Life after Graham James—a child sexual deviate

I am quoting part of this article word for word from an excerpt from Greg Gilhooly’s book “I am nobody” in 2011, as part of hockey coach Graham James’s plea deal with the Crown (prosecutor) related to other sexual assaults of young players, the charges relating to Greg Gilhooly were stayed. Gilhooly then decided to have his identity publicly revealed. “I may still have been nobody, but I would be anonymous no longer.” This article is an adapted excerpt from his new book, a’Life after Graham James—a child sexual deviate Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole my Life” that was published this month is an adapted excerpt from the book “I Am Nobody: Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life” by Greg Gilhooly. Published by Greystone Books Ltd.

Greg Gilhooly suffered in silence, and anonymity, for decades after meeting the notorious hockey coach and sexual predator Graham James. Gilhooly, now a lawyer living in Oakville, writes about the battle to get justice for other abuse victims and reclaim his own life.

PLEASE NOTE: I have added some words to this article for easier reading plus my own thoughts on this particular topic since I was the victim of two male sexual predators when I was also a child. I have described those attacks in my first volume of my memoirs (Whistling in the Face of Robbers)   Further, while I was studying criminology for five years at the University of Toronto, I also studied Abnormal Psychology and was taught that subject for a year as part of that criminology program.

The additions I have placed in Greg’s story as told by him in this article will be my own and will be in italics and now—Greg’s fascinating story.

What is it like to be groomed and abused by a serial child sexual abuser and to try to survive the abuse and the aftermath? How does it happen? Why can it happen? What can we do about it? My book, I Am Nobody, is about all of that.

Graham James got me when I was a boy, a young man. But I’m a lawyer now. (I was a boy when I was sexually abused and now I am a retired criminologist)

As a mature adult who is familiar with criminal law, Greg has an informed concept as to how serious this problem is.

Abuse can destroy a person, and child sexual abuse it is nothing short of the murder of a child’s soul. It should be treated as such. Unfortunately, in Canada, it isn’t. There are too many of us #MeToo victims out there. Enough is enough.

Sexual abuse is about much more than the actual acts of sexual abuse. Coming out of the abuse, I had no self-worth. I thought I was responsible for what had happened, that I was broken, defective, that I had wanted it all to happen, that I must have liked it. I must be a horrible person. I must be weak. And so I didn’t believe that I deserved to live, let alone succeed. Yet I wanted to live and I wanted to succeed.

Those two opposite forces lived within me. Ever since the abuse started I had been at war with myself. I would try so hard just to be me, then I would immediately set out to tear myself down. The real me was good. I was a nice, talented, responsible, and respectful person. I could succeed at the highest level in sports and at school.

I was the first in the family to go to university, and not just any university, but Princeton.(My mother and I both went to University)  I skipped a grade in school and could have skipped more. I was at the top of my class, (I failed in elementary school three times) and I excelled at hockey and was a recruited athlete. After Princeton, I combined the demands and stress of law school at the University of Toronto with the commitment required to play hockey for the university’s storied Varsity Blues. And yet nothing was ever as good as it seemed, as easy as I could make it look to others.

I didn’t rush to pick up my paper. I knew I had done very good work. I knew that whenever I did the work, I was among the best. I know how awful that sounds. But the scoreboard inside my head was fine with things, knowing that I had put in an effort. A friend eventually grabbed my paper and handed it to me. I got an A-plus.

I followed that up with A’s on my research papers for small group. As at Princeton, I had shown immediately not only that I belonged but also that I could succeed at the highest level. But you already know where this story is going.

I don’t deserve this. I’m a fraud. The person you see trying to look normal isn’t real. The real me is a failure. You want to see failure? I’ll show you failure.

So, me being me, that initial success immediately triggered a self-destructive response. I stopped going to classes. I stopped caring about school. I started to seek out ways to hurt myself. I explored Toronto and found it to be a most suitable place for somebody looking for ways to numb the mind, the body, and the soul.

In contrast to Princeton, where I had roommates, a campus job, initially a sport, and a social structure that all required me to go to great efforts to hide my self-abuse.  At law school I was on my own that first year, living by myself in a rooming house. That room became my safe place, where I stared at the ceiling and revisited the past, where I tried to make sense of what had happened and was still happening, and then tried to forget about it all.

I had so very little back then, a mattress on the floor of the single bedroom I rented, a desk, a chair, and an old dresser. Nothing on the walls. It was all I needed to get those early great grades, and it was all I needed as I slipped further and further into hell. I could stay there in my room and nobody, nobody at all, would care. And I did stay in that room. And nobody cared.

I would emerge for classes that interested me and for social events I thought would be fun, but I was having a harder and harder time engaging with the world outside my room. Self-doubt, the feeling that you’re a fraud, the fear that people know you’re a fraud, is debilitating. I wanted to hide. The more I hid, the less able I was to go out, because it had been some time since I had gone out. The fear of going outside grew. Withdrawal, living like a hermit, increasingly became my new normal.

I had less and less of the outside world and its reality to counter the reality playing out inside my head. The more I isolated myself, the more strongly I believed that I was a fraud. I spiraled deeper and deeper downward into depression, isolation, and the reality inside my head that kept me from engaging in life, until I just didn’t leave my room, other than for brief trips to go to the corner store down the street, for about two weeks.

In my room I was all by myself with nobody to speak to, nobody to care about, not even myself. I wasn’t lonely. I was where I needed to be, away from all of the energetic students with things to do. Oh, I wanted to be with them, but I needed to be with myself more. With them I had no control by myself so nobody could hurt me. The isolation was intoxicating. The things I took to go along with that isolation, they too were intoxicating. I lay on my mattress, closed my eyes, and the world disappeared.

To get to that point I had to line up my supplies and the juxtaposition between the panic and stress of being out and about in the living city and the serene isolation of being in my own room was immense. In my room, I could drift wherever I wanted to go. In my room, I was the supreme commander of my affairs. In the real world, I was terrified every single waking minute. I would lie down on my mattress on the floor and wonder what was happening.

Why can’t I just get over it and move on? Why can’t I just accept that it happened, that I am still me, and nothing can ever change that? But what does that mean? The real me walked back to him over and over again. The real me is somebody who craved his attention, who got jealous when I thought he was with someone else. The real me is somebody who couldn’t make it stop. The real me is somebody who hates himself for not being able to stand up for myself. The real me is somebody who wanted it, who needed it, who needed him. The real me is worthless, somebody he could just walk away from at the end. The real me is nothing but his discarded garbage. The real me wants, needs his affection, his protection. The real me misses him. The real me misses his attention. And that is one of the scariest things I can ever admit.

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But I am much stronger than I sometimes give myself credit. I was able to eventually pull myself together and get myself out of bed and back to school. I just willed myself to push through it all and get myself going. I just knew that I needed to keep trying.

There were days when I would make it to the bottom of the stairs and then have to go right back up to my room. There would be times when I would get to the subway station and then go back home. I started making a game out of it, something I could win. I would promise myself that if I could make it to school. I would treat myself with this or that item of food, a chocolate bar, a meal at McDonald’s.

Food, always an issue with me, continued to be a coping mechanism, but I had figured out how I could use it to both make myself undesirable and safe and try to re-engage at school. As always, if I couldn’t control anything else in my life, I could always control what I put in my mouth, as well as what I would throw back up out of it. Bingeing, purging, gorging — it all helped.

And that’s another thing about living on the Danforth—the markets are open 24 hours a day.

A good binge and purge required some planning and execution. When I was planning and executing, I wasn’t thinking about him. I always started with a good liquid base, usually a large bottle of Diet Coke, although not all upfront. It provided good lubrication, more than enough flow for the purge, and had the added benefit of being acidic and thus assisting with the breakdown of whatever I inhaled.

The feelings you get when you’ve ingested that amount of food and drink are intense pain and a need to purge. Your body is actually telling you it’s at serious risk if you don’t get rid of everything you’ve ingested. The faster I could get out of my room and down the hall to the shared bathroom the better. A shared bathroom in the rooming house was potentially problematic, but not as much as the large shared facilities at Princeton had been. Here all I had to do was chart an appropriate time when others were out at work or, if that wasn’t possible, explain that I had the stomach flu again.

The sense of relief on purging that pain, on successfully making myself throw up, was indescribable. A sense of accomplishment at having planned and controlled everything at every step. Knowing that I and nobody else had caused my body that pain, and that I and nobody else had brought that subsequent pleasure. It’s my body, not his, and I, not he, will do whatever I want to it. “Purging that pain.” On some twisted level, it kind of makes sense now, doesn’t it?

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I engaged socially whenever I could, and my peers would probably even say I was well liked and popular. As long as I was strong enough to put on the figurative mask, hide what was really going on with me, and confront the world at large, I was fun to be around. The emotional late bloomer I had once been was now somewhat more mature than most of his peers, having had experiences most of them could never have understood.

Whenever I showed up, I greatly enjoyed law school. I found the subject matter fascinating, especially given my circumstances. It was an interesting perspective to have while sitting through a criminal law class, delving into the proper way to approach sentencing. (I studied criminal law at the U of T for two years and like Greg, I found it interesting.)

The thing that struck me most was how easy it was for academics to diminish or ignore the victim, for while the cases are studied as historical disputes between contrasting legal principles that emerge to develop “the law,” the teaching of the law seldom, if ever, mentions, let alone focuses on the victims. (I am one of the precursors of the United Nations Bill of Rights for victims of crime)

It is a most inhumane way to look at things. The victims in all these cases were real people. Who were they? How did they live? How did the crime impact them? What were their struggles in the aftermath?

The legal system as taught when I was in school removed the victim from the equation. Thoughts of vengeance quite properly have no place in our judicial system. But at the same time, my peers and my criminal law professor seemed unable to consider that there were real people, victims, behind every case, and that there are indeed monsters among us for whom no sentence could ever be enough.

That is the end of Greg’s statement as published recently in the newspapers.

Now I am going to give you my thoughts about how Greg felt after he was sexually abused by his hockey coach.  First of all, the abuse wasn’t just done on one or two occasions. It was done quite often. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t escape from the deviate. That is a story in itself that bears retelling but I would rather let him tell the story in his own words. 

In his statement that was recently published in various newspapers, he spoke of loneliness and about how he felt as a human being.

The sexual assaults committed against me weren’t as often as the sexual assaults committed against Greg.

I was fairly successful in putting the memories of those sexual assaults against me by my father and the head of a group home I was sent to into the back of my mind. When I was twelve, I was sent by the Legal Aid in Vancouver to a number of other group homes were boys were placed. While in Vancouver, I failed in school for the third and last time that I was in elementary school. The reason for my failures had nothing to do with the sexual abuses I had endured.

My life as a young teenager was interesting after that. I had much more on my mind than reliving my life as a victim of sexual abuse. I am not faulting Greg for the way he handled himself as a former victim. Everyone has different ways in which they handle themselves as victims of sexual abuse.

Surprisingly, lack of self-confidence is not necessarily related to lack of ability. Instead it is often the result of focusing too much on the unrealistic expectations or standards of others, especially parents and society. Friends’ influences can be as powerful or more powerful than those of parents and society in shaping feelings about one’s self. 

There are many understandable reasons why children do not seek help at the time of the abuse. Abusers often scare children by threatening to retaliate or by insinuating that the child will not be believed. The abuser may also confuse the child by implying that the abuse is the child’s fault. Comments such as “You asked for it,” “You were all over me,” and “I know you enjoyed it” are often used to blame and to silence the child. Sexual abuse of a child can never be the child’s fault.

For whatever reason, if the abuse is not dealt with at the time, its damaging effects will still be present years later.

I will deal with self-esteem. Questions will often come to a victim such as:

1. Do I often feel that I am not a worthwhile person?

No victim of sexual abuse should ever feel that he or she is not a worthwhile person. It is the abuser who should feel that way.

2. Should I feel bad, dirty, or ashamed of myself?

That would depend on two possible scenarios. If the victim purposely placed himself or herself in a situation where that person suspects that he or she may be a victim of such abuse, then the person should at least feel ashamed. For example, a young woman who traipse about in front of a man while wearing scant clothing is really asking to be sexually assaulted.

If on the other hand a victim is unaware of the risk of being sexually abused by a pervert and subsequently is assaulted sexually, that person has no reason at all to be ashamed as to what happened to him or her.  

This raised a quandary to both me and Greg and millions of others. We knew from the first assault that we were going to be sexually assaulted again. Why then did we not run away?  Both Greg and I were for some of the time living with our abusers. Where would we go to escape? What would we do if there was nowhere we could go to escape and no one available to help us? Millions of children world-wide are faced with that very problem. If a child is in that situation, he or she should not feel ashamed at all.

Greg had another problem that forced him to stay with his abuser. His abuser was also his hockey coach and if he left the coach’s home, his coach would abandon Greg and his career in hockey may have been severely curtailed.

3.  Will I have a hard time getting my mind back to being normal again?

The answer to that question is yes to some degree. I am 84 years of age and I can still remember every detail of what happened to me by those two sex deviates when they sexually abused me as a child.

The way to shove the memories of the sexual assaults out of the forefront of your mind is to get involved in as many things as you can. Your mind will subsequently be crammed with ongoing events that will shove the bad memories further away from your current thinking. I have spent my entire life being involved in many activities and occupations so I really didn`t spend that much time thinking about what happened to me when I was a young boy being sexually abused by two sex deviates.   

Unfortunately for Greg, his experiences with Graham clouded his mind to the extent that it literally interfered with what should have been an active life for himself. Instead, he kept himself from others and ended up being a very lonely man.

He said in part in his book, `”In my room I was all by myself with nobody to speak to, nobody to care about, not even myself. I wasn’t lonely. I was where I needed to be, away from all of the energetic students with things to do.”  

He said he wasn’t lonely. He was kidding himself. Anyone who spends a great amount of his or her time in a room when he or she could go out and meet people, is a very lonely person. I know because I was once in the same situation as Greg however not because I was sexually abused as a child. It was because I didn’t have any friends I could visit at that time in my life. I eventually found many friends and I have never been lonely after that. 

The devastating effects of sexual abuse do not need to be permanent. Victims can heal.  They have already survived the worst part—the abuse itself. They have choices now that they didn’t have then. If they choose to commit to their own healing process, they should have patience with themselves and let others support them along the way.  They can learn that it is possible not only to “survive,” but to experience what it means to be truly alive.

Sex abusers should be punished. The day after my father sexually abused me, he left his family, our home, our town and even our province. I didn’t call the police because it would have come down to my word against his word. I never told my mother after she returned from her sister’s home many miles away because she would be saddled with guilt. To her dying day when she was ninety-one years of age, she never knew what my father did to me. It was something that I had to keep to myself. She did learn however half a year later that the man who operated the group home that she sent me to had been sexually abusing all of us boys. I chose not to talk about the abuse he submitted us boys to and she didn’t press me for the information. I think she did however feels some guilt because it was her who chose that group home for me to live in. 

As to the owner of the group home I was sent to, (His last name was Bates) I don’t know what happened to him. Many years later when I was visiting North Vancouver, I went to the place where his home was situated. The house was gone.

I sincerely hope that Greg has gotten over his horrible experience with that child sex abuser as I have with the two deviates who sexually abused me. The best way to keep these terrible experiences that Greg and I and  tens of millions of other persons world-wide who were also in the forefront of all of our minds (as I said earlier in this article) is to move on to better things.

I have been married for 41 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren and I have visited 30 countries and done a great many things during my life times that I truly enjoyed. I never nor will I ever let those two deviates clutter up my brain with those bad memories they both subjected me to.  I hope Greg and other similar victims put those bad memories at the back of their minds and enjoy life the way they should.