DAVID: No one's ever asked
how did that impact you?
How did you feel? How are you doing now?
I'm only 30 years old, and I'm wearing a heart monitor,
because of chest pains that I've had
for a number of years now due to probably the stress of all
of this more than anything.
I'm supposed to push a button on it whenever I feel stressed,
and I've been pushing it a lot lately.
I've had nightmares ever since I was a little kid.
Usually, the dreams are Scott hunting me or all of us,
me and my mother and my two sisters.
I end up dying, and that's what wakes me up.
I refer to him as Scott.
Sometimes I slip up and say "my father,"
but I don't ever see him as that.
He was the worst thing in my life.
JESSICA: I wish that I could take away
things that David has seen.
I think as the oldest sibling,
I have a lot of things that I wish that I could bear
the burden instead of them having to.
Just knowing that he was there
and had to deal with that kind of fear.
Um...
I'll never know what that's like,
and I hate knowing that he sees it all the time.
I know I couldn't take it away from him,
but sometimes I wish I could at least share in it,
because I just -- it just breaks my heart.
[exhales heavily]
DAVID: Every morning, my mom would make me a cup of coffee,
and we'd sit out on the couch,
drinking our coffee together, and just...
just fantasize about the many ways he could die
while he was out running an errand.
What if while he was out,
he got into a crazy accident and just never came home?
And every once in a while, you know,
I'll be sitting on my porch having a cup of coffee,
and I'll think about that.
If I was talking to someone in the exact same situation,
I'd say, "Kill him."
Nobody's gonna come and help you.
And if you want to survive,
if you want your loved ones to survive,
you can't hesitate.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is a picture of Scott and my mom on their wedding night.
That was the November after I was born -- at this point,
mom already had Jessica through an earlier marriage
that had fallen apart.
From what I've been told when they met, you know,
he was a gentleman, the kind of guy who would
give you the shirt off his back,
and you wonder what happened to that fun-sounding guy.
My mom had to have been happy at one point.
She wouldn't have stayed with him,
wouldn't have married him if she wasn't,
but it's hard
to imagine them ever happy.
Maybe there's some decency there,
but I never got to see it in person.
I've only heard stories.
So this is a photo of myself and Scott at their wedding.
I hate looking at pictures of Scott.
I hate looking at his eyes. It makes me uncomfortable.
I do look happy in this photo.
This is before everything just went off the rails.
I had no idea what was to come.
Looking back now, this is a lie.
This is -- this is a sham.
I never felt genuine love from him.
I think that I was a pawn, a means to an end.
It's weird to look at it and kind of think, like, you know,
like, what could have been -- if things had just turned out
differently, then this photo
would have an entirely different meaning to me.
Coercive control is a form of
abuse that does not leave any marks.
It's tactics that include intimidation,
humiliation, isolation,
financial control.
It changes you as a person.
It makes you doubt yourself.
When we first moved, I was excited,
but there were rules about everything.
I really love this color.
I don't know if it'll be my color.
-Daddy will tell me. -SCOTT: We'll see.
Put it up to you.
How we did things, how we said things,
where we went, who we spoke to.
Hey, what do you think you're doing?
JESSICA: On the surface, wiping your feet,
the way we wash our hands, that all sounds normal.
But jewelry couldn't be worn in
the house, because we might scratch a countertop.
You couldn't sit on the floor if you were
wearing jeans, because the rivets might scratch
the hardwood floor.
The rule that we had on Monday
might not be the same rule Wednesday.
Why did we have the rule? We didn't know.
He had complete control over myself,
my brother, my sister, my mom.
Take 'em off.
JESSICA: And there were consequences
if you didn't do things his way.
Scott would not allow my mom to wear makeup.
She wasn't allowed to paint her nails or dye her hair,
but one day, I came home, and my mom was wearing not only makeup
but purple eyeshadow.
Mom?
-JESSICA: I was like, what? -Jessica.
-What is this? -How was school?
What are you wearing?
JESSICA: And I was asking her, like, why --
why are you wearing this?
I thought you weren't supposed to?
And she wouldn't really give me, like, a straight answer.
Don't you worry about it.
JESSICA: Just trying to push it off
like it wasn't a big deal, and I'm a very persistent person.
And I kept asking her, "Why now? Why this color?
What was special about today?"
And, like, looking closer, it just dawned on me
that it was...
to cover up bruises.
-Can I see? -Jessica, sweetie.
JESSICA: My mom never had to actually tell me that
that was why she had the makeup on.
Why don't you go get cleaned up?
JESSICA: But I knew.
There was just, like, a -- like a sadness in her eyes.
Like, she didn't have to tell me.
You know how Scott gets.
JESSICA: I think in that moment was when I realized that things
had escalated beyond just the yelling and the rules.
I realized that there was physical violence
going on, as well.
So one thing that I noticed about Scott was,
he seemed to get more controlling,
a little crazier, as time went on.
David being born.
Emily being born, everything seemed to push him
a little further, and as that took place,
he seemed to feel the need to control more and more things
and more and more people around him.
JENNIFER: Come on. Say something!
Shut it off.
JESSICA: There was a lot more slammed doors
and a lot more hearing things were happening.
One time, we were in the playroom, and my mom
was outside,
and we hear him slam the garage door
and scream her name.
AS SCOTT: Are you stupid?
How many times do I have to tell you?
JESSICA: And we could just hear yelling,
and then I just heard this banging.
And, of course, we're scared.
We had no idea what it was.
We knew it wasn't good,
but we didn't know exactly what was going on.
AS SCOTT: Use the other shovel!
Eventually, later on, she came into the playroom.
Hey, guys.
And I just kept asking her what it was.
What was noise before?
JESSICA: And she didn't want to answer me.
She wanted me to just leave it alone, let it go.
And eventually, she told me that the sound that we heard
was him slamming her head against the garage door.
I should have known better.
JESSICA: Scott had rules about which shovels were used where,
and she was using the wrong shovel.
And then, because he did that,
she kind of, like, fell on the floor, and then he beat her
more, because she got dirty from falling on the garage floor.
But Scott was really good at not leaving a lot of marks.
The time that she wore the makeup was, like,
an exception to the rule.
Other injuries were more punching in the ribs,
kicking in the ribs.
Typically, there weren't a lot of marks.
I just remember being very afraid,
not understanding why something like that would
happen, feeling like I wish that I could protect her,
but I knew that I couldn't.
We're gonna figure everything out.
JESSICA: So many people, after everything happened,
were like, "Why didn't you just tell us?"
We didn't feel like we could tell anyone.
That felt more dangerous, because he told my mom
that if she ever tried to leave him, that he would
find her, and he would kill her.
But he would kill me first and make her watch.
Her overall appearance was just defeated.
You could see the stress, you could see the anxiety,
you could see the fear.
She was never at ease.
She just always seemed...
scared.
DAVID: The frequency grew over time to the point where
if we tracked a grain of sand into the house,
he'd beat our mom.
If he thought we turned the light switch on
too forcefully, he'd beat our mom.
Emily, Jessica, and I would all cower
in the playroom and know that
we couldn't do anything.
There was one time in particular,
Jessica was away for the weekend,
so it was just me and Emily in the playroom.
He comes stomping down the hall,
tells us he'll cave our heads in with baseball bats
if we make a noise.
He doesn't want to hear a [bleep] sound out of
this [bleep] room, slams the door,
stomps back down the hall,
and starts beating our mother.
AS SCOTT: How many times do I have to tell you,
shut the hell up?
[As Jennifer sobbing]
And we can hear the screaming,
we can hear the hitting -- the impacts reverberated through
the house, but...
you know, the next thing I knew...
she was calling out for me,
AS JENNIFER: David!
and she had never done that before.
She must have been thinking that
that was the moment that she was gonna die.
[As Jennifer screaming]
When I heard her call out for me,
it was almost like instinct took over, you know,
I didn't even think about the ramifications
of pissing him off by going down there and defying him.
I ran down the hall to
the kitchen, and as I came around the corner,
she was on the floor in the fetal position,
and he had clearly been kicking her in the rib.
He looked over and saw me, and he
had that look of the beast in his eye.
When he was in that kind of a mindset,
there was a look in his eye that was just this primal rage.
I don't believe in demonic possession,
but if I did, that would be it.
When you saw that look, you just knew
he is just out for blood.
I ran back down the hallway towards the playroom,
and he caught up with me by the time I got to the door
and picked me up by the collar of my shirt
and threw me into the playroom.
He closed the door, went back
down the hall, and the beating stopped.
I started thinking about how I could kill him
to save us all,
even if it meant I spent the rest of my life in jail.
I thought of sneaking into his room
and hiding under the bed until
he fell asleep and coming out with a kitchen knife
and stabbing him.
I remember very distinctly that night looking
at myself in the mirror and seeing
this scrawny 10-year-old
who couldn't protect his mom
and realizing that I needed to start preparing for when
the day came that I needed to fight him.
Every night before bed,
I would do a couple hundred pushups,
a couple hundred situps,
but I didn't realize that the last fight
wasn't going to be a fistfight and that he would bring a gun.
DAVID: Hi, daddy. Hi, Jess.
Scott was my stepfather,
and I felt like he used that to his benefit.
When I was supposed to be listening to what he said,
he was my father.
When it came to him trying to explain why it would be okay to
have a sexual relationship with me,
he was my stepfather.
It kind of started innocently enough.
I was about 18, and one morning, Emily was in
bed with Scott, cuddling, and he wanted me to join.
But then it turned into just me,
and then just me with the door closed,
and then wanting me to wear less clothes
and him to wear less clothes.
Then it became Scott sending my mom to come get me.
I feel like that's probably one
of the cruelest things that he did.
I remember her coming in in the morning
to get me -- she's like, you know,
"Daddy wants you to come snuggle," and I would be like,
"I don't want to go in there, I don't want to."
And she'd say, "I know."
Her face was one of sadness,
but I still had to go.
And am I mad at her about it?
Of course. Do I blame her a little bit?
Yes, but I understand,
and a lot of people don't.
They say that she was complicit, that she didn't care,
and she was serving me up to him on a platter.
That's not what happened
At that time, compliance was our only option.
No one liked it, but there wasn't a choice.
If I said no, he'd be upset,
and I didn't want anything to happen to my mom.
So I said yes.
Even though I was in college when this was going on,
and I had a car, and I had the means to leave,
I couldn't -- I couldn't leave my mother behind.
I couldn't leave my siblings behind.
I would try to make excuses. I have to go to the bathroom.
My stomach hurts. I'm hungry. I think I hear David.
David knew what was going on, and he
knew I didn't want to go in there.
DAVID: I don't remember Jessica ever telling me
what Scott was doing to her.
It was apparent to me that
something was happening behind closed doors, and it
was less common if I was actively around Jessica.
I think he was afraid of me figuring it out.
So if I stayed awake and didn't go to bed,
it was less likely that he would call her into his room.
I realized I needed to stay awake,
until sometimes up to one at night,
just to listen.
You know, it's something that sticks with me to this day.
Takes me a couple hours to fall asleep at night,
and I wake up throughout the night most nights.
When I was in college, I would just come home on weekends.
Every time I was leaving to go back to school, I had to leave
him a note, basically,
just thanking him for being such a wonderful stepfather,
for all the things that he does for me.
I'll miss you.
Um, you know, see you next weekend kind of a thing.
[sighs]
And I remember standing at the island in the kitchen,
just, like, not even knowing what to write anymore,
because I'm like, what else can I say?
I hated him.
He was a terrible person that made our lives hell.
And I still had to write him this, like, sicky sweet note
like we were the Waltons.
But I did it, because I knew if he woke up and it wasn't there,
what kind of day was that gonna be for my mom?
It was like another thing I felt like I needed to do to try
to ensure things would go smoothly for my --
my family in my absence.
I had no idea that Scott was saving them, dating them.
After everything happened, Scott actually used them, um, in
court as a tactic, like, "Oh,
"if I had done all these things to her,
"if I treated her this way, if she was so afraid of me,
why would she leave me all these nice notes?"
These are
the notes that Scott made me write for him.
This one is particularly upsetting.
It says, "Good morning, daddio.
"I hope you slept well.
"It was nice spending time with you last night.
"I hope you have a good week. I love you.
See you Friday. Love, Buddha."
And that was because I was self-conscious about my weight.
So "Buddha belly," you know?
He was just -- all of this was humorous to him.
I didn't mean a word of it,
but I did it for my mom.
I was honestly embarrassed when this was
something that he used in court to say,
you know, how could these things be true
when she wrote me these notes? I felt foolish.
I felt, like, how can I back up what
I'm saying when he has this thing in my handwriting.
I didn't think that my mom had it in her
for us to escape the way that we did,
and I certainly don't think that Scott thought that
my mom had it in her to do that.
So, on the morning of April 14, 2007,
our microwave stopped working.
AS SCOTT: Damn it!
JESSICA: This set him off.
Are you kidding me? Again!
I'm sure I was making
a facial expression that he didn't find compliant.
What the hell was that?
And he just came over and, like,
open hand just slapped me across the face.
And that had never really happened before.
And as he was, like, kind of yelling at us, yelling at me,
my mom was mouthing to us, like, over his shoulder
that we were gonna leave.
We could see her saying, like...
[mouthing words]
DAVID: According to my mom, that was the breaking moment.
[breathing shakily]
Are you okay?
The level of physical violence directed
at one of the kids.
We're leaving...tonight.
DAVID: Most days, Scott had this ritual that he took
these very weirdly long showers that lasted
around two hours.
Our mom said, "Tonight, when he takes a shower,
we're gonna leave."
There was a lot of disbelief,
but there was definitely a cautious optimism
of we could actually do this.
It started to get pretty late.
We thought it wasn't gonna happen.
And then a little bit later than
he normally would take his nightly shower,
we heard the water go on, and it was go-time.
Everything from that moment on was just...
on the seat of our pants -- we're gonna need
toothbrushes, pillows,
a couple days worth of clothes,
and we don't have suitcases, what do we do?
And we were just like, garbage bags.
Me and Jessica started going
through the house, opening drawers, not even
looking, dumping stuff in.
I think mom was looking for
things like our Social Security cards,
you know, um, birth certificates, like things like
that, important things that she would need.
It felt surreal.
I wasn't quite sure we were gonna be able to pull it off.
Was he gonna catch us?
And then what? What's gonna happen?
Is this when he's gonna finally actually kill all of us?
-[water stops] -[breathing shakily]
All of this was a big risk, because his bathroom had
a window on the driveway,
so we had to make sure we were as quiet as possible.
We piled everybody in the van, put it in neutral, and rolled
down the driveway as far as
possible away from the house before turning the engine on,
drove a few towns over to a random, dinky little motel,
which was both exhilarating and absolutely terrifying.
Every time we heard somebody walking down the hall or heard
the ice machine or heard the wind blow,
we thought it was him.
JESSICA: We were too afraid to be separated.
We had to stay together as a unit, and no one
would take us except for a shelter in California.
While we were gone in California, unbeknownst to us,
he started to put some plans
that we weren't even aware of, um,
into action.
No, of course not.
No, I would never do anything like that.
DAVID: We attempted to check our bank accounts,
and he had drained everything from our mother's account.
No, no, we're not going back. We can't.
We found out around that time that he had put out
an Amber Alert for us, that we were missing,
and then he hired a lawyer and filed for custody
of us saying that our mother had kidnapped us.
The court date came and went, and my mom didn't know
about it -- Scott won.
I understand.
Mom, is everything all right?
We were going to have to return to the state
of Connecticut for her to hand the kids over to Scott.
I think she was terrified, not only to go back, but at
the thought of having to hand David and Emily over to him.
We had no idea what we were gonna be facing.
What if we just kept going?
DAVID: We floated the idea of running away and kind of going
off grid, but we ended up deciding against that,
because not only would we have
to live in fear of him, looking over our
shoulders for the rest of our lives,
but that would also mean that anytime we saw a police officer,
we would be worried that they were there
to arrest our mom and take us all back by force.
AS DAVID: So what do we do?
What if we just tell the police?
So we decided that the only option that
we had was to fight it in court.
JESSICA: One of the first things that we did was
go to the Plymouth Police Department,
file official reports there.
we reported the physical violence, the sexual abuse,
all of that.
DAVID: We did get the restraining order,
and in the end, he was forced to move out.
Our plan in coming back to Connecticut was
always for it to be a temporary situation.
As soon as we were not required to be there,
we intended to leave.
We felt that we would send Jessica out early to
get a job, to start setting up a life for us.
We would follow as soon as we could.
And it was sad, you know, but I was like,
oh, you know, I'm gonna see them soon.
There's just, like, a little bit more to do and, you know,
then we'll all be together again.
So I headed back,
and my mom and my brother
and sister were staying at a friend's house.
It was emotional to be separated from them,
but I didn't anticipate what happened next.
DAVID: On August 22nd, we decided that we would go take
a few of our belongings back to our friend's house.
It appeared that Scott had moved out of the house.
That night, we left,
and when we left, we left all the lights on
and all of the windows open.
On August 23rd, we went back to
the house to pick up a few more things.
When we arrived, all of the blinds
were shut, and all the lights were off.
So clearly somebody had been up there.
We called the local police, and they searched
all of our rooms upstairs,
the attic, the loft, the garage.
But our grandmother, Mary Lou, lived on
the ground floor of a separate in-law apartment.
After they searched our portion of the house,
they went to the in-law apartment, and she opened it
a crack, and they asked if they
could search the unit, and she said that it was her private
property and that they would need a warrant.
They decided not to pursue it.
We didn't know at that point that Scott was hidden somewhere
within Mary Lou's apartment,
but at one point during the search,
they missed two key items that
should have been a major red flag
that there was somebody in the building.
In one of the kitchen cabinets
was a baby monitor.
While the police were searching the house,
Scott was hidden somewhere within Mary Lou's apartment,
listening to our conversations.
And also, there was a note next to the telephone
that had not been there on the first day
that said that the telephone line was no longer in service.
We had kind of gathered the supplies that we wanted,
and my mom just wanted to do some more cleaning.
So I went next door to play video games
with my old friend, and around 10 p.m.,
we got a call at my neighbor's house.
It was my mom telling me that it was
getting late, and it was time to come home.
My friend walked me back to the front door,
and I distinctly remember locking the front door
behind me,
and I turned around, and I remember seeing just
a gun come past the door of the kitchen,
and at first, I thought it's a sick joke, until
I saw Scott follow the gun.
I saw that look in his eye that he
always got when he was about to be violent.
Right on his heels was his mother, saying,
"Scott, don't do it.
Don't do it now, we're gonna settle in court, don't do this."
And he went over and grabbed my mom by the hair and said,
"If anybody calls the cops, I'll [bleep] shoot you,"
and slammed her head onto the counter,
and she just kept saying, "Scott, don't do this.
Not in front of the children."
Ever since the day we ran away,
I started to carry a pocket knife on me.
I unfurled the pocket and tried to brace myself
to stab him.
If I could go back and talk to myself,
August 23rd at 9 p.m.,
I would tell myself, you know,
"In an hour, you have to kill Scott.
You can't hesitate."
And knowing what I know,
I don't think I would have let that moment pass.
But I thought, I can't kill someone.
And in that moment, he turned around,
and I lost the opportunity.
He turned the gun on me and said,
"Don't think about it," and dragged her out
and down the stairs by her hair.
I ran to the phone in the kitchen
and tried dialing 911,
I think three times, before I realized that
there was just no sound on the phone,
and that's when I noticed the new note that
hadn't been there the day before in his handwriting
that said that the phone had been disconnected.
As soon as I noticed that, I just dropped it
and ran for the stairs, and I heard a gunshot,
and everything went black.
I was told he shot the gun I think five times,
but I only remember one.
Everything after that was a blur.
When he shot her,
she had fallen down the stairs,
and her head was close to the bottom.
Her feet were halfway up the stairs,
and...
there was blood everywhere.
There was brain matter everywhere.
I listened for a heartbeat, and there was none.
Half of her face was gone,
and just...
ground up.
Scott jumped in one of the vehicles
and peeled out of the driveway, and the police arrived.
They started taking statements.
I covered Emily's eyes as quickly as I could.
She screamed that she wanted to see our mom,
and I told her that it was bad enough
that I had to live the rest of my life
with that image of mom, that I wasn't gonna let her
grow up with
that image seared into her mind.
Um, I got my hands, I think, on --
on somebody's cellphone, and I just started calling family.
I called Jessica first.
So I was watching TV.
It was probably about 7:30 or so in the --
in California, and my phone rang, and I missed it.
Didn't think much of it.
[phone notification alert]
But then I saw that I had
a voicemail, and it was from my brother David,
and when I listened to it, he said, "Dad just shot mom."
I remember I was so distraught,
I couldn't even figure out how to make my phone work.
I was holding it, staring at it, and I
just couldn't put together how to call him back,
because I was so out of my mind.
The rest of that day,
the rest of that week, was a fog.
I remember telling my brother it was gonna be okay,
that it was gonna be okay, we were gonna figure it out,
and I was gonna get there as soon as I could.
I remember laying at the top of the stairs just crying.
I remember thinking, like, I can't go on.
I don't want to go on, like, what am I supposed to do
without my mom, without my best friend.
But before we could even, like, process any of that,
the main concern became where was Scott?
DAVID: Eventually, someone took us to a hospital
that had a secure wing.
Jessica wasn't gonna be out here for three more days,
because that's the soonest flight she could get.
I still remember that first shower,
just watching the drain turn red,
um...
That moment has haunted me a lot, too.
I refused to let anyone take my glasses and clean them.
That was something that my mom always did.
She would say, "Dave, your glasses are filthy,"
and she would take them and run them under the sink,
and my glasses were,
for a few days, just
covered in her blood and brain matter.
And I ended up getting new glasses,
because I refused to let anybody touch them.
They brought us to a room with
two gurney tables and brought some blankets in,
and Emily fell asleep, but I couldn't sleep,
and I sat up awake, watching over her,
when two of the nurses came outside
the door and started discussing what had happened.
They said, "They found the father,
"and he's already dead.
Do you think we should go in and tell them?"
So I got up, and I poked my head
out the door and let them know that I knew.
And then I just went back in and watched over Emily
until the morning came.
It was important for me to confirm for --
for my own sanity that he was gone.
I definitely wouldn't have put it past him to have
found someone who looked enough like him and done enough
damage to the body that they found
a corpse that conveniently looks similar and called it
a day, and in the meantime, he was still out there.
They walked me down the hall.
They pulled back the curtain, and there he was.
I...
looked at his body, and his eyes
finally didn't have that rage in them.
They were kind of yellowed and glossed over.
He looked a lot cleaner
than my mom, I remember that.
I remember being angry about that,
that the last image that I had with my mom
was this bloody, ground-up mess.
The last image that I had of him was kind of cleaned up.
Then I asked what had happened, and one of the morticians
did...
like, mimed how he had killed himself.
He had fled in the van,
he drove two or three streets over
into an abandoned lot, and...
shot himself through the roof of the mouth.
When I saw Scott laying there,
I was mad that I hadn't been the one to do it.
I wanted to
have him in a room, tied to a chair,
just take my anger out on him.
It took every...
fiber my being, every ounce of self-restraint
that I had, not to just beat him.
They took me
back up, and Emily woke up,
and I told her that the bad man would never hurt her again.
JESSICA: After mom passed, we all kind
of ended up going in different directions.
Emily went to California, lived with an aunt and uncle.
I got into a relationship,
and I went and lived with that person.
David went off to school.
So then we were in three separate states, and it was --
it was hard, and we went a lot of years like that,
where we became more distant.
DAVID: It was the first time that the three of us hadn't
been together,
but I was lucky enough to buy a house right before
the pandemic hit, and I had two spare bedrooms.
Emily moved into one of my spare bedrooms.
And then Jessica came up to visit
for a weekend and stayed for nine months.
JESSICA: We got to spend a lot of time together
and really get to know each other as adults.
I think that we have definitely
strengthened our relationship recently, and we get to see each
other more, and we talk more, and it's been really good.
One thing that my mom always said was
that she didn't want to be just another statistic,
and after my mom passed, we had the opportunity to
advocate for a law on her behalf called Jennifer's Law,
which was, um, firstly, named for Jennifer Dulos,
another victim of domestic violence, as well as our mother.
And it makes it so coercive control is
now recognized in family court and is a punishable offense.
It helps me
see a silver lining in what happened.
There's nothing anyone can do to bring mom back,
but I know that she'd be proud of us
helping another child not lose their mom,
maybe help another woman get out of a situation.
It's very helpful to
feel like we're doing positive things in her name.
I feel like she would be proud of us.
It's...
not this taboo thing that we can't talk about anymore.
Obviously, my life was indescribably difficult
and full of tragedy
that most people will never experience in their lives.
In spite of all of that,
I'm still very privileged.
I'm not the only kid who grew up in a broken home,
and I think that
the world would be a lot better of a place if we all
acknowledge that, even if I have pain,
that doesn't mean that you don't have pain and that I
shouldn't be able to see it,
I shouldn't be able to recognize it.
I think we're all suffering, and if we don't
take the time to acknowledge other people's sufferings,
we're all just gonna be suffering alone.
♪♪