TRIGGER WARNING - Interview with Rape Academy Survivor Amanda Willett Part 2 of 3

TRIGGER WARNING

62 million visit and so few victims know or come forward. Sex trafficking and how hard to be believed when you escape. Why must you fight to be heard? Discussing her journey to become a forensic nurse after not being believed.

Part 2 of 3

TRIGGER WARNING

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I there's a lot of, you know, um, me coming forward and sharing my story. I am opening myself up to ridicule. I am opening myself up to the comments section. I promise you, and just go back and think of the things that have been um talked about, discussed, current affairs, news, everything that's happened over the past three years regarding drug facilitated, sexual assault, sex trafficking, the Epstein stuff, all the stuff. There's a lot of stuff intertwined, you know. It's just a lot of stuff. And I can assure you one thing there is not one thing that is discussed in the contents of the things that these, you know, survivors have survived. There's not one thing that I'm triggered by. I'm triggered by the comment section. I'm triggered by absolutely people coming and speaking on things that they number one don't know anything about, and number two, they've never experienced it. I have when I picked bear. Oh my goodness, picking bear was like asking for it. No, I I'll take bear any day.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yes, I think most of us would, and it's like asking for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

So one of the things that I want to talk about and uh want really want to try to cover, what were your symptoms when you were being drugged? Because I want to get because I want to nerd out a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, no, this is important to talk about too, because um right off the bat, and and going back to the I believe that I was drugged with three different things, something to keep my brain fuzzy, to elicit the brain fog and the confusion and to keep me, you know, just in this very confused state for and that that opened the door for other things to happen. Something to to cause libido off the charts. And girl, when I'm talking off the charts, I experienced things that I didn't even know were humanly possible. Yeah. And I'm talking about, I'm talking about um having sex every single day with this man four, five, six hours straight. And I'm not exaggerating, uh, back to back-to-back orgasms with very little um effort put into that. And I mean, it was just it was just happening over and over and over again. And then, you know, it got to a point where we're not even in the room anymore, we're floating in a galaxy far, far away.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

And there's several different medications that are um prescribed. I'm not gonna get into that in detail, but these are called excitatory neurotransmitters. You've heard of some of them before, so it's your adrenaline or epinephrine, your noradrenaline or norepinephrine, but then you have your dopamine, you have your glutamate, you have your acetylcholine. So those are your five big ones. And with those five big ones, they act on several different receptors and the drugs that they prescribe for seizures. The way they modulate these excitatory neurotransmitters is a little bit different, but their goal is to take these excitatory neurotransmitters and make them do certain things. So when you're talking about, and they call them date rape drugs, but they're drugs that work in so many different ways. And one of the main things that all of them do is they work on the excitatory neurotransmitters. Their job is to take these five neurotransmitters and make their action either greater or less great, and how they do this dictates the action. I started it, I'm gonna finish it. So everyone knows benzodiazepines. If you are looking to do something, and I hate to say this, but the date break genre, chances are you know, benzodiazepines or benzos or bz, and there's several different kinds of benzodiazepines, and they work there's the slow acting, the fast acting, and the medium. And the slow, the fast, and the medium is not based on how quick they act on the human, it's how quick you can detect them. And so this is important when you're doing drug tests. If you think you've been drugged and there was sexual activity that happened to you, um, most people use slow acting. And so these are CNS depressants, these are usually your seep sleeping pills, and so you get into your restoral, your verset, your helicon. And I, you know, I'm using the name brands because if I say things like um your medazolam, your triazolam, most people, they're not gonna know what I'm talking about. I want to say very clearly, yes, I am mentioning name brands. I am not mentioning these name brands because they do anything wrong or they've done anything wrong, they've developed very nice pharmaceuticals that have a very good place, and I am not talking anything about what this company or companies have done. And as someone who used to work for pharmaceutical companies, there is a very great place for pharmaceuticals. And while in some places I will mention a brand name drug, it is in most places not the only brand name, but just like we will say Kleenex for facial tissue, or we say Vaseline for petroleum jelly, it the the pharmaceutical has done so well at its job that people just switch out the the generic for the brand name. And so I want to make it very, very clear that the pharmaceutical that I may mention by brand name, and in some places I will mention both the brand name and the um the generic just because I want people to know that even if it's not the brand name, it is the same substance, and so I I have to give that just because um I I don't want people to think, oh, it it's not versatile, but if it's Medizalam, it is the same drug, yeah and so I want to say one, there are a lot of benzodiazepines that are very short-acting, and they are used very often for drug facilitated crimes, and they're they will disappear in the body within a few hours, yeah, because at very short half-lives, and so people have to be very aware of that. Like one of the original date rape drugs, uh flanacetram, is a benzodiazepine. Usually speaking, for someone that may not know any um pharmaceuticals at all, if it ends in a zapam, it's a benzodiazepam. And so be cognizant of that. Most benzodiazepams are actually used for um your central nervous system uh depressing. So their whole job is to make it so that your brain and your nerves do not work.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

So that's why they're used for drug-facilitated crimes because it makes it so that your body doesn't work the way it's supposed to. You don't speak, you don't walk, you don't fight. Um, sometimes you don't know where you are. And that's with a lot of sleeping pills, is if you overdose on those, you won't know where you are. And so that's why with a lot of sleeping pills, they come with a lot of warnings that say, take one, take one, do not take more than one, do not mix with this, do not mix with that, because their whole job is to make you sleep, but be aware and conscious so that you wake up. If you overdose on them, which doesn't mean that you're not gonna wake up, it doesn't mean that you're going to have pain. What it means is it may take you longer to wake up. You may wake up and not know where you are or what happened to you. That's what overdose means with a lot of the benzodiazepines. And so that's very, very important because in a lot of those places you have that brain fog, you may not remember what exactly happened to you, or you only know bits and pieces, it's because you may have taken more. Whether you knew it or not, you've taken more than the prescribed dose. Yeah, and I also need to mention because a lot of people, especially when you're talking about college-age people, frat parties, and things of that nature, you may be on this, you know, medically prescribed the way you're supposed to be. You're taking it the way you're supposed to be, but you're taking your drinking alcohol in and of itself is a drug. A lot of people treat it like it's not a drug, it is a drug. Ethanol is a drug, and so when you start taking a benzodiazepine with an alcohol, you're actually making it act more than it's supposed to. You are compounding the effects. So even if you're taking your whatever the way you're supposed to, but if you drank beforehand, or and I will say I'm horrible at this, but I'm not on a benzo, I will take one of my I I know I have to take X, and I will just, I'm drinking, I was just having a bourbon, I'll drink it, take my last shot, my last sip of bourbon with the drug, and I go to bed. You can intensify the effects of said pill because of alcohol. Alcohol is very, very common as a forensic toxicologist and as a forensic nurse and magnetic will tell you this when you're looking at you know fatal cases, you're looking at overdose cases, you're looking at problematic um cases, alcohol is usually on board. Yeah, so and then another category of drug are gonna be your Z drugs. And Z drugs are you normally or usually for um for insomnia, and these are gonna be your non-bizodiazepine and so insomnia drugs. And so they're called or antidepressants, and they're called Z drugs because most of them start with the Z. The only brand name that starts with the Z, and I will apologize, is gonna be Zoloft. Then you have Zopidin, which is Ambien, which Ambien itself they had to reformulate in a certain way because people were seeing the dead chick, the chickens, and they were fighting the chickens, and they didn't remember anything about the big blue chicken. And so that was actually used for drug facility facilitated crimes for a very long time until people started to get injured because people were fighting the big blue chicken. Um, then you have azopidin and you had uh zeppelon. And so those are gonna be your four big Z drugs. Um, anti-convulsants, your gabapentins, your pregabolins, and if I'm talking about what things do, you have CNS depressant, CNS depressant, slash antidepressant. These are gonna move into a different category because these actually work on a specific receptor in your brain. And now we're moving into things that specifically act on a receptor, and the other one is gonna be benadryl. And I have to mention benadryl and what is it? Uh dihac di what is it? It has a name. Crap, what is benadryl? Uh diphytahydrimin. And that one's actually very important. And the reason why it's very important because when you're looking at some of your Z drugs, and specific was yeah, specifically for you, Amanda, when you were talking about cross-reactivity, and so what cross-reactivity is for people listening, if you think you've been drugged, you go to the hospital or you do a self-test and you get one of those 12 panels or 24 panels, six panels, whatever. Because before they send anything off to a lab, they're gonna have you pee in a cup. And depending on what it is that comes up when you pee in a cup, they either are gonna send it off to the lab, they may, you know, blame you, argue with you some more. But for a lot of things, especially for the some of the benzos, they don't actually come up for benzos, they'll come up for what's called a tricyclic um antidepressant. If you're not prescribed an antidepressant, or you and if you are, it becomes even more difficult. So benadryl comes up for TCA. I'm sorry. Um and if you and it also comes up for methadone. So benadryl is actually used for some drug-facilitated crimes because you can mix benadryl with alcohol and it intensifies their effect. One of the things Benadryl does is it knocks you out because it wants your body to stop reacting to whatever allergen you're taking. And so when it knocks you out and makes you stop reacting to whatever allergen it thinks you're taking, it's gonna knock you, it's it's gonna get you down. And most people, when they see a TCA, they'll assume Benadryl. And so they're not gonna act on it because it's Benadryl. People take Benadryl. Benadryl is an over-the-counter, it's very, very common. So it was mentioned earlier in some of the things that Amanda was saying that they used to smoke weed together. Marijuana is actually one of the most common things that's used as a media for drugging, and so is alcohol. So once you get away from the drugs, weed and alcohol that are used, you have other drinks, you have some lotions and some oils. So there are some drugs that really like liquid, like water-based, and then there's some that are oil-based, and so you can't put this oil in a water because it's just gonna float. People are like, What's it in my cup? And then they're not gonna drink it, and so they'll put it in an oil. So if you're with someone and they decide to get really into massaging you at night, there may be something in that oil. So going more into some of the drug tests where you get um compounds that will make you not only more sexually aroused, but also get you real um drugged, you have to look at some of the things like um Evelyn or amnitryptaline, um palore, uh no, palomore, which is noramylitryptamine, and then sequel is a huge one. Um, because SQL is actually very easy to get prescribed for you, and it actually gives you false positives above both on TCA and methadone. Most people see you take methadone, they assume you're in a treatment program. There is a lot of um embarrassment around being in a treatment program, but methadone is considered you getting better, and so they won't necessarily, most patients won't actually necessarily ask if you're in a treatment program. They'll just be like, okay, they must be in a treatment program. So when you start getting seroquil, um they just assume you're in treatment and they don't do anything about it. The problem with seroquil is it is a very good depressant on its own. So, and it's actually a good oil, it will mix with weed, but it won't make it burn differently. Some of the drugs will actually burn differently. And so when you start looking at your drinking something, or if you want to do an oil, if it's not gonna be a massage, and you want to do an oil because the active ingredient in THC, if you remember from weeks ago, is an oil. And so you want an oil to mix with an oil, and it's gonna give false positives because uh seroquil will give a false positive in both TCA and methadone.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

So if it's one of those drugs, that's a really good one to do because one, it's common enough where people won't think anything of it, and two, it actually soaks into the um marijuana leaf very, very well. It won't change the way that it burns. And when it comes up on a drug test, it's not something that will raise an eyebrow real quickly. It won't go, huh? And so a lot of people don't go down that further path. And so one of the side effects actually of seroquil is drowsiness, dizziness, and it actually opens some, it will increase your dopamine, which increases your sex drive. And so when you start looking at things that will increase your sex drive, you think about blood flow, which a lot of you know, GABA receptor agonists will do, a lot of depressants uh will antidepressants will do. And so you get into this place where you're like, okay, so anything you take that's gonna be an antidepressant is also gonna increase your sex drive. That's what it's designed. Well, it's not designed to make you want to fuck, but it's gonna make you want to go that way because it's designed to make you feel happier. And I don't know anyone who's happy that doesn't want to have sex, and so when you start looking at all these things and you're taking several different things, and you know, based on some of the things you were telling me in your story, it sounds like you know, this person was probably using Benadryl, a real easy over-the-counter thing to get, and that will show up in a drug test as something fairly harmless, if not at all. So, and I hate to say this because I am not advocating for people to try to use it. There are some places now as a standard will actually test for uh I suck at drug names. Benadrill. Um and actually, there are some places. I know in some countries it's actually regulated now because it can be used for drug-facilitated crimes. But between that and seroquil, um, based on the things that you were finding in some of your tests, that is probably something that if I were you, I would make sure that they test for. Um, as we're moving forward, there is one thing that we have not talked about, and I apologize because I I did see you crying, and I don't, and I hate that because I I did not want to um go that way, is you know, there are a lot of biases when it comes to drug-facilitated crimes. And one of the things I will talk about when it comes to when you are being fed a substance against your will, there's gonna be withdrawals. There's withdrawals with every single substance that you can take, whether it's alcohol, whether it's coffee, whether it is marijuana, even Venadril, they all have withdrawal symptoms. And, you know, you were with this person for several years, and so you were fed something probably daily.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Let's let's talk about you know, withdrawal if there was one.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Yeah. So the assault happened on the 25th, the near-death experience, uh, the murder, the attempted murder happened on the 26th. I woke up on the 27th, and about 48 hours later, my body started going into excruciatingly painful withdrawals. And I can describe this to a T. And for someone who has never knowingly touched anything other than weed in my whole life, never had a desire to, weed has always been my drug of choice. Um, if you even want to call it a drug. Like I need to, this is part of what I want to get into as well, and the medicinal effects and how I have relied on cannabis to heal from the trauma that I've endured. And um, and then the ways that I have been treated, been been treated like a drug addict by medical professionals, by people, you know, anybody that I went to go run to for help, they found out oh, the some of the things that are, and I have written, you know, things that were in statements and medical documentation and ways that I was treated and ways I was dismissed. And they it was like doctors just heard that, and then all of a sudden, oh, she's a drug addict, and I don't know if I can trust her, and she's having a panic attack. And this was the whole thing. Like, no, I went through whether and like I said, I believe that he was um drugging me with a concoction of something to keep my brain fuzzy, something to increase libido. And then towards the end, like the last six months of the relationship, when we lived together, he had full access to me, and I started experiencing periods of blacking out. And I'm talking about being wide awake. He would make a drink, make a nightcap, we're have the lights on, put a show on. I'm wide awake, ready to turn up. And then I'm out. And I wake up the next morning and I'm naked, I'm wet. Like we had I don't, my God, I don't even remember having sex. And the things again, this is one of the things that I really, really, really Need for people to understand is when these things are happening, um, and I was back in and out of doctors' offices and out of hospitals. I'm going, you know, I'm I'm telling my doctor all of these crazy details of the sex and everything that I'm experiencing. And it wasn't just that, it was um crazy kind of uh tremors, like feelings of electricity going through my body, um, just chronic tachycardia. And I normally, that's something that I want to talk about because I normally stay in the gym working out the pretty much the entire time that I was with him. I couldn't because my heart was just racing all the time. I had this severe onset of vertigo, this crazy, it it wasn't even like the room was spinning, it was like my head continued to spin when I turned over in the middle of the night for like from the pillow. And going anyway, what I'm saying is I was in and out of doctor's offices. I am saying this is happening to me. Can you help me understand? I thought that I had early onset MS. I was being, you know, given referrals to neurology and um brain MRI, cervical spine MRI, all the labs, you know. I mean, I say all the labs, but just trying to investigate these things. I'm I'm going to the doctor, I'm doing everything that you're supposed to do in these situations. Something as amazing as this sex was that I was having, it didn't make sense. I couldn't make sense of it. And I start firing off um emails. I'm I'm I'm a very, you know, have medical background before the interior design, my military career. And so I'll go online and find studies and I'm finding doctors and wherever they were, different countries. I fired off, found their emails, I'm firing off emails to doctors all over the world. Okay. I, you know, I don't understand what's happening to my body. If you have any studies, I don't know if I'm a medical anomaly or whatever, but um, you know, I this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. Yeah. And now going back and looking back at all of these, these were my cries for help.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about that in a very nerdy way. So, you know, to kind of drive home the the point that you were making of all the things that you went through and all of the pain and all the the panels that you had taken and your your strive for justice and you know, quitting cold turkey and what that looked like. I, you know, I want to wrap up with um, you know, one talking about your book and you know, what your fight for justice actually looked like, and you know, because I want to give you a plug. And um, I think we covered everything else, so let's accept uh a few biases about um I guess we'll we'll start with your biases about how most sexual assaults from professionals actually look like sex workers.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Yeah, so that was one of my as a newcomer to soft and I which is a society of forensic toxicologists, yeah, and I I couldn't wait because you gotta understand before I even met you at that conference for the previous 900 something days, I had studied on my own NPS, and um novel cycle active substances, sorry, yeah, and no, no, no. I this is what I've studied because this was like you know, getting into it, and I'm I'm getting into all of this in my book, every detail. You don't if for people who have questions and don't understand how it can happen and how it can go um, you know, missed and this is my story, and this is exactly what happened to me. And the the withdrawals were real, the things that I experienced and the ways that they were dismissed as this is what happens when a woman goes and and you're crying for help and you're you know, you're hysterical because hello, I'm traumatized. Do you not understand what I have just survived? I was drugged long term without my knowledge or consent. I have, you know, that opened the door for even more evil crimes, physical assaults, sexual assaults, um, two attempted murders. I've I've survived now two attempted murders and a near-death experience. And of course I'm traumatized. And the the person that I was three years ago, I probably was I was hysterical, but I was viewed as hysterical, which is what a lot of people are gonna do. They you they see a woman crying. They absolutely do. And instead of getting the answers, so here I am, I'm trying, I'm trying to solve my crime because I did all the things. I I ran to police, I did everything that I was supposed to. I I cooperated, I gave evidence, I got a protective order, I pressed charges, like I'm doing all of the things. I'm being forthcoming with my part in this as well. Like I live in the state of Texas and we were smoking weed and you know, all the ways that that that can be criminalized, right? And so I'm I'm moving forward and I don't care about any of that. Do you like do you not see what happened to me? And going and trying to get justice and continuously being treated like, I'm sorry, I I like this is what I need for people to understand. I was told we're not gonna test your evidence. What do you mean you're not gonna test my evidence? I have a lot of evidence, and you know things are gonna come out in the book where it's just like, oh, you there's no denying what happened. This is exactly what happened. And for police to tell me that, okay, cool. Well, guess what? I don't care how much it costs, I don't care where I got to go to, where do I need to go to a reputable forensic crime to get this done? And was continuously told by police, I'm sorry, I don't know, you're gonna have to figure that out on your own. And that began my journey of figuring it out on my own. And I have reached out when you you want to talk about being resourceful. I have reached out to um Bear County. A lot of labs, let's not name many. Yeah, but I won't, I won't name, but but just the organizations that I have gone to and trying to elevate my story and to get the help that I deserve and and to get somebody to look into this, somebody to investigate this. Bear County Sheriff's Office, Texas DPS, Texas Rangers, FBI, DEA. I I'm telling you, and most of my cries for help have gone unanswered. Which is unfortunate. It's I mean, like not even a phone call back, not even an email back. And it's just this is my life. This is my life, and my life is worth something. I'm still here to tell my story, and I love that.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

And I I actually call it the uh what's her name, Marissa Hardegee heart attack effect, the fact that she was able to get all 50 states to agree to test their rape kit backlog. To me, that's important. And then right after that happened, I'm here in the state of Michigan, in the city of Detroit, they actually formed a task force where they're now searching every empty lot, every vacant home in the city of Detroit for missing women. Like that's amazing. Um, that task force was right after you know that that decision. And I I do know that that was in process before the decision by the by the Supreme Court, but to me, I'm I'm still saying that she was probably part of it because she she has been advocating around this country for years. And I'm hoping that her effect, the Olivia Benson effect, you know, really uh pushes people to not only start testing things, but to reform how they talk to vic survivors. I don't want to say victim to survivors. That that is important to me.