Landa Mauriello-Vernon
An account from Crosses: Portraits of Clergy Abuse by Carmine Galasso
My name is Landa Mauriello-Vernon. I'm thirty-one years old. When I was seventeen year's old I attended a private all-girls academy in Connecticut.
During my senior year I was sexually assaulted by one of the nuns, who was my religion and morals teacher. It started the summer before my senior year when this nun took us on a trip to Greensburg, Pennsylvania to work at a camp that the sisters ran for children with disabilities. She talked to me a lot about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. She had convinced me at that point that maybe entering the convent was for me. I'd just broken up with a boyfriend and when you're seventeen and had your heart broken, it's pretty easy to convince you that a life of celibacy and working with everyone's children would be better than a life outside the convent walls. It seemed very safe. She did warn me not to tell my parents that I had decided to do this. I called them from Pennsylvania and told them and my mom said, "Over my dead body'.
It was at that moment that she was right and my parents became wrong. She was very good. She knew that would be the reaction of my parents and she knew that would cause a wedge. And it did. She would give me books to read about how to raise my self-esteem and how to become a better person because she told me how weak I was and that I needed help. It was this constant game of mind-twisting that she did that enabled her within weeks to start using sex against me. She had isolated me from my friends and my family at that point.
She became my best friend.
I don't know how the actual abuse started. The sex part of it anyway. She would take me into a conference room that was right outside her classroom - in a very isolated part of the school. And so no one was there. It would happen during school hours, after school hours. It didn't matter. But we would go into this conference room and talk about one of the books that she'd given me, um, and then one day she just started wrestling me. And I ended up on the ground with her on top of me. And she would just, she would just stay on top of me until she would eventually orgasm. And she had. I was pinned down. I couldn't move, and that's pretty shocking. Especially for me because I was seventeen, um, but seventeen, even in 1972 was different than now where sex wasn't talked about very much. And I wasn't very aware, I guess, of different types of sexual behavior. I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea. I just knew that I didn't want anyone else to know about it.
And I never spoke of it. Ever. And she didn't speak of it either. She would just get up and go either on with the conversation or right out the door to go to prayers.
Once-a-week, twice-a-week, four-times-a-week.... It just depended on her mood, and on my mood, I guess. She was very good at reading if I started to feel strong. She was able to quickly knock that down.
My parents: of course that relationship continued to go down hill because I would become more sullen and more angry at them. I would go into this deep stare sometimes.
During the time of the abuse I started actually cutting myself with my nails. I would... and I usually did it on my upper legs where no one could see. But I would just pinch or scratch or dig holes into my legs. And, you know, my mom at one point noticed and sent me to the doctor because I had given myself a staph infection. But no one could figure out, you know, no one could figure out how I got these holes in my legs, and I never, ever told anyone.
My parents tried really hard. They went to the principal of the school, another nun. My dad went over and over. Five, six, I don't know how many times and said, "We want her kept away from our daughter. She's brainwashing her."
My parents actually went to the provincial of the order. And they said, "Look, we're not signing the papers. We want you to keep this nun away from our daughter." And the provincial looked at my mom and said, "Why don't you just let her enter the convent and we'll take care of her from here?" And I think my mom looked at her and said, you know, "Over my dead body."
I did not enter the convent. My parents would not sign the papers.
They sent me to Eastern Connecticut State University.
I called every night, crying. I didn't know how to live outside of the abuse anymore. When I didn't want to feel things I would make myself bleed. I would pinch myself till I had holes on my legs, on my face. I destroyed my body.
I would drive to the school and then I would sit in the parking lot because I was having panic attacks at that point. I just couldn't walk into a classroom without, I mean, feeling like I was actually having a heart attack. And so I dropped out. I just couldn't do it.
I was able to get a job waitressing at a country club. I knew I wasn't going into the convent and at that point I had no relationship with the woman who abused me. I met two girls and I remember one of them saying, "We're going to be really great friends." I remember thinking, "Oh I just don't think so." I didn't want to be great friends with anyone.
They saved my life.
I started to understand what it was like to have friends my own age again and started to meet guys again. They started teaching me how to be normal and I was - for a while.
I had gone to therapy and I thought I had kicked whatever the depression was. And it sounds silly but I just thought, "Well, you know, I'm depressed. I have headaches." I never thought to say, "For a year of my life there was a woman in a habit on top of me, um, using me for her sexual pleasure." I didn't deal with that.
In January of /94, I went back to college and that's where I met my husband, Brent.
I think anytime you have a boyfriend, girls start to lose weight. But at that point I really started to lose weight and I started to lose very fast: and that was when I started to deal with my eating disorder. And I think I went from a size twelve to a size six in six months.
In my engagement pictures, I mean, I'm a size four, and my hair was falling out. But I was still looking to lose weight! I actually thought that I was being healthy. I thought I was doing something good for myself, losing weight. And, you know, I think I could have gotten to a size zero and still thought I needed to lose weight.
We moved a lot in the first few years of our marriage. Just kind of following his job. And that was miserable for me. I started to put weight on again. My daughter, Alea, was born in May 2000. And that was pretty much when all hell started to break loose. I missed my family. Just panic. So we moved to Rhode Island because we felt that was close enough. And, um, I don't know, Alea was almost two at the same time that the scandal was hitting in Boston. Cardinal Law was the big topic of conversation and that's when I just was devastated by the effects of my own abuse - sitting on the kitchen floor just crying and knowing I wasn't going to survive it anymore.
I knew that I had to get help that day. Or that Alea would grow up without a mom. I started therapy in Rhode Island. I just felt so ashamed, like, why didn't I say "No"? Why didn't I walk away? Why did I keep going back to that classroom? And you actually have to know in your head, you have to learn it - that it wasn't your fault. And as much as I would say to anyone else who told me a story of abuse. "Oh my God, you could have never... it wasn't your fault." But when it's your story, you're like, "Yeah, but I should have known". I mean, how did I miss that? How did I? How did I let that happen?
The fact is that there was no way our power was equal. She was a teacher. She was a nun. She used to say that she would represent the avenue that I could get to God. She was going to help me become my best self. I mean I grew up with anyone wearing a habit or a collar as just holy! You never, ever, questioned.
The next step was telling my family what had happened.
I remember the look on my mother's face - my dad's face was just angry. You know, my parents were victims of this, too. And my sister. And now my husband. The kids.
What bothers me about the whole thing is not really the abuse because you'll never stop people from becoming sexual predators. We'll never stop that. But the worst thing about the whole thing is when a leader knew and they did nothing. We need to listen to our kids. We need to watch for signs. And now we know. What we didn't know ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, we do know now. And there's no excuse for not calling people out on what they've done.
The girl that was best friends with her before me entered the convent, the girl who was best friends after me entered the convent, and I just don't think that in the early nineties you had that many girls going into a very small convent in Hamden, Connecticut that weren't pressured.
And still to this day, where I consider myself, you know, in full recovery, every once in a while you think, "Why didn't I see it?"
Why didn't I know it? Why didn't I just knock the crap out of her and walk out of the room?
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