Julie learned that I worked in Nashville as a reporter for the ABC station, WKRN, and she asked me if I knew her father. How could I not? He has an absolutely wild story. He and I talked about doing a documentary about his story. I need to work on documenting my OWN story so I passed and brought a bunch of his stuff to Julie when I met her in Myrtle Beach.
Then I found out that her story is actually every bit as compelling as her father’s. If Julie had her way, she would have killed a man. She did her best to stab him in the jugular with a pair of scissors. When you hear this story, I promise you that you will be pulling for Julie.
She did a short bit in prison over that. Then she did something I’m not sure I ever would have done. She called the man up and made amends to him.
That man held her captive, bound and trapped in a box under his bed. She had run away from home and trusted a dope dealer to take care of her. Instead, he kept her as a slave. She had already endured multiple sex assaults starting when she was nine.
Most “true crime” frames tragedies like Julie’s with predictable cliches. There’s the innocent victim, the evil villain and the heroic rescuer. Julie is a bit of all three.
Her wild ride included prison in NC, boosting a car in NY, stripping in SC, becoming a kind of madam in GA and ultimately bottoming out hooking on the streets of ATL. The most amazing part of Julie’s twisted story is that she is alive and happy and clean and sober and she helps tons of women in the U.S. and Europe with their own journeys of recovery.
I asked Julie to paint me a picture of what she looked like when she finally picked up the phone and called a true friend in recovery and simply said, “Come get me.” She said she weighed less than 100 pounds. She wore thigh-high boots, a push-up bra, black bicycle shorts, and had hair teased “out to here” (she says as she holds her hands about two feet on either side of her head).
She is not the same person. She has been transformed through the healing, restorative power that I do not pretend to understand. I just marvel at it. I’m just in awe.
DON’T MISS JULIE’S STORY AVAILABLE @MANLISTENING PODCAST THIS THURSDAY.