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an autobiography
of child murder
and rape
ROBERT - UPDATED 09/01/24
09/23/23 - I never knew how I could make Speechless into a movie because, if I did, then I’d have to hand out barf bags to everyone in the movie theater. I survived things that are unethical and illegal to portray on screen. Today, however, I just finished watching Rewind, the 2019 movie about Sasha Joseph Neulinger and the abuse he survived as a child. In the movie, a therapist has Sasha draw pictures of what he endured. And that’s when it hit me. I could never portray my story as a motion picture, but I could tell it as a narrated slideshow using the same kind of stick figures as Sasha drew. Click on the movie poster.
10/12/23 - I contacted Aven Shore-Kind about making the movie. In 2018, Aven had narrated the audio-book version of Speechless. It was on Amazon for several years, but I finally took it down because of how Amazon was giving it away online for free. I told Aven about my idea of doing a narrated slideshow and asked if I could use her audio-book recordings as the vocal narration for the movie. She said yes!
10/17/23 - I’m not an artist, so I realized that I was going to need a professional illustrator to draw the stick figures. Today, I started placing Illustrator Needed posts on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ve never done this before, and I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for, so I’m going to consider everyone who applies. The first thing will be to send them a copy of the book just to make sure they are able to handle it emotionally.
10/29/23 - I’ve gotten about 60 replies so far from my online wanted posts. Most of them aren’t interested once they read the book. One person even said that no one should ever read my book or see this movie. I don’t think they understand the painful isolation of being a survivor and how important it is to share our stories and know that we are not alone. On the bright side, a few people have sent me sample drawings, and they look promising.
11/12/23 - Today I signed a letter of agreement with Tyshay Thomas to be the illustrator for Speechless. All the other applicants had very good technique and style, but they lacked something Tyshay had: the ability to capture emotion. I knew right away that she was the one.
11/18/23 - I started the website today, and I’ll post here periodically as things progress. This is exciting and terrifying at the same time. I still cry whenever I read the book, so I hired a therapist to help me defuse all the emotional landmines I'm going to encounter over the next few years while completing this project.
11/19/23 - I've always had a hard time explaining my motivation to make this movie. Today, I heard a quote by Dr. Solomon Boyce Isaac Lefakane, a pediatrician in Soweto, South Africa, who said, "A dream is a dream that you participate in to the degree that it suites you," which totally encapsulates all of the times I was afraid to know the truth, all the of times I struggled to understand the truth, and all of the times I've worked to share my truth with other survivors.
11/20/23 - Today I finished the music soundtrack for Speechless and created the movie album on Bandcamp. Click on the album cover.
11/24/23 - In 2021, I wrote a companion book to Speechless called Children Of Pain: 4 steps to recovery for survivors of childhood abuse. After publishing the book, I started a free, weekly online support group by the same name. The meetings ended in April of 2022, but the support group website is still there with lots of useful information. Click on the logo.
11/25/23 - This is the poem I wrote for the back cover of the book Children Of Pain:
My Own Private Auschwitz
by Robert Mitchell
10/25/20 - FtLd
I look back
In my latter years
Upon my earlier days
And the abuse I survived
As my own private Auschwitz
Not where the guards were called Nazis
But mommy and daddy
Not where the ultimate torture was the gas chamber
But my bedroom
And not where my body was thrown into an oven
But my soul
So I say now
Never more
11/26/23 - This is a poem I wrote for the Children Of Pain support group to express my long-lasting scars from surviving childhood abuse:
Ghost
by Robert Mitchell
10/18/21 - FtLd
I let you go
You were not mine
For you cannot hold
Onto a ghost
With nothing received
So nothing to give
Ever
But know these scars
Here from absence
Made their presence known
Long before you were absent
Scars that will not heal
By letting you fuck me
Or me fuck you
Cause it don’t work that way
For you will come and go
But these scars
They stay
Eulogy to childhood
17 years numbed horror
Eulogy to torture
Endless, silent, screams
So deny, lie, hide
It’s all the same
The ghost just grows
And grows
And grows
And grows
And grows
Until finally
I will realize
The ghost
Is me
11/27/23 - This is an audio recording of a breakthrough therapy session I had on November 8th of 2012 when I finally recalled my brother who was murdered. Unfortunately, the microphone is closer to the therapist so it's hard to hear me. Also, at times you can hear someone else in a similar session in the room next to ours.
11/28/23 - I connected two unexpected dots today. In college, on a single breath I could swim two lengths underwater of the university’s Olympic-size pool. Today, I remembered that every time my father raped me, he would use one hand to pull down my pajama bottoms and then hold my legs in place, while the other pushed my face into my pillow so that no one could hear me scream. That’s how I learned to hold my breath for so long.
12/01/23 - Yesterday, I saw the first drawings from Tyshay and they are amazing! We discussed our schedule for the rest of the year and began working on final edits of these initial illustrations. I also created a trailer for the movie which I uploaded to the website today.
12/03/23 - The last time I saw my mother, we were talking when I heard a ringing sound. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse and had a brief conversation with my brother. When she hung up, I said, "Wow, I didn't know you had a cell phone. Can I have your number?" "No" she said," it's for my friends." She never gave me the number.
12/03/23 - I've been able to photographically trace my mother's family back to these 1905 pictures of Washington Street in Boston. My great grandfather's store - Peoples Credit Co - is on the left-side corner of the street.
12/04 /23 - I just created the Speechless website on FilmFreeway. With a projected release date of November 1st, 2024, the movie should be in film festivals during the holidays next year. Click on the logo to see the website.
12/06/23 - I had a bit of serendipity today. I tried a new deli in town. When I walked in, there was one seat left open at the end of the counter. I asked the guy sitting next to it if anyone was sitting there. He said "YOU" in such a historical-factual kind of way that I said "OK" and sat down. We chatted a bit. He said his name was Sam. I asked where he was from. He said Los Angeles. So, I gave him one of my cards. He took it. Then a few minutes later he left. Who knows? Maybe he’s in movies. Maybe he’s not. But...
12/08/23 - I've started getting quotes for an Academy Qualified Run which will make the movie eligible for an Academy Award. Do I really think it will win one? The odds certainly aren't great. But there are two types of luck - dumb and prepared - the latter being when unintentional preparation meets unexpected opportunity. So, instead of disqualifying it from the start, here's to being prepared!
12/10/23 - I edited the first 2 and 1/2 mintutes of the movie that comes right after the opening credits. It took 5 hours, so at this rate the entire film will take about 200 hours of editing. 5 down. 195 to go. It's a start!
12/10/23 - In the early 1900's, my great grandfather changed his store’s name from Peoples Credit Company (see 12/03/23) to Sallingers. It was in the upscale shopping district at the corners of Washington and West Streets, and it had one of the largest collections of furs in all of Boston. On the night of December 16th, 1942, a fire began in the basement of the store and spread quickly through the building’s elevator shafts and stairwells. Five alarms were called, and about 600 fire fighters were dispatched to the scene, representing nearly half of the fire department's staff. A contingent of 160 Coast Guards were deployed to support the effort. So much water was poured onto the blaze that the subway below Washington Street began to flood, and pumps were employed to keep the transit line open. The streets were cleared of thousands of spectators, and a security force was set up as firemen went into the jewelry section of the store to retrieve precious stones from the vaults. The fire took about five hours to get under control, and another ten hours to extinguish. The total financial loss was about one million dollars which is equal to about 20 million dollars today.
12/16/23 - My great-grandfather gave the original Sallinger’s to his son, my grandfather, in 1935, which he promptly burned to the ground in 1942 to hide all the money he had embezzled from the store. Later, my grandfather would make a reincarnation of the original establishment, under the same name, as a discount version of its former self. Following the red arrows, you can see it in mid 1950's, then with a new owner in the late 1950's, and then gone in the 1960's. This was the man who not only wasted away our family legacy, but he also raped his own daughter, my mother, thus turning her into the monster she would become.
12/17/23 - Today, I finished the first half of the first segment of the film. In addition to being the producer, screenwriter and editor, I pondered whether to also call myself the director, too. In the end, I decided not to as Aven, Tyshay and I all work independently. Yes, I have discussed many project-related topics with them, but they have ultimately done their work on their own. With the screenwriting done, currrently my most active role is as editor, weaving all of the final product together.
12/22/23 - I found another photo of the Sallinger Fire in Boston on December 16, 1942. The fire started at night, and this was taken the next day. It took 15 hours to completely extinguish.
12/31/23 - Everything in the movie is in the book, but not everything in the book is in the movie. To keep the film around 100 minutes, there were two things left out. The first were four of the times my father tried to kill me. Even without them included, he is still an unredeemable monster. The second was my mother’s back story, including that her father raped her. Though, as you can see from this blog, there is an interesting story there, her malevolence was in reaction to my father’s behavior, and it is not certain that she would have done the things she did if he had not been an unfaithful murderer and rapist.
01/07/24 - In the book, after he had killed my middle brother, I detailed how, between the ages of 3 and 8, my father tried to kill me five times . Only the first of these, when he convinced me to stick a screwdriver into an electric outlet when I was 3, is in the movie. The last episode occurred when I was around eight and he took me “fishing” on nearby Candlewood Lake which has a hydroelectric power plant (pages 43-47 in the book). He never did this, and, given the four prior events, I knew this was probably going to be a one-way ticket for me. So, when we stopped at a KFC to get food to take on his boat, while he was at the counter ordering, I quietly walked from table to table introducing myself to people eating there by saying, “Hi, I’m Robert Mitchell, and I’m going fishing with my daddy.” If I turned up in the news as missing, I wanted people to know he did it . And I was right. When we got to the boat, instead of fishing, he drove us up to the far northeast end of the lake where he unsuccessfully tried to knock me into the intake pipe (A) for the hydroelectric plant. Had he succeeded, my body would have traveled down through the feeder tube (B), into the power plant (C), been shredded into a thousand pieces by its turbines (D), and then discharged into the Housatonic River.
01/07/24 - This is the main building of the private school my brother and I attended (pages 72-73 in the book). My first day there, I was bullied by another student while standing on that lawn. Later in the afternoon, he was given two black eyes by my brother for messing with his property.
01/07/24 - This is the Old Courthouse in Danbury, Connecticut, where my brother beat me into a coma on the sidewalk out front at night during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. It would be the final act of abuse which I would have to survive (pages 75-80 in the book).
01/07/24 - This is the Peter Pan Diner in Danbury where the book and the movie both end with me sitting in the front corner window seat (red dot). This was my safe space, and a large blowup of it hangs in my bedroom. I see it every night before I go to bed. The diner no longer exists.
01/08 /24 - This is what the sink looked like that my mother claimed I, at 3 years old, had climbed onto, stood upright on all by myself, opened the medicine cabinet above it, and then repeatedly cut myself with my father's razor blade (page 61-63 in the book). Even if I could have somehow managed to climb onto this sink at that age, the edges were curved and slippery, and there would have been no way I could have stood up without falling off.
01/12/24 - I've been involved with this book my entire life, and I have a huge library of images in my head that I want to see in the movie. Tyshay has only be working on this project a few months and she doesn't have as much experience with it. To bridge this gap, we're trying out a new approach to the illustration process. To give Tyshay a better idea of what I'm looking for in the stick figure illustrations, I've created picture maps of the book which are kind of like detailed story boards but without the pictures. Below is a sample. The first column is the picture number. The second column is the text for that picture. The third column denotes a sequence of animated overlays if there are down arrows. The fourth column is a description of what should be in the picture. We're testing it now.
01/24/24 - Tyshay sent the first batch of drawings developed from a picture map and they were great. They were also easy to edit into the movie which confirms that the picture map process is working. We've only completed about 10% of the movie so far, but I'm putting together a preview of the opening credits and the first 9 minutes of the film. This will give people a chance to see what the movie looks like and, hopefully, provide us with feedback as we continue production. So far, everything is on schedule, with the anticipated release date in the fall of this year.
01/31 /24 - To give the audience a more linear time line, we have reduced the film’s run time from 100 minutes down to 68 minutes. In the book, the Father chapter goes from when I’m 2 years old until I'm 9 at the lake when he makes his fifth and final attempt to kill me. At the start of the next chapter, Mother, the story goes back to when I'm three again for the razor blade attack. In the original movie version of 100 minutes, Father ends with the pedophile ring when I'm 5 years old and then jumps back in Mother to when I’m 3, just like the book. These back-shifts in time can be hard to follow for a movie viewer, and they introduce tangent stories (the times my father tried to kill me, my father’s abuse of my mother, my older brother’s violence on the high-school football team) which dilute the impact of the larger events (rape, murder, beatings). So now, the film’s three parts chronologically run from when I’m 2 to 3 years old in Father (part 1), followed by when I’m 3 to 5 years old in Mother (part 2), finishing with elementary and then high-school in Brother (part 3). Another benefit of this time reduction is to lessen viewer fatigue. This is a very dynamic movie in a format - still picture - that audiences rarely see. On average, the screen changes every three seconds, leaving little time for pause or reflection. The shorter run time will help to maintain audience engagement throughout the entirety of the movie.
02/18/24 - So this film raises awareness of child abuse by being shown to as wide an audience as possible, one of the hardest parts of making Speechless was to figure out how to illustrate the narration of sexual abuse without showing any sexual activity, nudity or pornography. Through much trial and error, we determined that the key was to focus on emotions and not actions. For example, there is a two-part scene where a naked child is sitting on a bed next to a perpetrator (part 1), when suddenly the young boy is yanked across the adults lap (part 2). To avoid nudity, in part 1 we reduce the focus to just the child’s face looking forward, showing surprise at being grabbed by the adult. Then, in part 2, again we show just the child’s shocked face, but this time in a side view. In addition, the child’s face is in the upper left-hand corner during part 1, but then in the lower right-hand corner for part 2. This change in position simulates the movement from being grabbed in the initial upright position, to then being forced down across the perpetrators lap.
02/24/24 - I have been working on the final picture map for the 12 segments of the movie, while Tyshay is illustrating the drawings for the 4th segment. Due to some decisions we made regarding the final look of the film, we she finishes the 8th segment, we will jump to the final segment before completing segments 9 through 11. This will allow her to develop style sheets for those three unfinished segments so as to gradually transform the movie from a minimalist stick figure composition in the first 8 segments to a more detailed aspect of drawings in the final 4 segments. Like so many things regarding the process of creating Speechless, this unanticipated shift has become a highly constructive part of our production process.
03/02/24 - By mid-March, the film’s illustrations will be one-third completed. With the initial drafts of all the picture maps finished, this week I moved on to the audio special effects. While these audio enhancements are being used sparingly, they will heighten critical aspects of the viewer’s experience. We are also discussing the release of companion books to the movie: one an illustrated, text version of the movie’s audio track, and the other an audiobook of either the original book version (unabridged) or the film version (abridged).
03/09/24 - I watched a movie this week called Filling In The Blanks. It’s about Jon Baime who takes a 23andMe DNA test and then discovers that the man who raised him was neither his, nor his siblings, biological father. One of the issues discussed in the movie was how children are treated differently in the same household when some of them are biological children and others are not. Though Jon was raised in a family where none of the children were biological descendants of the man they called dad, his story made me wonder about my own family. Even without the sexual and physical abuse, the contrast was glaring between my older brother’s relationship with my parents and my relationship with them. Publicly, my father eagerly talked to my brother, while only begrudgingly responding to me. My parents would routinely go out and do things with just him, leaving me at home as a child and then not inviting me as an adult. During the summers, he got sent on vacations to places like England and Canada, while I got sent to either live with my father’s parents or to camps for emotionally disturbed children. On birthdays, he would get lots of presents and a party with his friends to which I was literally uninvited (those parties were just for his friends), while on mine I would get one or two pieces of clothes, usually given to me at breakfast time with little fanfare, often unwrapped, sans party or celebration. And they would buy him a sports car, a custom van with a bed in the back, and even a formula 4 race car, while I got my mother’s used car. The list was daily and endless (see 12/03/23, above). So, it made me wonder, were those monsters really my biological parents? I immediately ordered a 23andMe test kit. It should arrive in a few days. Click on the movie poster.
03/15/24 - One of the obstacles in making this movie are all the memories it brings up from the time when the abuse was happening: mostly bad, but some good. One such memory is of a boy I had a crush on throughout high school, a secret I held onto until I finally told him right after graduation, and by that time it was too late. Although it was painful to have such feelings for so long (it took three more years after I told him to get over it), looking back I now realize that even though it took me too long to tell him, and even though he was only an acquaintance and not a close friend, this crush was actually an emotional life-line for me during those torturesome years. In unexpected ways, that unacknowledged and unrequited one-sided love gave me hope and something to focus on other than my own desperation, and I am thankful for that.
03/22/24 - The 23andMe DNA test kit I mentioned on 03/09/24 arrived last week. They offer two basic services: ancestry and health. Ancestry looks at their existing DNA database to see who you are likely related to, while health looks at your DNA to identify possible health issues you and your children may face now or in the future. Since I’m older and don’t have children, I chose just the ancestry service for $124. To add health would have cost $100 more. This was a one-time fee (health has an annual membership fee) which includes the sampling kit, all shipping costs getting it to me and then back to them, and all necessary packaging. The process was simple. I set up a 23andMe account online and paid online. Then they mailed me a small box with the sample supplies, and I provided a saliva specimen following their simple instructions. Finally, I dropped off the pre-paid/labeled box at a nearby mail facility. Now, I wait three to four weeks for the results. Hopefully I’m not biologically related to the people who tortured me. Click on the 23andMe logo.
03/22/24 - While I was writing the above blog about 23andMe, I got a notice that someone had commented on a comment I made about a 1996 movie titled The Toilers and the Wayfarers. Though none of what happened in that movie happened in my life, the emotions it portrayed were similar to those I had for the boy I mentioned on 03/15/24. Yet, I had commented on that movie nine years ago, and now a complete stranger’s reply has brought it all back to me right after I blogged about the same boy I was thinking of when I made that post so many years ago. Funny, huh? Click on the poster.
03/25/24 - There’s a movie on Netflix called Tell Me Who I Am (spoiler alert - I’m going to give away key details). It’s about two brothers, now grown men, from a well-to-do family whose parents prostituted them out to pedophiles when they were children. In one scene, after both parents are dead, the two men are going through their mother’s belongings when they find a photo of themselves as children. In it, they are standing together at the seashore, side-by-side in full-frontal nudity. The odd thing about the photo is that the top part has been torn off so you can see their entire naked bodies but not their faces. To my surprise, the two men cannot figure out why their mother had such a photo. To me it was obvious: this was a product display card their mother would show prospective pedophile clients who were interested in buying her children for sex. Though it is not included in the movie version, in the book version of Speechless (pages 25-31) I describe the pedophile ring my parents belonged to and how they traded me in it. I don’t know how my parents found other children for my father to abuse, but I do know that my mother ran an agency for “troubled” children, and I have often wondered if it was a front to find victims for my father and other pedophiles in our town. Click on the poster.
03/29/24 - During the past month I contacted some people I knew when I was growing up and enduring the abuse. None of them knew about what was happening to me back then, and most of them found it hard to believe. One of them even suggested that I was playing the victim card and should get over it. This is not an uncommon response. People who were not abused as children don’t understand the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lives the abusers lead, and how they can appear perfectly normal in public, yet be complete monsters behind closed doors. These monsters don’t keep diaries, and they don’t take photographs. They destroy and burn all of the evidence, even their victims. In the end, I know that these people who knew me back then will never believe my story, for they only knew Dr. and Mrs. Jekyll while, unfortunately for me, I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Hyde. Click the image to watch the movie.
03/30/24 - I am using two different pieces of software to make this movie. The story is broken down into 20 different parts, and each part - its audio and illustrations - is individually created in the first software. Then, like cars in a train, those 20 individual parts will be assembled into the final movie using the second software. As the editor, I must watch each part many times to be sure that they are all correct. Then, in the final assembly, I will have to watch the entire movie many times to be sure that it is also correct. So, to avoid getting burned out while editing, I’ve decided not to work on the full version of the film until all of the 20 parts have been individually completed.
04/02/24 - I tried to set up an Amazon Merch Account to sell t-shirts and other printable items with a childhood abuse survivors’ logo based upon the Speechless illustration of a stick figure with no arms. This armless stick figure is often drawn by children in survivor's therapy to express their sense of powerlessness against their abuser. I had hoped this symbol might become for the childhood abuse survivor community what the pink ribbon is for the breast cancer patient community. Without any explanation, Amazon denied me a Merch Account, so I am offering this symbol here for anyone who would like to copy it and print it themselves for their personal use (not for sale or resale).
04/03/24 - Adverse Childhood Experience scores (ACEs) helps us understand the potential adulthood health risks for those who survived childhood abuse. An ACE questionnaire consists of 10 questions, and the higher your score, the more likely you are to have health problems later in life. For example, those with ACE scores of 4 or more were 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs. People with ACE scores of 6 and higher have an almost 20-year shorter lifespan. My ACE score is 8. Click on the link to download an ACE questionnaire.
04/03/24 - Positive Childhood Experience scores (PCEs) measure factors which can protect childhood abuse survivors from the bad health effects from high ACE scores. A PCE questionnaire consists of 7 questions that measure positive support factors during the first 18 years of life. High PCE scores act like a counterbalance to high ACE scores, reducing the health risks associated with high ACEs. My PCE score is 0. Click on the link to download a PCE questionnaire.
04/06/24 - One of the key communication elements I use with Tyshay Thomas, the illustrator, is the use of spatial diagrams to convey the Point Of View (POV) she will use when creating a particular drawing. Not to give too much away, the diagram below represents a street scene involving a car, and it shows the multiple POV’s she will use for various images in this part of the movie. I have created many of these diagrams during the film’s production. This one is probably the most detailed.
04/12/24 - While making Speechless, most of my focus has been on the past, but some has been on my future and, in particular, my end of life. Writing the book version of Speechless was the product of over 40 years of therapy and a major milestone in my recovery. It wasn’t until 2008 that I cut myself off from my family, having been blinded to their toxicity by Familial Stockholm Syndrome. I was in such denial and repression as to have been delusional about them, and for much of my earlier life I actually thought we were a normal family. Once free of them, I finally regained my memories of what they had done to me and understand the horror that they were. They have, unfortunately, left me with unhealable physical and emotional damage, not the least of which are the scars I still see every morning on my face in the mirror from when my mother attacked me with the razor blade. Their brutality cast me into dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) which took me most of my life to resolve and reunify. What is left of me, due to deep, unrootable trust and intimacy issues, is incapable of loving another person, for you cannot have love without trust. So, I live, and I will die, alone. Having no friends or family to help me, I refuse to end up unable to take care of, or defend, myself in an old-age storage facility where people are underpaid to pretend they care about me. During my medical training I have seen these places, and they are their own kind of special hell. My life started with 17 years of abuse, and I refuse to have it end with further abuse. That said, I do plan to see my cats through to their end, and as the youngest is just over 1 year old, I probably have 15 years or so to go before I check out. In that respect, I like to think of myself as Ruth Gordon’s Maude from the movie Harold And Maude, but without the Harold. Early in the film, when they first meet at a funeral, Maude asks:
Maude: “Did you know him?”
Harold: “No.”
Maude: “Me neither. I heard he’s 80 years old! I’ll be 80 next week. Good time to move on, don’t you think?”
Harold: “I don’t know.”
Maude: “I mean, 75 is too early, but at 85 you’re just marking time. May as well go look over the horizon.”
It is true that I did commit suicide my first year in college - stopped my heart on a PCP overdose - so I do have a certain familiarity and comfort with the process. It’s kinda like checking out of a hotel: you want to do it as quickly, as cleanly, and as painlessly as possible. I haven’t sorted out the details yet, but I do keep myself abreast of the latest ideas and innovations in self-termination. Funny, we rejoice in the fact that we graciously euthanize our beloved pets when it is their time, but deny ourselves the same mercy when it is ours.
04/14/24 - I just emerged from a 52 year long rabbit hole. A long time ago, I fell in love with what I thought was a real person, but was in fact just an imagination in my own mind. There were two people involved - the real one and the imagined one - but though they shared a few similarities, they were not the same person. In making Speechless, this faded adoration came back to me, and I finally recognized it for what it was: a misunderstanding on my part. In coming to this awakening, I was finally able to release myself from decades of unanswered questions. In the process of finding those answers, I also came in contact with someone from my past who, without knowing it, had saved my life many years ago. It turns out that he too had fallen in love with this same person, but he had had an actual friendship with him, while I had only admired him from afar. My long ago savior still held great affection for his friend, but was suffering greatly from his own inability to reach out and reconnect with him. In an effort to repay his long-ago kindness to me, I contacted this person we both deeply admired and asked him to call his one-time friend so as to grant him some peace of mind while there was still time to do so. I do not know if they will reconnect, but I hope they do.
04/20/24 - My 23andMe results came back and, sadly, they were disappointing. Given how favorably my parents treated my older brother, and how brutally they treated me, I was hoping to find out that I was not genetically related to them. In my post of 03/09/24 I wrote about how children are treated differently in the same household when some are biological children and others are not. So, it would have made complete sense to me if I had discovered that I was not the biological offspring of the monsters who abused me. Unfortunately, this DNA test, when compared with 10 million other people, neither confirmed nor denied my hope. The closest relative it was able to identify was a 97 year-old first cousin once removed with whom I shared a very low 5% DNA match. It made no matches with either my biological parents or any siblings. Of course, the obvious explanation is that none of my immediate family had taken the test. But that still leaves me wondering: am I, or am I not.
04/28/24 - Yesterday, I finalized segment six editing which means we are officially halfway done with production of the film. If we maintain our current pace, there are four more months of production left to go which will put us two months ahead of schedule when we are done. Turning an eye to post-production, I will then move on to compiling all of the individual segments into the final movie and attempt to find a distributor. Due to its brutal subject matter, this film might have a limited audience, which means than any potential distributor might make a limited offer, including little or no signing money. So, I’m considering what non-monetary aspects I’d like in a contract. These include that during the contract the movie remains free for schools, abuse survivor groups, and others who might benefit from seeing it. I’d also like to see some form of performance clause where if the distributor is unable to meet certain agreed-upon distribution goals by certain dates, that the contract will become null and void so as I can either seek a different distributor or simply place the film on Youtube for free viewing.
05/05/24 - I’ve been thinking about what motivated me to write the book and make this movie. I know that my original plan had been to wait until I had retired to write the book so that I could devote all of my attention to it. But in 2018, I read about the Gold Cross Boys of Pennsylvania - young boys who were molested by priests and then given special gold crosses so that other priests would know they could rape them - and I knew I had to share my story then so they would know they were not alone. I also wanted to have a record of what had happened to me, so if I started to forget in my later years, I would have it written down to remind myself. Once I figured out how to make it, the movie was a natural extension of this biographical safety net, but in a visual format.
05/12/24 - Who is the target audience for this movie? Given it’s subject matter, it’s primary interest would be with other survivors like myself. But since we were victimized as children, the question becomes how young is too young to watch something like this? Even though there is no sexual activity, nudity or pornography in the illustrations (see 02/18/24), sexual and physical abuse are described during the narration. So, this would be an adult film, with younger viewers watching it at their parents’ discretion.
05/19/24 - Today’s Horror Story: To understand how common horrific child abuse is in the world, consider this event from May 17, 2024, titled Man shoots his 6-month-old baby multiple times at home near Phoenix, but child expected to survive. It’s impossible to imagine what any 6-month-old baby could have done to justify being shot, let alone being shot multiple times. It's even harder to comprehend the lifelong emotional and physical scars this child will have to bear. Yet this is just one of many horrifying stories of child abuse that are happening around us all the time. Read the full story at:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-shot-6-month-old-002738825.html
05/26/24 - In balance, not as individuals but overall as a species, in the big picture we are a failure and will likely go extinct while still on this planet. Though we bond with each other one-on-one, we lack the ability to globally trust one another and, therefore, to cooperate and collaborate on the planetary scale necessary to migrate to other parts of the universe. Thus, rather than fight wars against poverty, hunger, homelessness, disease and illiteracy, we spend a disproportionate amount of our time, energy and resources waging war against each another. This leaves the global human corpus with a terminal auto-immune disorder which compels us to destroy one another and this planet. So, I have written this poem to commemorate our brief existence.
Ode To A Human Requiem
by Robert Mitchell
05/26/24 - FtLd
Life is but a shit ladder
With each to their own rung
And as we fall off one by one
It’s none for all
And all for none
06/2/24 - My father was able to get away with murder because in the 1960's he was Vice President in charge of quality control for National Semiconductor which produced integrated circuits during the development phase of the largest spy satellite ever built at that time: KH9-Hexagon. Previously, in the late 1950's he worked for a military contractor called Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, developing radar components. Prior to that, in the early 1950's he served during the Korean War at the U.S. Army’s top-secret “House of Magic” at Camp Evans in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where transistors were first employed in radios and radar. This was the same facility where the convicted and executed Russian spy Julius Rosenberg had worked in the 1940's. Given what my father knew about transistor technology, he was too important to fail, so much so that even homicide could be swept under the rug.
06/9/24 - People unfamiliar with childhood abuse sometimes find my autobiography improbable and impossible. Yet, just Google childhood abuse and then click News and you’ll see how these crimes happen all around us on a daily basis. One of the most horrifying abuse crimes I read was the Fritzl Case which emerged in 2008 when a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl told police that she had been held captive for 24 years by her father, Josef Fritzl. The father had assaulted, sexually abused, and raped his daughter repeatedly during her imprisonment inside a concealed area in the cellar of the family home. The incest resulted in the birth of seven children, three of whom remained in captivity with their mother. A fourth died shortly after birth and was cremated by Fritzl, and the other three were brought up by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, while living upstairs in the same house. Fritzl was arrested on suspicion of rape, false imprisonment, manslaughter by negligence, and incest. In March 2009, he pleaded guilty to all counts and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Read about it on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
06/14/24 - This past Tuesday, I put Ibby, my cat, to sleep. She found me when she was 3 weeks old, and every night for the past 22 years she has slept right next to my pillow. I know how lucky I've been to have her with me for so long. I noticed downward changes in her last year when she began dropping weight. Amazingly, she was still perky and purring up until this past Saturday when she stopped eating and drinking. So, as to not prolong her suffering, I had a vet come to the house, and she passed right on the bed where she had slept next to me for so long. I was very grateful for how peacefully she went, and I think my loss of her was softened by all the pre-grieving I did over the past year or so, knowing this day was coming. Today, I made her resting place in a flower garden right outside my front door where I will see her every day. She is resting now, I am okay, and I will miss her forever.
06/16/24 - While any one of the abuses I survived is believable, to those unfamiliar with childhood abuse, so much trauma involving so many people over so much time in the same family seems unlikely. Yet, consider this. One person, Elon Musk, has amassed so much wealth that he could literally spend 5 million dollars per day - PER DAY - every day, for the next 100 years, and he would still have 30 billion dollars. On the other end of this spectrum, some 700 million people - over twice the population of the United States - live on less than $800 per year: not even $70 per month. In a world that celebrates and idolizes one person’s unfathomable averistic hoarding, while ignoring the plight of millions doomed to never ending, debilitating poverty, any cruelty is possible.
06/19/24 - I had no social life during high school. One night during my junior year, my brother’s car wasn’t working, and he said if I gave him a ride to a party that I could go, too. When we arrived and were just about to go in, my brother told me to wait outside and then entered, closing the door behind. A few moments later, the person who lived there came out and said there were too many people inside so I could not come in. I asked if I could talk to my brother, but he said he was busy and then went back inside closing the door behind him. I went back to my car, and before going home, watched other people arrive and go in. This was the one and only time I was ever invited to a party.
06/26/24 - Do people really sexually abuse toddlers? Yesterday, in Fort Pierce, Florida, a 28 year old woman named Natalie Jesslynn Wagner was sentenced for sexual battery on a child, lewd and lascivious molestation, promotion of child pornography, and incest involving her 1-year-old and 3-year-old sons. Wagner sold videos of the abuse on Snapchat and Dropbox. She faced a total of 139 felonies after investigators reviewed 18 of the videos that prosecutors said involved her sons and the family dog. Wagner was given 21 life prison terms.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/judge-imposes-21-life-terms-122456393.html
07/20/24 - Due to the extreme physical and sexual abuse I endured as a child, to protect myself I dissociated from, and repressed all memories of, the trauma I survived. The emotional pain was so severe, so damaging and destructive, that I could not face it. So I repressed it. I forgot about it. I pretended it never happened, and I let it go. But it did not disappear. Instead, it hid in my subconscious for decades, festering, decomposing, and devolving into something that would not go away. Over time, it became a monstrous inner child: an inner self wallowing in so much pain, loneliness and abandonment, that it began to grow. And as it grew it became stronger. And as it became stronger it started to control me, making me think and feel things I did not understand. Decades later, it was this internal confusion that motivated me to seek help, to look inside, to see this forgotten, frightened, little inner child I had left behind: to embrace it, understand it, and allow us both to heal. And in doing so, I remembered my forgotten past, the abuse, and the suffering. Often when I share this with others, they will call me a liar, because they believe that repression does not exist, that repressed memories are a fantasy, that they are lies. Yet, it is these same people who will then turn around and advise me to forget about the pain from my past, to stop thinking about it, and to let it go. How bizarre that someone would call me a liar for having repressed memories, and then tell me to repress those same memories: to forget about them; stop thinking about them; let them go. This is the fucked-up world I live in.
07/26/24 - This past weekend we completed the first half of segment 11 of the movie. The film has 12 segments, so in the next six to eight weeks we should complete the production phase well ahead of schedule. Then it’s on to post-production editing and finding a distributor.
08/09/24 - I just watched Just, Melvin: Just Evil, a 2000 documentary by James Ronald Whitney about his grandfather, Melvin Just, and the devastating consequences of the sexual abuse that Just inflicted on their family. Though I survived many horrors as a child, I also had many privileges that others did not: white, male, American, wealth, education, healthcare, and more. I’ve often wondered how I would have ended up if I didn’t have all of these unearned advantages, and now I know. Other than being white and in America, these girls that Melvin molested had none of the other inter-generational entitlements that I had, and their molestation continued to destroy them both as children and adults. This is not to say that I am happy or healed: I never have been and never will be. But, I do understand that because of these unearned advantages, I was spared many of the long-term consequences of surviving childhood abuse. Click on the movie poster.
08/14/24 - Ten months ago, in mid October of 2023, I took the first steps towards creating this movie: obtaining the domain Speechless.Film, and getting Aven Shore-Kind’s permission to use her 2018 narration tracks as the audio for the film. Yesterday, Tyshay Thomas and I reviewed the final picture map (see 01/12/24) for the last 35 illustrations which will complete the movie. This weekend, I anticipate doing the final editing for these illustrations, and the following weekend I will compile the first draft of the entire movie. It is amazing how far we have come in making this impossible film (see 09/23/23).
08/25/24 - Yesterday, I completed the fourth and final draft of the finished movie. Now it’s on to finding distribution. The film’s target audience is other abuse survivors, as this movie can do its greatest good by providing an example to them of how to tell their own stories as part of their ongoing recovery efforts.
09/01/24 - The movie is finished, and though it is very powerful and thought provoking, it is not commercially viable for either theater or streaming. It’s greatest good will be as an example in helping other survivors tell their stories. So, I am posting it on this website and Youtube for free viewing.
info@speechless.film