to be able to say, well,
(06:58):
let me be home. Because he was a TV director,
his work was all encompassing. I mean the hours are
sometimes eighteen hour days. Sometimes he was out of town,
but even when he was in working in New York,
it was important to me that there be a point person,
you know, not just a point person, but that I
(07:19):
got to be there and go to the school events,
and go to the doctor's visits and be on the
book sale committee. And I loved it. And I missed
my career, but I was lucky enough to be able
to keep a toe in, you know, and do do
work here and there. And it was really busy. There
(07:41):
was and still is dogs and cats and and friends
and kids. And I find a lot of twin moms
are really organized, and it was like they were chosen
from above. I'm not so. I always felt like I
was forgetting and I did, you know, forget somebody's soccer
game or something. Um. And that is not to say
that my husband was checked out at all. He would
(08:04):
be around on the weekends and coaching the kids teams
and volunteering at the local churches and temples, doing Midnight Run,
which is bringing food to the homeless. And we were happy,
but certainly distracted. Our life was mainly about the kids,
and that was what we both chose, you know. That
(08:27):
was it was an unwritten agreement in our marriage, but
one that I think we both we're fine with, which
is they're going to take center stage and we are
going to work around that. It's an absorbing family life.
Years go by in a happy, busy blur. By the
summer of the twins have finished fifth grade, Mattie's daughter
(08:49):
is a teenager taking driver's Head, and Maddie had a
guest spot on a TV show. Everything as business as
usual until very early one morning at five am. Maddie
is driving to set when she received a phone call.
Her daughter is hysterical. On the other line. My daughter
was sixteen. I'd been a mom for sixteen years. I've
(09:12):
heard all kinds of screams and yells, and you just know,
as a mother, I was already a warrior. But I
knew the minute I heard the pitch of her scream
that this was different. And really bad. And already, when
you're sixteen year old calls you at five am, that's
not normal. But she was screaming and saying that the
(09:33):
police were in the house, and I couldn't. I couldn't
understand what she was saying. And I couldn't even comprehend
that police were in our house, let alone why they
were there. And I could also hear that my boys,
who were eleven at the time, were with her, and
they were I could hear them crying. And even right now,
(09:55):
I feel like my face is going to fall off
even just talking about this and remembering this moment, because
it was the moment that all of our lives changed forever.
This was the moment of discovery. And um, I told her,
I have to hang up and call Daddy and find
out what's going on. Just hold on, hold on, hold on.
(10:18):
And I didn't pull over like I I you know,
when I tell the story, people are like and then
you turned the car around. I didn't. I wish that
I could say I did, but I just kind of
kept driving to work. I somewhat left my body, but
kept driving and I called my husband, who didn't pick up,
and I called again and he picked up, and he
didn't even sound like my husband, my person, my partner,
(10:41):
my best friend. He sounded very formal and weird, and
he said the police are here. I said, yeah, I
know what what's going on? And he said, I can't
really talk right now. And I just couldn't understand or
imagine what was going on. I think that the police
said they want to talk to you, and someone got
(11:03):
on the phone and said we we're searching devices or
your husband's computer or something. And all I could think
was I need to get my kids out of that house.
I need my kids to not be there. And I
was close to Brooklyn at this point, which is not
close to my house. I called my daughter back and said,
hold on, I don't know what's happening. What's happening, and
(11:26):
I said, just hold tight, baby, hold on. And in
a very very strange I guess one could say stroke
of luck. My brother was staying. He doesn't normally live
in this house, but he was staying two doors down
from where our house was. And I'm very close with
my brother, and my brother is very close with my kids.
(11:48):
My brother and his amazing wife had just had their
first baby. I mean, she was maybe a week old,
maybe not even she was probably ten days old actually,
And I called him and said, you have to go
get my kids and bring them over to your house.
And of course he was going why, and I said,
I don't know, but you have to do that right now.
(12:09):
I can't talk to you. You have to go do it.
What was going through your mind in this discovery moment?
Nothing was going through my mind except I don't understand.
I don't understand. I don't understand. Were there are scenarios
that were running through your mind, like maybe it's tax evasion, yes,
or gambling or something. And then I believe I called
(12:34):
back my husband, and you know, I heard something about
they're saying they found some files that are illegal, and
and that was the first time my mind thought about
pornography maybe, And I still thought, well, that has to
be a mistake, even if that is what they found.
Looking back with the eyes that I have now, and
(12:57):
I've heard many many people's stories that are similar, different
but similar, I had no idea. I'm embarrassed still deciding
the lots of shame about lots of things. But pornography
was not a part of my marriage, and it was
not a thing where I had caught my husband multiple
(13:18):
times watching pornography. If you had said to me, do
you think your husband watches pornography? I would have said probably,
you know, when he's away. But like, it didn't even
occur to me that this was something which turned out
to be a very big issue for him. Mattie's father
also lives nearby in Westchester, and he takes Jace to
(13:41):
a lawyer and then drives him to Brooklyn. Maddie leaves
work early, citing a family emergency, and then she goes
to meet Jase on a street corner near the set.
It wasn't until I looked at his face and he
didn't even look like himself, and he looked away that
I realized this was not a mistake. I mean, obviously
(14:04):
it was a mistake that he viewed any kind of
child pornography, but it was not a mistake like, oh,
they got the wrong guys, something got the wrong guy,
or my kid accidentally downloaded something. Yeah. It's kind of
amazing in those moments, the way that in you know,
moments of a lot of trauma, the way the body
and the psyche kind of take over in some way
(14:26):
to protect us, Like you went on autopilot. You were
definitely just dissociated. You kept on driving, you were going
to go to work. I did my work. I mean,
I haven't ever watched that TV show, but I shot scenes. Yeah,
I shot two scenes in a completely altered state. And
you took care of your kids. You did what was
necessary to get your kids safe and out of the house.
(14:47):
But I just think that there's this way, and I
I'm familiar with it myself, and and I've heard it
in many stories where there's this kind of protection that
happens for a little it's you know, shocked is a
form of protection. Yeah, it's like a biological survival instinct.
Within about twenty six hours, the story becomes public. Maddie
(15:12):
and her family are not even given the opportunity to
have a secret or to reckon with it privately. What
ordinarily would be nobody's business is swiftly in the public sphere,
leaving the family unable to properly or quietly digest what
has happened. I was also worried about him. We didn't
know it was going to become public. It was as
(15:34):
we were sitting in a diner right after court, and
I was still digesting like I said, I hadn't even
really gotten what had happened and who he was and
what this is and is this a thing? And what?
And are my kids okay? Are they you know? Where
(15:55):
are they? Are they all right? Do I go to court?
Do I stay with them? Who are we telling? Um?
How is he going to go to work? And then
we're just sitting with these lawyers who are brand new
people in my life, talking about things I never thought
i'd talk about, like jail time for my husband and pornography,
and it's all swirling. And I looked down at my
(16:16):
phone because I'm constantly texting and calling my children, and there's,
you know, a banner alert, and it's on Facebook, it's
on USA Today, It's it's on the local patch you
know there, it's everywhere. So that opened up a whole
new way of having to deal with the crisis, which
was the press showed up at our house. I'm not
(16:38):
a famous person and neither is he, but we're well
known enough and this is salacious enough story that the
press was there, and that was another thing that I
had to keep my kids safe from. And I did
not want my husband to kill himself, so I made
him promise that he wouldn't kill himself. But I'll so
(17:00):
felt like I had to keep an eye on him
as well in those early days. And there's so many
layers of feelings that might seem like they would contradict
each other, but of course they don't. That that you're experiencing,
both in those early days and then for a long
time to come and perhaps even forever, like ten minutes ago. Yeah. Absolutely,
(17:25):
But in the early days it wasn't what I would
I think had I written this story and not lived it,
I would have said, well, no, you would have been
feeling that. And when I started writing my story and
we did it as a play, my brilliant producer Darryl Roth, said, well,
it's not really believable that you got up and went
(17:46):
to work the next day. I was like, I know,
but I did, you know, because I thought it would
be a secret and I had to finish my job,
and I had a little part of me that also went, um,
I'm probably going to have to be the breadwinner. There
was just that's what I did. And the anger that
I felt didn't come when I thought it would come,
and the all of that. It was so it was
(18:09):
such a crisis and such a catastrophe trauma. I wasn't
thinking about all the things one should probably even think.
You know, that all came later and continues to come.
There are real victims of I want to be really
clear that I understand that I was traumatized, my kids
were traumatized, but that does not take anything away from
(18:32):
the children that are traumatized in this kind of pornography.
That was not at the forefront of my mind in
that moment that came later, like well, what does this
mean to me as a woman? Was it? What does
it mean? Are my kids safe? There were just so
many things, but it was an emergency in the beginning,
and even even in the following weeks and months. You know,
(18:57):
kids and dogs and cats don't stop having me needs
because there's a crisis, And so I was trying to
process a lot of things at the same time that
there was, you know, a wisdom teeth removal and kids
starting school, and bills that needed to be paid and
all these things. In the beginning, it was just what's
(19:19):
right in front of me, and how can I make
sure we get through today. We'll be right back in
the midst of all this. Jase loses a number of jobs.
(19:42):
In the midst of all this, friends come forward, so
I'm saying absolutely the right thing, and others not so much.
And in the midst of all this, someone important appears
in Maddie's life, someone she considers to be an angel.
I'm not a big fan of the New York post
(20:03):
um nor what they've written about uh me and many
other people, but I believe that she saw the story.
And we have a mutual friend. I don't say her
name because she's very famous and because that's her story
to tell. But somehow she contacted this mutual friend and said,
(20:23):
I think you know the wife. And she had her
own version of this, nothing to do with this particular
acting out, but her husband was a sex addict, and
she recognized some kind of addiction that I didn't even
know was something we were talking about. But whatever it was,
she had the compassion and the experience to read a story,
(20:46):
a headline and say, there's a family behind that headline,
there's some people in real trouble, some people who are
really hurting and scared and lonely and afraid. And she
contacted me, and I was being contacted by everyone under
the sun, and I didn't really want to talk to anyone,
(21:10):
but something in me had a feeling. And I didn't
know her story, but something in me had a feeling
that I should take that call and speaking to a
stranger but who had some experience, strength and hope around
what I was going through. It did save my life.
I'm not being hyperbolic. It absolutely saved my life. It
(21:33):
was just so complicated and it was so lonely and
so terrifying, and to just have someone go it's going
to be okay. I kept saying, no, no, no, but
my story is different. I'm telling you it's going to
be okay, and your kids are going to be okay,
and maybe even your husband's going to be okay. And
just hearing those words would have been enough, but she
(21:57):
went beyond that, and she gave me names of people
to call, and she was just there for me in
a way that I don't know how that happened, but
she was my angel. And it's amazing the way that
within some of the most difficult stories there are these
beautiful stories or these kernels of light and just miracles, really,
(22:19):
and that's certainly just seemed like one Jas goes to
rehab in Arizona for forty five days, the first two
weeks of which he and Maddie are not allowed to
speak while he's away. The fallout continues, and a sort
of public excommunication occurs. He's fired at the kids soccer coach,
(22:40):
removed from his position at the Director's Guild, and their
names are removed in quick succession from several charities and boards.
At that time, you lived in a relatively small town,
you don't like, very very small suburban town where everyone
knows everything, which is incredibly comforting and then incredibly horrible
(23:00):
depending on what's going on. So what role did at
that point did shame play in all of that? Um?
Did you find yourself, you know, just sort of hiding
or feeling like you didn't want to talk to people,
you didn't want to deal. Oh? Absolutely, the shame was crushing,
is the only word that comes to mind. Absolutely crushing
(23:23):
in the moments that I had time to feel it,
you know, in some ways I just had to keep
going with life. But when I had a moment or
saw someone or made eye contact, yes, the shame was
absolutely staggering. And I had been not even aware of
how much I cared about what other people thought it
(23:45):
was incredibly humbling to be publicly humiliated, and also, what
is mine and what is my partners? Where is my
part in that? Why am I ashamed of something that
I didn't do? Butt? How do I not wear this?
And how do I process it privately when everyone's talking
(24:07):
about it, looking at it, asking me, are you staying together?
Are you breaking up? You know what's going to happen?
Is he going to jail? You know? I was not
prepared for this. I had been married to this man
for almost twenty years, and what I hadn't noticed along
the way was how much of my identity had become
(24:27):
wrapped up in being his wife and being this family
that we were. And I had lost a lot of
myself And so now who am I? And what am I?
And I was very proud of my marriage. My marriage
looking back had certainly started to fray, and there were certainly,
(24:48):
now that I can look back, there were some signs
that things weren't so well, and my husband had gotten
progressively more irritable and depressed and distant and romantic. Only
things were off, but we were so great and we
are the actress and the director who aren't in Hollywood
we're making it work, and we're still coaching the kids
(25:11):
teams and look, and I was proud of that. I
was proud of that part of my identity. We can
we can give you marriage advice. Look at us, We
got it and and we're messy. By the way. I
wasn't even trying to pretend to be perfect. I just
thought we had something that we actually now I know
we did have. But there was a big, big secret
(25:31):
that was there that I didn't see. And so for
everyone to see that secret at the same time that
I was seeing it was incredibly shameful. And I also
I was trying to navigate this without letting my kids
feel that, but also wanting them to feel their own feelings.
(25:53):
And I still feel this way, which is, you know,
renn A Brown says it way better than I do.
But it's okay to care about what some people think
the people you love very much. But if you spend
your time caring about what every single person thinks, you'll
never get out of bed. Mattie has asked at one
point to come out to Arizona for family Week at
(26:14):
the rehabilitation center. She really really does not want to
do this, but with the help of her daughter, her therapist,
and her angel, she eventually decides to go. You learn
while you're there that porn can be as addictive as
crystal meth, that you know what it actually does to
(26:34):
the brain, and that addicts are not bad people, they're
sick people. And and that really is something that in
getting over your resistance to going to family Week and
going there and hating it and at the same time,
you know, going through all of the waves of feelings. Um, oh,
thank god I went. And you know, it was my
(26:57):
daughter who actually got me there. My therapist who is
Goddess who specializes I had switched therapists because also my
wonderful therapist I had been seeing It's just a lot
of people aren't versed in this, and it's so scary
and and I really needed someone who it was not
going to be shocking. I needed to not absorb anyone
(27:20):
else's shame just to get to being moderately okay. And
my therapist was great and actually had trained at and
had worked at this place Gentle Path in Wickenburg, which
is part of the meadows where my husband went, and
so she was just great and she said, you have
to go, and my Angel said you absolutely have to go.
It's where her husband had gone and it saved his
(27:42):
life at family Week, saved her life, and you have
to go. And I said no. But then my daughter,
who was sixteen at the time and not thrilled with
any of this, said to me, well, Mom, didn't you
take a vow to love dad and sickness and in health?
And I said yes, and she said, well dad's sick
(28:05):
and she was so clear and clean about it, and
I thought, yeah, okay, I'll go. And I'm really it was.
It was a life changing experience. And the women that
I met in Wickenburg, the other partners wives, were so
incredible and continue to be my sisters. And I would
(28:29):
never have had that. I mean, I feel incredibly Again
it's weird to say lucky around this, but I know
that I am privileged that we I mean, we just
didn't even think about how much it would cost, and
it is incredibly expensive. But at the time it was
like the ship was sinking, just whatever. But to be
around other people who were going through something similar again
(28:52):
very different, acting out behaviors, but just looking at each
other going what and learning that almost every one who's
married to sex addict finds out about it in a
really shocking way. It's not usually like, hey, there's something
I want to tell you. It's usually a big, dark, deep,
shameful secret that comes out in a really messy, horrible,
(29:16):
catastrophic way. At least people who wind up at this
place nobody's there because they're having a little bit of
a bad day. You also describe, you know, these broken
husbands who are there, and it's kind of the beginning
of your getting in touch with your own compassion, because
(29:36):
these are not trolls. These are decent human beings who
have done things that are awful, but it doesn't make
them awful and good men by the way, rabbis, doctors, musicians, sons, fathers,
and men um that I did spend incredibly authentic intimate
(29:58):
moments with intimate meaning people were pouring their souls out
and telling their stories, and I could barely look at
my own partner, but seeing these men and seeing how
deeply sorry they were for the hurt that they had caused,
(30:18):
and seeing that they were smart and funny and kind
and just decent, which is not what I You know,
the story that we're told that we hear about the
names we hear, you know, perverts, sex addicts, sex offenders.
You know, this is not the men that I saw,
(30:40):
were not the image that I had, And it was
the beginning of my ability to feel compassion. The combination
of me being able to witness other people and also
hearing from people who could say I too, went to
a place I never dreamed I would go in the
(31:00):
throes of a of a really gripping addiction, helped me
have a glimmer of an idea that this was the
person who I loved, whose brain had been hijacked. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Mattie
(31:33):
returns home, and soon Jason will too. Parameters are set.
He will sleep in the guest room, and there will
be one computer in the house filters on all the devices.
It's a tenuous time for them all, but also bolstered
by incredible bits of generosity and wisdom. As one of
their sons says, it's intense to love someone so much
(31:57):
and also be really, really out at them. So Jason's
back home, You're experiencing all of these different waves of feelings.
You know, you're you're shopping at St. Leonards, the famous
supermarket that's both in Westchester and in Connecticut for Halloween items.
And suddenly it occurs to you, maybe it's not okay
(32:19):
for us to decorate our house for Halloween. Um, maybe
people won't come and trick or treat at our house.
And there's this really powerful sense of mourning the loss
of the way things were, you know, the grief for
that life that would never be the same as it
(32:40):
was before that phone call that morning. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And no matter what, if I choose to stay with
this person, there will be a very big loss of
the life that I have known and that we have known.
And if I leave this person, there will also be
a very big loss. Right, So there's going to be lost,
(33:01):
there's no getting around it. And there's only so much
I can do to protect my kids from that. You know,
there's some part of me still that is so resistant
to change, and and I project that onto my kids, like,
oh no, but what if we have to move? That
will be so upsetting, you know. And it's like I
(33:22):
never think about the good things that might come from that.
I just don't want them to have to absorb any
more trauma. And change to me sometimes means trauma and loss. Eventually,
Jason moves out of the guest room and back into
the master bedroom. Things improve, not in some sort of cinematic,
(33:44):
smooth narrative arc, but rather it fits and starts. One morning,
Maddie wakes up in a profound state of rage, and
this moment marks a turning point. Jason has apologized before,
but this time he exp us as his full empathy
and awareness of what he's done to her in all this.
(34:05):
Shortly after this powerful moment, Maddie decides she wants to
acknowledge that while this is not the same marriage it
used to be, it's still a marriage. She hadn't been
wearing her wedding ring for some time, and now she
wants a new one. They go to Soho and wander
through jewelry stores, but nothing feels right. They're about to
(34:25):
let it go and head home when Maddie stops to
look at a street vendor who has jewelry on display.
Something about this person seems magical. He asks her what
she's looking for. I said, um, I want something unique
and beautiful and delicate but strong, nothing like he probably had,
(34:48):
I mean mostly had, like peace sign rings and you
know Kitty cat rings, and and he said hold on,
and he reached under not on the main tray where
everything was, this little kind of secret drawer, and he
took out this ring and it was so beautiful and
it was unique and delicate but strong, and it had
(35:08):
a kind of a scarlet stone. And I have freakishly
tiny hands, I really do, um especially my fingers, and
I've never had a ring that I haven't had to
get sized down, especially from my wedding finger. I think
it's one of other than my pinky, the smallest one.
And I popped this ring on and it fit perfectly
(35:32):
and I loved it. Yea. My husband was so excited
because we had gone to a bunch of shops and
nothing was right and things were too expensive and didn't
fit and and he said great, and he went to
pay for it, and I said hold on, and I
took out my wallet and paid with my money. And
not that that maybe was more symbolic than anything, because
(35:53):
it's not like at that point we had separated our
bank accounts. But it was important to me to get
myself a ring. I made a choice to be married.
I made a choice to stay for the time being,
at least at that moment with my family and try
to put this family back together. And I wanted a
symbol of that, but I wanted to get it. Yeah,
that's beautiful. When there's a betrayal in a marriage, when
(36:19):
there's a secret that one person knows and the other doesn't,
there's a part of history that is stolen, at least
from me. And until recently, I couldn't even look at
my wedding photos or beautiful moments over the twenty years
we had together because I felt like I was the chump,
(36:39):
you know, like I didn't know what was really going
on there. That's changed a bit, i will say, in
present day, but at that time, there were songs that
I always loved that I couldn't listen to. There was
jewelry that meant so much to me that I had
to put away, and that was just such a loss.
And I don't mean to belittle other parts of grief
(37:01):
and loss in betrayal, but there is something that the
partner who's betrayed really never gets back because you're still
putting the story together, whereas the other person knows the
full story. And you know, my husband to this day,
I'll look at a photo and say oh, that was
just such a beautiful happy day. And I'll say, but
(37:23):
I don't know, I don't really know. He'll say, no,
it was, and I but you know, there's just that
feeling of there was something going on that I didn't know.
At Jase's hearing, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to
ten years of probation. It's a huge relief that he
(37:43):
won't serve jail time. But despite the legal proceedings being over,
there is and perhaps always will be, continue to fallout,
and he had to register as a sex offender. Yes
he did, he does, he is. I guess I'm thinking
about marriage and partnership and intimacy and what it means
(38:09):
two like sort of reach a new place, hard hard
one and ongoing, but one in which there is the
true intimacy. Early in your play, you say something like
I entered the marriage with little secrets, you know, the
(38:30):
occasional cigarette, a little botox, you know, my secret meditation mantra.
But Jason entered the marriage with a big secret, and
that was obviously something that was there and which you've
had to revise in a certain way those those twenty years.
With the fact that he knew his secret and you
(38:50):
did not, but now you do. And what does that
do for the sense of connection and closeness and intimacy. Well,
I've heard it said, and I believe that the opposite
of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. And when someone's
(39:11):
in their addiction of any kind, there's no real chance
for intimacy. So I was in a marriage. I want
to also be clear that again I say this that
I can't tell my husband's story. That's for him to tell,
but I will say that Jason's pornography addiction did not
start where it ended, you know. That's that's like the end.
(39:36):
The illegal pornography was a very late stage, part of
the end of a long of a drug, you know,
where you need more and darker to get your high,
I suppose. But yes, pornography was a part of my
marriage that I didn't know. And now I am with
(39:56):
someone who not only do I know the worst thing
they've ever done, everyone knows the worst thing he's ever done.
And as much as that is shameful, it is incredibly
freeing because if you're that person and people still love you,
I mean, what that can do is pretty astonishing. So
we don't have secrets anymore. So there is a level
(40:19):
of intimacy that I didn't know existed that I now
have now Danny. That is not to say that if
I say to him one day, hey babe, I need
blueberries as part of you know, you're going to do
the food shopping and he comes back and forgets the blueberries,
that I don't have a moment of going you don't
(40:40):
listen to me. You're keeping secrets. What's going on? You know?
This is not to say everything is latti dati da.
I am very very attuned and afraid of any kind
of lie or secret. But I also see the person
that I fell in love with who started to fade
away through the years, and I see more than that.
(41:04):
So I don't wish this on anyone. He has done
a lot of work and is well aware of the
victims of that kind of pornography and the hurt that
he has caused so many people, and he is fully
(41:26):
honest in his life, and so to have that partner
is great. I mean, it's a weird thing to say,
but it's great, and it's deep and it's real, and
it's sometimes incredibly exhausting, and I try to match it
(41:47):
with my own work and my own program and my
own honesty. Like I said, I'm really not a person
who kept too many secrets. Quite the opposite. I tend
to lead with telling you the worst thing about me
so I can get ahead of it. But this stuff
goes to another level. I've learned a lot about shame
and things. Anything that has to do with sex and
(42:10):
sexuality can just be really deeply buried, and I've I've
had to look at my own past and things that
I had to look at. I didn't understand at first
why my husband wouldn't just tell me I'm struggling with
this or I was abused as a you know, I
had some abuse as a as a boy, like I'm me,
(42:33):
But there's something that shame does. I really have come
to believe that secrets keep us sick, and that the
shame just perpetuates this, and that if we don't talk
about it, it'll just keep happening. I think if you
ever interviewed Jace, he would say he planned to stop
doing this and go to his grave with that secret.
(42:55):
He did not want to ever tell anyone that he
was looking at pornography, let alone illegal pornography, ever, and
he didn't tell his therapist, you know. And and if
someone believes that maybe they could talk about it and
not be thrown out of society and not be thrown
(43:15):
out of their marriage, maybe we can actually get somewhere
and get some help and not have this huge industry.
I mean, pornography is everywhere, and nobody's talking about it. Well,
I mean not nobody, but I feel like we're not
talking about it. I have three children. They've gone to
sex ed in various schools, temples, churches, and it is
(43:38):
really under disgust, which again is like, oh, it's shameful,
it's secret, but it's there. I have now told this
story publicly partly because it was already out there, but
I wanted people to know the nuance a little bit.
And the number of women and men who have shared
their stories with me, including people I know well who
(44:01):
I had no idea there were certain secrets going on.
I'm happy to be in a family and I include
my kids in this where we can lay it all
out on the table. There's not much that we don't
talk about. And seeing that their dad fell down so
hard and we as a family allowed him to get
back up, I hope is a lesson in saying, you
(44:25):
don't have to keep things secret. We can help, there's recovery,
there's hope. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.
(45:10):
Molly Zachor is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
(45:32):
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance m h.
(46:09):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning,
this episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion
is advised. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
(00:22):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
My guest today is actress and playwright Mattie Corman, whose
one woman show Accidentally Brave, premiered off Broadway in the spring.
Of Mattie's is a story of love and resilience when
(00:45):
faced with a bombshell of a secret. Her bravery strikes
me as anything but accidental. So in many ways, this
is a story that has a before and and after,
you know, like a really bright line. Let's start by
talking about the before. Okay, you married your best person. Yes,
(01:07):
it was a real romance, a real love. I was
swept away and madly in love and had my eyes open, thinking,
this is a really good man and a person who
really wants to be a partner, a person who more
than more than I. At the time, I was really
ready to be a dad and a husband. I had
(01:30):
been married before, actually, which I forget sometimes because it
was like a baby marriage. To my first boyfriend, my
college sweetheart, and that did not work and we got
a baby, marriage and a baby divorce. So it was
very I don't want to, you know, drag him at all,
but I knew walking down the aisle that time that
(01:51):
something was up, that it was probably not a good idea,
but the invitations had been sent, the dress was on,
let's do it. But I didn't feel that way this time.
I felt very, very good, safe, happy. How did you
and chase me? I wish it were a simple story,
but it's a little bit of a twisty road because
(02:11):
we had been He's a little bit older than I
and we had been in the same circles for years.
He's part of a theater company, started theater company called
Naked Angels, and they were the really cool kids when
I was in high school and college, and so I
kind of knew of him and was around him, but
we weren't friends until later. Um he had come to
(02:35):
a screening of a movie I was in with someone
he was dating. Like we had just kind of cross paths,
and indeed, I think one of the last auditions he
was an actor, and then he left acting to become
a director and I think we ran into each other
in l A. I mean, I know we ran into
each other, but at one of his final auditions before
(02:56):
he quit so and I remember thinking was smart and
funny and cute, and I was unavailable at the time anyway.
But then we really met when I was single and
living in l A but shooting a movie in New York.
It was the final night of filming, and I went
out with them a very good friend of mine, and
(03:17):
she took me to see a play that her friend
had written, this great play, This is Our Youth. Kenny
Lonergan and Jas had directed the play next door, and
it was I believe it was Kenny's opening night, it
was Jason's closing night. So everybody ended up at the
west Bank and which is a great New York City restaurant.
(03:39):
It was so romantic and a great New York City
theater night. And there was this guy and I spoke
to him and I thought he was adorable and funny
and smart, and I was going back to l A
in a few days. So it turned out he was
going to work in l A in a couple of weeks,
(04:00):
and we had mutual friends, and I made sure that
I was where he was. Um, that was intentional. After
a flirtatious game of basketball, yes basketball, in a friend's backyard,
Mattie and Jason go out on a date and within
a week they're crazy about one another. Jason returns to
New York and for a while they navigate the bicoastal
(04:22):
divide as. The romance becomes serious very quickly. Then about
six months in, he said, somebody's gotta move someplace, and
my whole family. I'm from New York. I love New York,
and I thought, well, I'll come there. I kept my
(04:43):
place in l A just in case, but I moved
in with him after six months. And then you began
to build this great, big, beautiful life together. Yep. We
had a big, fun, outdoor, hippie kind of wedding with
lots of friends and family celebrating. We had basically a
(05:06):
honeymoon baby. My mom had had a really hard time
getting pregnant, and I grew up with that story, so
I was very aware. I thought it could take years,
and it took. It was very after school special, like
it was the first, like the first, the first try.
So we had a baby before our first anniversary, and
(05:28):
that's my daughter, and a couple of years later, I
thought maybe I'd only have one because it was so
all encompassing and amazing and difficult and fantastic and all
of it. And then when she was about three and
a half, I thought, Okay, well I want another. I'll
be so much better at it this time, and i
won't be so scared, and I'll be the cool mom
(05:51):
with my four year old. And then another on my hip.
And then God laughed and I got pregnant with twins,
so there was no There was no cool mom with
a baby on my hip. But I had the boys.
I had twin boys who are about four and a
half years younger than my daughter. Before the twins are born,
(06:13):
Maddie and Jason moved out of Manhattan and to a
Westchester suburb. Their life in that suburb is idyllic. They
have the nice house, three great kids, a cat, and
a dog, and as Maddie calls it in her One
Woman show, she has a semi great career. Life just
kind of took over. I had been not really a
(06:37):
kid actress, but a young actress, you know, starting in
my teenage years, so I had been working. But when
I had my all these kids. My husband was a
very successful director and producer, and so he knew about
his jobs more in advance, and he was well compensated.
So I was very lucky to be able to say, well,
(06:58):
let me be home. Because he was a TV director,
his work was all encompassing. I mean the hours are
sometimes eighteen hour days. Sometimes he was out of town,
but even when he was in working in New York,
it was important to me that there be a point person,
you know, not just a point person, but that I
(07:19):
got to be there and go to the school events,
and go to the doctor's visits and be on the
book sale committee. And I loved it. And I missed
my career, but I was lucky enough to be able
to keep a toe in, you know, and do do
work here and there. And it was really busy. There
(07:41):
was and still is dogs and cats and and friends
and kids. And I find a lot of twin moms
are really organized, and it was like they were chosen
from above. I'm not so. I always felt like I
was forgetting and I did, you know, forget somebody's soccer
game or something. Um. And that is not to say
that my husband was checked out at all. He would
(08:04):
be around on the weekends and coaching the kids teams
and volunteering at the local churches and temples, doing Midnight Run,
which is bringing food to the homeless. And we were happy,
but certainly distracted. Our life was mainly about the kids,
and that was what we both chose, you know. That
(08:27):
was it was an unwritten agreement in our marriage, but
one that I think we both we're fine with, which
is they're going to take center stage and we are
going to work around that. It's an absorbing family life.
Years go by in a happy, busy blur. By the
summer of the twins have finished fifth grade, Mattie's daughter
(08:49):
is a teenager taking driver's Head, and Maddie had a
guest spot on a TV show. Everything as business as
usual until very early one morning at five am. Maddie
is driving to set when she received a phone call.
Her daughter is hysterical. On the other line. My daughter
was sixteen. I'd been a mom for sixteen years. I've
(09:12):
heard all kinds of screams and yells, and you just know,
as a mother, I was already a warrior. But I
knew the minute I heard the pitch of her scream
that this was different. And really bad. And already, when
you're sixteen year old calls you at five am, that's
not normal. But she was screaming and saying that the
(09:33):
police were in the house, and I couldn't. I couldn't
understand what she was saying. And I couldn't even comprehend
that police were in our house, let alone why they
were there. And I could also hear that my boys,
who were eleven at the time, were with her, and
they were I could hear them crying. And even right now,
(09:55):
I feel like my face is going to fall off
even just talking about this and remembering this moment, because
it was the moment that all of our lives changed forever.
This was the moment of discovery. And um, I told her,
I have to hang up and call Daddy and find
out what's going on. Just hold on, hold on, hold on.
(10:18):
And I didn't pull over like I I you know,
when I tell the story, people are like and then
you turned the car around. I didn't. I wish that
I could say I did, but I just kind of
kept driving to work. I somewhat left my body, but
kept driving and I called my husband, who didn't pick up,
and I called again and he picked up, and he
didn't even sound like my husband, my person, my partner,
(10:41):
my best friend. He sounded very formal and weird, and
he said the police are here. I said, yeah, I
know what what's going on? And he said, I can't
really talk right now. And I just couldn't understand or
imagine what was going on. I think that the police
said they want to talk to you, and someone got
(11:03):
on the phone and said we we're searching devices or
your husband's computer or something. And all I could think
was I need to get my kids out of that house.
I need my kids to not be there. And I
was close to Brooklyn at this point, which is not
close to my house. I called my daughter back and said,
hold on, I don't know what's happening. What's happening, and
(11:26):
I said, just hold tight, baby, hold on. And in
a very very strange I guess one could say stroke
of luck. My brother was staying. He doesn't normally live
in this house, but he was staying two doors down
from where our house was. And I'm very close with
my brother, and my brother is very close with my kids.
(11:48):
My brother and his amazing wife had just had their
first baby. I mean, she was maybe a week old,
maybe not even she was probably ten days old actually,
And I called him and said, you have to go
get my kids and bring them over to your house.
And of course he was going why, and I said,
I don't know, but you have to do that right now.
(12:09):
I can't talk to you. You have to go do it.
What was going through your mind in this discovery moment?
Nothing was going through my mind except I don't understand.
I don't understand. I don't understand. Were there are scenarios
that were running through your mind, like maybe it's tax evasion, yes,
or gambling or something. And then I believe I called
(12:34):
back my husband, and you know, I heard something about
they're saying they found some files that are illegal, and
and that was the first time my mind thought about
pornography maybe, And I still thought, well, that has to
be a mistake, even if that is what they found.
Looking back with the eyes that I have now, and
(12:57):
I've heard many many people's stories that are similar, different
but similar, I had no idea. I'm embarrassed still deciding
the lots of shame about lots of things. But pornography
was not a part of my marriage, and it was
not a thing where I had caught my husband multiple
(13:18):
times watching pornography. If you had said to me, do
you think your husband watches pornography? I would have said probably,
you know, when he's away. But like, it didn't even
occur to me that this was something which turned out
to be a very big issue for him. Mattie's father
also lives nearby in Westchester, and he takes Jace to
(13:41):
a lawyer and then drives him to Brooklyn. Maddie leaves
work early, citing a family emergency, and then she goes
to meet Jase on a street corner near the set.
It wasn't until I looked at his face and he
didn't even look like himself, and he looked away that
I realized this was not a mistake. I mean, obviously
(14:04):
it was a mistake that he viewed any kind of
child pornography, but it was not a mistake like, oh,
they got the wrong guys, something got the wrong guy,
or my kid accidentally downloaded something. Yeah. It's kind of
amazing in those moments, the way that in you know,
moments of a lot of trauma, the way the body
and the psyche kind of take over in some way
(14:26):
to protect us, Like you went on autopilot. You were
definitely just dissociated. You kept on driving, you were going
to go to work. I did my work. I mean,
I haven't ever watched that TV show, but I shot scenes. Yeah,
I shot two scenes in a completely altered state. And
you took care of your kids. You did what was
necessary to get your kids safe and out of the house.
(14:47):
But I just think that there's this way, and I
I'm familiar with it myself, and and I've heard it
in many stories where there's this kind of protection that
happens for a little it's you know, shocked is a
form of protection. Yeah, it's like a biological survival instinct.
Within about twenty six hours, the story becomes public. Maddie
(15:12):
and her family are not even given the opportunity to
have a secret or to reckon with it privately. What
ordinarily would be nobody's business is swiftly in the public sphere,
leaving the family unable to properly or quietly digest what
has happened. I was also worried about him. We didn't
know it was going to become public. It was as
(15:34):
we were sitting in a diner right after court, and
I was still digesting like I said, I hadn't even
really gotten what had happened and who he was and
what this is and is this a thing? And what?
And are my kids okay? Are they you know? Where
(15:55):
are they? Are they all right? Do I go to court?
Do I stay with them? Who are we telling? Um?
How is he going to go to work? And then
we're just sitting with these lawyers who are brand new
people in my life, talking about things I never thought
i'd talk about, like jail time for my husband and pornography,
and it's all swirling. And I looked down at my
(16:16):
phone because I'm constantly texting and calling my children, and there's,
you know, a banner alert, and it's on Facebook, it's
on USA Today, It's it's on the local patch you
know there, it's everywhere. So that opened up a whole
new way of having to deal with the crisis, which
was the press showed up at our house. I'm not
(16:38):
a famous person and neither is he, but we're well
known enough and this is salacious enough story that the
press was there, and that was another thing that I
had to keep my kids safe from. And I did
not want my husband to kill himself, so I made
him promise that he wouldn't kill himself. But I'll so
(17:00):
felt like I had to keep an eye on him
as well in those early days. And there's so many
layers of feelings that might seem like they would contradict
each other, but of course they don't. That that you're experiencing,
both in those early days and then for a long
time to come and perhaps even forever, like ten minutes ago. Yeah. Absolutely,
(17:25):
But in the early days it wasn't what I would
I think had I written this story and not lived it,
I would have said, well, no, you would have been
feeling that. And when I started writing my story and
we did it as a play, my brilliant producer Darryl Roth, said, well,
it's not really believable that you got up and went
(17:46):
to work the next day. I was like, I know,
but I did, you know, because I thought it would
be a secret and I had to finish my job,
and I had a little part of me that also went, um,
I'm probably going to have to be the breadwinner. There
was just that's what I did. And the anger that
I felt didn't come when I thought it would come,
and the all of that. It was so it was
(18:09):
such a crisis and such a catastrophe trauma. I wasn't
thinking about all the things one should probably even think.
You know, that all came later and continues to come.
There are real victims of I want to be really
clear that I understand that I was traumatized, my kids
were traumatized, but that does not take anything away from
(18:32):
the children that are traumatized in this kind of pornography.
That was not at the forefront of my mind in
that moment that came later, like well, what does this
mean to me as a woman? Was it? What does
it mean? Are my kids safe? There were just so
many things, but it was an emergency in the beginning,
and even even in the following weeks and months. You know,
(18:57):
kids and dogs and cats don't stop having me needs
because there's a crisis, And so I was trying to
process a lot of things at the same time that
there was, you know, a wisdom teeth removal and kids
starting school, and bills that needed to be paid and
all these things. In the beginning, it was just what's
(19:19):
right in front of me, and how can I make
sure we get through today. We'll be right back in
the midst of all this. Jase loses a number of jobs.
(19:42):
In the midst of all this, friends come forward, so
I'm saying absolutely the right thing, and others not so much.
And in the midst of all this, someone important appears
in Maddie's life, someone she considers to be an angel.
I'm not a big fan of the New York post
(20:03):
um nor what they've written about uh me and many
other people, but I believe that she saw the story.
And we have a mutual friend. I don't say her
name because she's very famous and because that's her story
to tell. But somehow she contacted this mutual friend and said,
(20:23):
I think you know the wife. And she had her
own version of this, nothing to do with this particular
acting out, but her husband was a sex addict, and
she recognized some kind of addiction that I didn't even
know was something we were talking about. But whatever it was,
she had the compassion and the experience to read a story,
(20:46):
a headline and say, there's a family behind that headline,
there's some people in real trouble, some people who are
really hurting and scared and lonely and afraid. And she
contacted me, and I was being contacted by everyone under
the sun, and I didn't really want to talk to anyone,
(21:10):
but something in me had a feeling. And I didn't
know her story, but something in me had a feeling
that I should take that call and speaking to a
stranger but who had some experience, strength and hope around
what I was going through. It did save my life.
I'm not being hyperbolic. It absolutely saved my life. It
(21:33):
was just so complicated and it was so lonely and
so terrifying, and to just have someone go it's going
to be okay. I kept saying, no, no, no, but
my story is different. I'm telling you it's going to
be okay, and your kids are going to be okay,
and maybe even your husband's going to be okay. And
just hearing those words would have been enough, but she
(21:57):
went beyond that, and she gave me names of people
to call, and she was just there for me in
a way that I don't know how that happened, but
she was my angel. And it's amazing the way that
within some of the most difficult stories there are these
beautiful stories or these kernels of light and just miracles, really,
(22:19):
and that's certainly just seemed like one Jas goes to
rehab in Arizona for forty five days, the first two
weeks of which he and Maddie are not allowed to
speak while he's away. The fallout continues, and a sort
of public excommunication occurs. He's fired at the kids soccer coach,
(22:40):
removed from his position at the Director's Guild, and their
names are removed in quick succession from several charities and boards.
At that time, you lived in a relatively small town,
you don't like, very very small suburban town where everyone
knows everything, which is incredibly comforting and then incredibly horrible
(23:00):
depending on what's going on. So what role did at
that point did shame play in all of that? Um?
Did you find yourself, you know, just sort of hiding
or feeling like you didn't want to talk to people,
you didn't want to deal. Oh? Absolutely, the shame was crushing,
is the only word that comes to mind. Absolutely crushing
(23:23):
in the moments that I had time to feel it,
you know, in some ways I just had to keep
going with life. But when I had a moment or
saw someone or made eye contact, yes, the shame was
absolutely staggering. And I had been not even aware of
how much I cared about what other people thought it
(23:45):
was incredibly humbling to be publicly humiliated, and also, what
is mine and what is my partners? Where is my
part in that? Why am I ashamed of something that
I didn't do? Butt? How do I not wear this?
And how do I process it privately when everyone's talking
(24:07):
about it, looking at it, asking me, are you staying together?
Are you breaking up? You know what's going to happen?
Is he going to jail? You know? I was not
prepared for this. I had been married to this man
for almost twenty years, and what I hadn't noticed along
the way was how much of my identity had become
(24:27):
wrapped up in being his wife and being this family
that we were. And I had lost a lot of
myself And so now who am I? And what am I?
And I was very proud of my marriage. My marriage
looking back had certainly started to fray, and there were certainly,
(24:48):
now that I can look back, there were some signs
that things weren't so well, and my husband had gotten
progressively more irritable and depressed and distant and romantic. Only
things were off, but we were so great and we
are the actress and the director who aren't in Hollywood
we're making it work, and we're still coaching the kids
(25:11):
teams and look, and I was proud of that. I
was proud of that part of my identity. We can
we can give you marriage advice. Look at us, We
got it and and we're messy. By the way. I
wasn't even trying to pretend to be perfect. I just
thought we had something that we actually now I know
we did have. But there was a big, big secret
(25:31):
that was there that I didn't see. And so for
everyone to see that secret at the same time that
I was seeing it was incredibly shameful. And I also
I was trying to navigate this without letting my kids
feel that, but also wanting them to feel their own feelings.
(25:53):
And I still feel this way, which is, you know,
renn A Brown says it way better than I do.
But it's okay to care about what some people think
the people you love very much. But if you spend
your time caring about what every single person thinks, you'll
never get out of bed. Mattie has asked at one
point to come out to Arizona for family Week at
(26:14):
the rehabilitation center. She really really does not want to
do this, but with the help of her daughter, her therapist,
and her angel, she eventually decides to go. You learn
while you're there that porn can be as addictive as
crystal meth, that you know what it actually does to
(26:34):
the brain, and that addicts are not bad people, they're
sick people. And and that really is something that in
getting over your resistance to going to family Week and
going there and hating it and at the same time,
you know, going through all of the waves of feelings. Um, oh,
thank god I went. And you know, it was my
(26:57):
daughter who actually got me there. My therapist who is
Goddess who specializes I had switched therapists because also my
wonderful therapist I had been seeing It's just a lot
of people aren't versed in this, and it's so scary
and and I really needed someone who it was not
going to be shocking. I needed to not absorb anyone
(27:20):
else's shame just to get to being moderately okay. And
my therapist was great and actually had trained at and
had worked at this place Gentle Path in Wickenburg, which
is part of the meadows where my husband went, and
so she was just great and she said, you have
to go, and my Angel said you absolutely have to go.
It's where her husband had gone and it saved his
(27:42):
life at family Week, saved her life, and you have
to go. And I said no. But then my daughter,
who was sixteen at the time and not thrilled with
any of this, said to me, well, Mom, didn't you
take a vow to love dad and sickness and in health?
And I said yes, and she said, well dad's sick
(28:05):
and she was so clear and clean about it, and
I thought, yeah, okay, I'll go. And I'm really it was.
It was a life changing experience. And the women that
I met in Wickenburg, the other partners wives, were so
incredible and continue to be my sisters. And I would
(28:29):
never have had that. I mean, I feel incredibly Again
it's weird to say lucky around this, but I know
that I am privileged that we I mean, we just
didn't even think about how much it would cost, and
it is incredibly expensive. But at the time it was
like the ship was sinking, just whatever. But to be
around other people who were going through something similar again
(28:52):
very different, acting out behaviors, but just looking at each
other going what and learning that almost every one who's
married to sex addict finds out about it in a
really shocking way. It's not usually like, hey, there's something
I want to tell you. It's usually a big, dark, deep,
shameful secret that comes out in a really messy, horrible,
(29:16):
catastrophic way. At least people who wind up at this
place nobody's there because they're having a little bit of
a bad day. You also describe, you know, these broken
husbands who are there, and it's kind of the beginning
of your getting in touch with your own compassion, because
(29:36):
these are not trolls. These are decent human beings who
have done things that are awful, but it doesn't make
them awful and good men by the way, rabbis, doctors, musicians, sons, fathers,
and men um that I did spend incredibly authentic intimate
(29:58):
moments with intimate meaning people were pouring their souls out
and telling their stories, and I could barely look at
my own partner, but seeing these men and seeing how
deeply sorry they were for the hurt that they had caused,
(30:18):
and seeing that they were smart and funny and kind
and just decent, which is not what I You know,
the story that we're told that we hear about the
names we hear, you know, perverts, sex addicts, sex offenders.
You know, this is not the men that I saw,
(30:40):
were not the image that I had, And it was
the beginning of my ability to feel compassion. The combination
of me being able to witness other people and also
hearing from people who could say I too, went to
a place I never dreamed I would go in the
(31:00):
throes of a of a really gripping addiction, helped me
have a glimmer of an idea that this was the
person who I loved, whose brain had been hijacked. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Mattie
(31:33):
returns home, and soon Jason will too. Parameters are set.
He will sleep in the guest room, and there will
be one computer in the house filters on all the devices.
It's a tenuous time for them all, but also bolstered
by incredible bits of generosity and wisdom. As one of
their sons says, it's intense to love someone so much
(31:57):
and also be really, really out at them. So Jason's
back home, You're experiencing all of these different waves of feelings.
You know, you're you're shopping at St. Leonards, the famous
supermarket that's both in Westchester and in Connecticut for Halloween items.
And suddenly it occurs to you, maybe it's not okay
(32:19):
for us to decorate our house for Halloween. Um, maybe
people won't come and trick or treat at our house.
And there's this really powerful sense of mourning the loss
of the way things were, you know, the grief for
that life that would never be the same as it
(32:40):
was before that phone call that morning. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And no matter what, if I choose to stay with
this person, there will be a very big loss of
the life that I have known and that we have known.
And if I leave this person, there will also be
a very big loss. Right, So there's going to be lost,
(33:01):
there's no getting around it. And there's only so much
I can do to protect my kids from that. You know,
there's some part of me still that is so resistant
to change, and and I project that onto my kids, like,
oh no, but what if we have to move? That
will be so upsetting, you know. And it's like I
(33:22):
never think about the good things that might come from that.
I just don't want them to have to absorb any
more trauma. And change to me sometimes means trauma and loss. Eventually,
Jason moves out of the guest room and back into
the master bedroom. Things improve, not in some sort of cinematic,
(33:44):
smooth narrative arc, but rather it fits and starts. One morning,
Maddie wakes up in a profound state of rage, and
this moment marks a turning point. Jason has apologized before,
but this time he exp us as his full empathy
and awareness of what he's done to her in all this.
(34:05):
Shortly after this powerful moment, Maddie decides she wants to
acknowledge that while this is not the same marriage it
used to be, it's still a marriage. She hadn't been
wearing her wedding ring for some time, and now she
wants a new one. They go to Soho and wander
through jewelry stores, but nothing feels right. They're about to
(34:25):
let it go and head home when Maddie stops to
look at a street vendor who has jewelry on display.
Something about this person seems magical. He asks her what
she's looking for. I said, um, I want something unique
and beautiful and delicate but strong, nothing like he probably had,
(34:48):
I mean mostly had, like peace sign rings and you
know Kitty cat rings, and and he said hold on,
and he reached under not on the main tray where
everything was, this little kind of secret drawer, and he
took out this ring and it was so beautiful and
it was unique and delicate but strong, and it had
(35:08):
a kind of a scarlet stone. And I have freakishly
tiny hands, I really do, um especially my fingers, and
I've never had a ring that I haven't had to
get sized down, especially from my wedding finger. I think
it's one of other than my pinky, the smallest one.
And I popped this ring on and it fit perfectly
(35:32):
and I loved it. Yea. My husband was so excited
because we had gone to a bunch of shops and
nothing was right and things were too expensive and didn't
fit and and he said great, and he went to
pay for it, and I said hold on, and I
took out my wallet and paid with my money. And
not that that maybe was more symbolic than anything, because
(35:53):
it's not like at that point we had separated our
bank accounts. But it was important to me to get
myself a ring. I made a choice to be married.
I made a choice to stay for the time being,
at least at that moment with my family and try
to put this family back together. And I wanted a
symbol of that, but I wanted to get it. Yeah,
that's beautiful. When there's a betrayal in a marriage, when
(36:19):
there's a secret that one person knows and the other doesn't,
there's a part of history that is stolen, at least
from me. And until recently, I couldn't even look at
my wedding photos or beautiful moments over the twenty years
we had together because I felt like I was the chump,
(36:39):
you know, like I didn't know what was really going
on there. That's changed a bit, i will say, in
present day, but at that time, there were songs that
I always loved that I couldn't listen to. There was
jewelry that meant so much to me that I had
to put away, and that was just such a loss.
And I don't mean to belittle other parts of grief
(37:01):
and loss in betrayal, but there is something that the
partner who's betrayed really never gets back because you're still
putting the story together, whereas the other person knows the
full story. And you know, my husband to this day,
I'll look at a photo and say oh, that was
just such a beautiful happy day. And I'll say, but
(37:23):
I don't know, I don't really know. He'll say, no,
it was, and I but you know, there's just that
feeling of there was something going on that I didn't know.
At Jase's hearing, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to
ten years of probation. It's a huge relief that he
(37:43):
won't serve jail time. But despite the legal proceedings being over,
there is and perhaps always will be, continue to fallout,
and he had to register as a sex offender. Yes
he did, he does, he is. I guess I'm thinking
about marriage and partnership and intimacy and what it means
(38:09):
two like sort of reach a new place, hard hard
one and ongoing, but one in which there is the
true intimacy. Early in your play, you say something like
I entered the marriage with little secrets, you know, the
(38:30):
occasional cigarette, a little botox, you know, my secret meditation mantra.
But Jason entered the marriage with a big secret, and
that was obviously something that was there and which you've
had to revise in a certain way those those twenty years.
With the fact that he knew his secret and you
(38:50):
did not, but now you do. And what does that
do for the sense of connection and closeness and intimacy. Well,
I've heard it said, and I believe that the opposite
of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. And when someone's
(39:11):
in their addiction of any kind, there's no real chance
for intimacy. So I was in a marriage. I want
to also be clear that again I say this that
I can't tell my husband's story. That's for him to tell,
but I will say that Jason's pornography addiction did not
start where it ended, you know. That's that's like the end.
(39:36):
The illegal pornography was a very late stage, part of
the end of a long of a drug, you know,
where you need more and darker to get your high,
I suppose. But yes, pornography was a part of my
marriage that I didn't know. And now I am with
(39:56):
someone who not only do I know the worst thing
they've ever done, everyone knows the worst thing he's ever done.
And as much as that is shameful, it is incredibly
freeing because if you're that person and people still love you,
I mean, what that can do is pretty astonishing. So
we don't have secrets anymore. So there is a level
(40:19):
of intimacy that I didn't know existed that I now
have now Danny. That is not to say that if
I say to him one day, hey babe, I need
blueberries as part of you know, you're going to do
the food shopping and he comes back and forgets the blueberries,
that I don't have a moment of going you don't
(40:40):
listen to me. You're keeping secrets. What's going on? You know?
This is not to say everything is latti dati da.
I am very very attuned and afraid of any kind
of lie or secret. But I also see the person
that I fell in love with who started to fade
away through the years, and I see more than that.
(41:04):
So I don't wish this on anyone. He has done
a lot of work and is well aware of the
victims of that kind of pornography and the hurt that
he has caused so many people, and he is fully
(41:26):
honest in his life, and so to have that partner
is great. I mean, it's a weird thing to say,
but it's great, and it's deep and it's real, and
it's sometimes incredibly exhausting, and I try to match it
(41:47):
with my own work and my own program and my
own honesty. Like I said, I'm really not a person
who kept too many secrets. Quite the opposite. I tend
to lead with telling you the worst thing about me
so I can get ahead of it. But this stuff
goes to another level. I've learned a lot about shame
and things. Anything that has to do with sex and
(42:10):
sexuality can just be really deeply buried, and I've I've
had to look at my own past and things that
I had to look at. I didn't understand at first
why my husband wouldn't just tell me I'm struggling with
this or I was abused as a you know, I
had some abuse as a as a boy, like I'm me,
(42:33):
But there's something that shame does. I really have come
to believe that secrets keep us sick, and that the
shame just perpetuates this, and that if we don't talk
about it, it'll just keep happening. I think if you
ever interviewed Jace, he would say he planned to stop
doing this and go to his grave with that secret.
(42:55):
He did not want to ever tell anyone that he
was looking at pornography, let alone illegal pornography, ever, and
he didn't tell his therapist, you know. And and if
someone believes that maybe they could talk about it and
not be thrown out of society and not be thrown
(43:15):
out of their marriage, maybe we can actually get somewhere
and get some help and not have this huge industry.
I mean, pornography is everywhere, and nobody's talking about it. Well,
I mean not nobody, but I feel like we're not
talking about it. I have three children. They've gone to
sex ed in various schools, temples, churches, and it is
(43:38):
really under disgust, which again is like, oh, it's shameful,
it's secret, but it's there. I have now told this
story publicly partly because it was already out there, but
I wanted people to know the nuance a little bit.
And the number of women and men who have shared
their stories with me, including people I know well who
(44:01):
I had no idea there were certain secrets going on.
I'm happy to be in a family and I include
my kids in this where we can lay it all
out on the table. There's not much that we don't
talk about. And seeing that their dad fell down so
hard and we as a family allowed him to get
back up, I hope is a lesson in saying, you
(44:25):
don't have to keep things secret. We can help, there's recovery,
there's hope. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.
(45:10):
Molly Zachor is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
(45:32):
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance m h.
(46:09):
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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