Julie K. Brown

I believed her then and I believe her now.

So you have to get to a point, I think, as a journalist, and you know when you interview somebody, you can tell when somebody's usually making something up, you know.

And the other thing that I learned, I did a lot of research about sexual assault victims.

And the other thing that's common is for them to misremember things about their abuse because it just gets buried in their head.

They've been traumatized.

The thing that you have to really pay attention to is if they're almost rehearsed.

And none of these women that I interviewed were rehearsed.

It was clear that this, you know, the emotion, the crying, it hits you in the gut.

You know they're telling the truth.

Well, first of all, I spent a lot of time in Philly because my mother was a single mother and we spent a lot of time with her grandparents that lived in Philadelphia.

But we technically lived outside the city in the suburbs.

And nevertheless, I mean, back then for a woman to be divorced with three children, I know it's hard to even imagine now, but back then we were bullied because of that, you know?

And...

We didn't have money.

And, you know, I just remember, for example, on Halloween, the neighbor kids throwing dirt bombs at our house on Halloween, one of them breaking the front window, you know, so we would be crouched with our mother instead of going out Halloweening like all the other kids, we would be home scared to death.

So I just remember things like that.

And I felt, I think that in part that drove me into journalism because I wanted to tell the stories of other vulnerable people who really didn't have a voice.

And my mother certainly had things happen that I felt shouldn't have happened.

All the furniture being taken from our house because she couldn't pay the electric bill.

But I could have been in the same kind of spot that they were in and that they felt like there was no way for them to get out from underneath either the poverty or in some cases they were homeless and other cases, you know, they just were all alone.