In an essay article published in Harper's Bazaar, author Barry Lopez reveals the gruesome truth of being sexually abused when he was 7 years old.
A man named Harry Shier supervised a rehab treatment of a relative of Lopez's mother at the sanatorium. When Lopez was 7 years old, he recalls Shier telling him mother that there was something wrong with Lopez and rape was the treatment for it.
"I was a child," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I was 7 years old, and the world of medicine and the world of treatment and the world of how we take care of each other was a tabula rasa for me. I knew that when I saw these degrees from prestigious institutions - all of which were fraudulent - on his wall that I was in the hands of somebody that I knew the adult world respected, and as a young person trying to learn the world, I was trying to understand things that were new to me, and that just fell into that category. I think one of the things that's difficult for adults to understand about pedophiles who really prey on children is that the child is not an adult, so the perspicacity and the insight and the intuition that an adult might have in a situation like this [to] sniff the fraud out before it takes on the scope that it did for me and for others - you can do that as an adult but you can't do that as a child. And a child can be manipulated 10 ways to Sunday. All the while, the child is trying to pay attention and trying to understand a foreign world, and this was just part of that foreign world."
Shier pretended to be interested in Lopez mother and pretended to date her. Lopez's mother who was recently divorced and was having financial problems, found comfort in Shier's arms.
"[Shier] was extremely good at creating an atmosphere in our home where he would be highly regarded and appreciated by my mother and, you know, trying to control me was as simple as keeping a ... dog in a box. You're just a prisoner of something you can't understand," reveals Lopez.
After writing the essay article, Lopez reveals it was the hardest bit of writing he has ever done.
"The advantage that I had," he says, "is that I've been a writer all my life, and I had somebody at Harper's - Chris Cox - who was an exceptional editor, who could do what I could not do, which is I could not find and hold the emotional distance that I needed from this material in order to write about it in the way that I thought I had to, which is, in the end it's not about me, it's about us."