C-11

My Story

(by C-11)

C-11 was sexually abused by ex-priest Richard Hickerson.

C-11 testified at the Cornwall Public Inquiry 06 June 2007.

“My Story” (below) was posted with C-11’s permission.

I am posting this after reading 02 April 2008: The rise of Canadian porn star Pierre Fitch: BAWDY WORK / Cornwall native has a head for business. It struck me that on one hand one Cornwall native is apparently making a very good living producing porn, while another , C-11, was exposed as a child to pornography by his molester and believes that led to an addiction with which he has struggled throughout his adult life.

(Hickerson, incidentally, was also into kiddie porn and bestiality)

MY STORY

(adapted for website)

I began music lessons at Ecole Musica located in Holy Cross Convent School when I was in the third grade. Sometime during the seventh grade, Richard Hickerson, a former Catholic priest from the Prairies, was introduced to the students at Ecole Musica. He was made the lead violinist at the head of the first violin section. That was the person who took the lead from the conductor, who was Sister Madeleine, our music teacher. Mr. Hickerson would work with the first violinists when Sister Madeleine worked with the other sections of the orchestra. He also played in various chamber groups with us as well, mostly trios, as I recall.

With his extensive musical background, which included studies in Europe, we were encouraged along the way to work with Hickerson, to improve our technique and musical skills.

His seduction of me was gradual. He developed a trusting relationship with me first and foremost. He acted young and silly and he would laugh when the kids were fooling around during orchestra practice. He eased his physical presence upon me slowly—an arm on my shoulder, a hand on my arm or on my knee, moving it up to my thigh on occasions.

Sometime during the seventh or eighth grade, while I was at his house working on some music piece, he came around to assist me with my bowing or fingering. He had done this before, but this time he pressed himself against me in a way that I didn’t know how to respond. The next thing I knew, I began to shake from being so nervous, so he took me to his couch. Everything went very fast from there. He was a very large, burly man and I was quite small for my age. I remember him begin to kiss me and put his hands down my pants. When he said something about the bedroom in English, I didn’t understand the colloquial expression, and I was too overwhelmed to ask for clarification. By then I was also quite sexually aroused. I remember him taking me in his arms and going to the bedroom. He was naked without my even realizing it and he took my clothes off and got on top of me. You can’t imagine the shock of a two hundred-pound man, all hairy and sweaty, getting on top of you when you’re so young.

My father had told me about the birds and the bees but there was nothing in his talk about something like this. I remember staring at the ceiling and mouthing in French the words, “Moman. ” I couldn’t figure out what I had done to be there like that, and how come I hadn’t put a stop to it. (I couldn’t even figure out how it had even gotten started, since I was still not sure what was going on. . .) The worst of it all is that I had an orgasm very quickly. In seconds, Mr. Hickerson pulled himself up and shoved his dick on my chest, and what took place next really blew my mind away. I found myself showered with semen all over me. He could see I was freaked out. He told me to stay there and to not move. He came back with a warm washcloth and wiped me down, and asked me if I had liked that? [ I was twelve or thirteen, I weighed about ninety pounds. He was a huge adult. My teacher. Someone who could tell everybody, my parents, Sister Madeleine, what I had just done. To this day I can’t remember if I said yes or just nodded my head or did nothing. ]

Next, he opened his closet beside the bed, one of those double sliding door kinds. All along the bottom, where people usually keep shoes, he had stacks of magazines. He reached for a pile and placed them next to me on the bed and said: “Here, look at these. I’ll go fix us something to eat”

In seconds I was looking at all of these porno magazines—1940’s, 1950’s nudist style magazines, European pornography with adults fucking. Straight couples, gay couples. I was aroused immediately. When Mr. Hickerson came back to the room he asked me if I liked the magazines. I remember vividly when I replied, ‘Yes.” He came up to me and grabbed my erect penis and began to suck on it while I kept my eyes riveted on the pornography. I came twice more that day while he performed oral sex and I viewed his collection of porno.

When I was ready to leave I asked if I could borrow one of the magazines. He smiled and said that I knew where they were and I could come and look at them anytime.

So my pattern began. Where Hickerson was supposed to be coaching me, to help me get ready for a music exam, or one of the music recitals at Ecole Musica, he would seduce me instead. Though I tried to resist, knowing it was a sin, he would only have to bring out his porno for me to capitulate. When I might have become bored by his collection, he only produced more graphic sexual content. The man was a pro. Though I hated his body, and the foul smell of his genitals, I found myself possessed by all the variety of naked bodies in the magazines, doing things that I was only beginning to fathom.

It didn’t take long, given both my age and being so sexualized by the man and his pornography, before I wanted to have sex with other people. This still being the 1960’s in a small town in Ontario made that goal quite difficult. Before I knew it I had a reputation for coming on to guys. I tried to make up for it by coming on to girls, but I was used to sex on demand. No words of love, no intimacy. I scared girls away. All I wanted was disconnected fucking, with pornography as a stimulant. Back then there were no VCR’s. Pornography wasn’t available like it is today. I had no choice. I went back to Hickerson’s again and again. Like an addict, I could no more resist the drive to see and use pornography than if it had been injected in my veins.

I began to drink in the ninth grade. Hickerson didn’t give me liquor at first, but he did soon enough when I showed up already smelling of it. I started using pot, acid, and sniffing nail polish remover in the tenth grade. My music was going downhill very fast since the man responsible for helping me, was fucking me in the mouth instead, and shoving his fingers up my ass. (He would have penetrated me with his penis but it was much too thick in circumference, though he did try.)

By the eleventh grade, I was basically just walking through the paces of my life. I’d quit my music lessons at the end of the tenth grade, hoping to get Hickerson behind me. But then I found myself without the sex and the porno to which I had been accustomed. My solution: more drugs and alcohol. I got kicked out of high school in the winter of that year. Finally the other shoe had dropped. I had just turned sixteen a few months before. I had no music, no social outlets since I wasn’t in school anymore, no religion— (Hickerson had made me into a sinner and I wasn’t comfortable telling any other priest what I had done.)

When my Dad tried to get me reinstated in school, I didn’t have the heart to tell him how bad life was for me so I left home instead. I headed straight to Mr. Hickerson’s, who freaked out and insisted I had to leave before sunrise, so as not to be seen with my large backpack, coming out of his apartment. Still, he got me drunk, gave me my porno, and got what he wanted from me.

I stayed in Toronto for a couple of months, crashing where I could, doing what I had to do to survive. Sex was one of them.

A few months later, having completely bottomed out, I called home. My parents agreed to let me back in on the stipulation that there would be no drugs and alcohol, and that I had to work. I got a full-time job through Hickerson at Canada Manpower where he worked as a job counsellor. I was able to stay mostly clean and sober, at least undetected enough to remain at home. I went back to school in the fall. But I had one habit that I was unable to control. Pornography. And my only source of porno in town was Hickerson.

So again I found myself begin a pattern that has plagued me in its myriad ways, all throughout my life. By the time I was arrested in my twenties I had already been stopped by vice officers on two separate occasions. I had been held at knifepoint in a porno arcade and robbed, forced by the culprit to perform fellatio on the him before he left me with his cum all over my face. I had had numerous other close calls with other sick individuals in porno arcades and theatres over the years; I’d bought and destroyed more than one porno collection along the way determined to kick this pernicious habit.

Being bailed out of jail at four in the morning by your wife, on a lewd and lascivious charge, is one experience no one should have to go through. The costs of my porno addiction up till then had been limited to buying and viewing porno, to the toll on my body and my sanity, but now came the real expenditures—lawyer’s fees and court costs. Then that summer, having gotten a lucrative position I found myself unable to get my security clearance. I suddenly realized the full magnitude of my pornography addiction.

In the late ‘90’s I received a newspaper clipping in the mail from my parents. An article in the local newspaper was asking victims of molest to come forward to help in an investigation into a thirty-year pedophile ring that had been discovered in my hometown.

I was so angry, living still, with the ravaging effects of what had begun back when I had been a student of Ecole Music that I called the toll free number and told the OPP my story.

As the months passed, I was informed of others coming forward against Hickerson. I felt justified. The man needed to face the consequences of his acts. I will never forget that late

Friday night in May of the following year. It was pushing eleven P.M. when I got a call from the OPP that Hickerson had killed himself, just days before his indictment was to be announced.

My initial shock was very intense. Immediately, I felt responsible. I hung up the phone and went to my Buddhist altar and I began to pray. I prayed for his life and the causes he had made. And very soon, I saw what he had done with this last cowardly act of self-violence. He had tried to re-victimize me. Once again. But this time I said NO. I yelled it, screamed it out. NO. NO, you fucking bastard. This is not going to stop here.

I never initiated the criminal prosecution, but I was damned if he was going to do this to me again. That very night I began my personal journey to heal and take matters more into my own hands.

So here I am today. Every day until the day I die I will be a porno addict. Everyday, I navigate my environment, weighing out carefully my actions. The Internet was a minefield at first, like a kid in a candy store. Much like a recovering alcoholic I had to learn and set boundaries for myself using that particular medium. Relationships over the years had their own unique share of lessons for me. The potential excesses of falling in love and engaging in sexual relations too early on with new partners were often triggers that spun me out of control. The fear of somehow attracting a pedophile in my life was always a heightened one for me. The introduction of explicit heterosexual and homosexual pornography at such an impressionable age left me with so many pitfalls to manoeuvre.

Though I am generally happy in my life these days, in no small measure thanks to my Eastern religious path, I cannot tell you the burden that Richard Hickerson left on my shoulders, that I alone must bare.