Trigger warning in effect for child sexual assault and rape.
While I know some people on National Siblings Day have it worse than I do, I think it’s still valid to recognize that I’m in a tough situation when it comes to my siblings.
Well, one sibling.
From left to right: Me, Cassy, and Ray on Ray’s first wedding, 2008.
It’s so interesting to look back on the last decade and see just how bad things got before they came to a head with my brother. It’s interesting because it felt to me like he was given all the opportunities in the world, all the care and attention from our grandparents, all because he shared a name and birthday with my mom’s dad.
I am the youngest of three siblings. My sister, brother, and I all share the same biological mom, but have a biologically different dad. Yet, my dad adopted Cassy and Ray when he and Mom got married, and we were raised as siblings. Nothing ‘half’ about it.
My relationship with my brother was always tense and volatile. He always needed to be right, and therefore I never was, and it infuriated me. He would walk by me and punch me on the arm and make me scream. Mom and Dad told him countless times to stop hitting me, but he still did. And I always thought it was just a brother thing.
Here comes the really serious part - I believed it was also a brother thing when he told me he wanted to have sex with me.
I won’t detail the manipulative things he said to coerce me, or the downright lies he told to make it seem like it was a normal thing that happened between siblings. What I will say is that I will forever be a survivor of sexual assault. And I will forever feel guilt that it took me nearly 20 years to begin to speak out about what he did to me.
I was 12, and he was 16. And it was after that I began to notice all the things he did that made my stomach uneasy. I started hearing stories about my brother. All from girls who had been weirded out by him. This became prevalent in high school when I met several girls who told me they hoped I wasn’t like my brother.
“Yeah, he’s annoying,” I would say. Or, “No, I’m nothing like him.”
It turns out, I was just as annoying as he was, but in different ways. See, he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer when he asked them out. And as my sister and I have talked in these past years, there wasn’t a single girl we knew that Ray didn’t ask out. Both in her grade and mine, and everywhere in between.
Ray at a family birthday party somewhere in the early 2010s.
When I looked at pictures of my brother before, I thought I just saw a really annoying guy. But situations arose as we grew older that made me realize he was not simply annoying. He could be dangerous, to others and to himself.
He and his first wife divorced after a year or so, and both of them said the fight got physical. He said he was just trying to stop her from hitting him. She said she was trying to defend herself.
Some time after, when a girlfriend of his wanted to break up with him, he punched a wall instead of her. Then he said he took a bunch of pills, so she called the police and he went into the psych unit. Cassy and I visited him, and he essentially acted like nothing was wrong.
After he was married a second time, he and his wife got a dog, Chewie. (See my blog post about this story: https://www.chriscolebooks.com/blog/chewies-choice)
When Ray and his second wife decided on divorce, he also became suicidal then. We took him to the emergency room, where he claimed everything was fine. My sister and I looked at each other in shock, but we didn’t say anything.
The next day, he voluntarily committed himself after feeling like he was going to self-harm at his job as a sous chef.
As I was looking for photos, I realized it’s very obvious that my relationship with my brother wasn’t good. We didn’t spend time together (or at least get pictures of our time together) after I got married in 2016. And even at the wedding, I made a choice - my sister was one of two witnesses to sign my marriage license, and one of two people to do a reading.
A photo of Cassy and me outside my apartment.
My sister and I have almost always gotten along. I don’t remember any major fights with her growing up, and only one fight with her as an adult. We see each other every week for a family hangout (obviously made virtual by the pandemic) and now that we’re both vaccinated, we’re looking forward to more time together.
My sister and brother, however, had as strained a relationship as he and I did, but for different reasons. She had a hard time keeping female friends because he wouldn’t leave them alone and stop asking them out.
However, we were raised with the idea that family is family. Blood is thicker than water and all that. So when Ray wanted to marry a former classmate of mine in middle school that I had actually dated, he asked my sister to be a witness.
But when he called me, he asked if I wanted to hang out. I said I was tired and wanted to spend time with my husband. He said okay.
I found out the next day that he’d actually gotten married that night. When I told him I was offended he didn’t invite me, he said he did, but if I didn’t want to hang out with him, that meant I obviously didn’t want to be there to see him get married.
I’m still angry about this, because it is such a clear and deliberate attempt at manipulating me into acting a specific way so he can be assured he has my support.
I spent less and less time with him as we grew up, and when he moved 45 minutes away, it was a nice excuse to see him even less and speak with him even less. He was aware of this, and any time we did speak, he would complain that mom never called him, and when he called her, she complained he never called her. He said a phone works both ways.
I tried to explain that it’s just how we do things in our family. The kids check in with the parents. He said Mom obviously didn’t support him because she always seemed to criticize him. I said she also told me when she thought I was making bad choices, but I actually listened to her advice (sometimes) when he usually did the opposite of what she said, and things usually went to hell.
His third marriage was rough on everyone. This was when he first got in legal trouble for slapping his wife’s six-month-old baby from a previous marriage.
His wife, not wanting to think her husband did it, accused my sister and brother-in-law’s son of hitting the baby. My sister and brother-in-law were called in for questioning the next morning around the same time Ray finally admitted to it.
Well, he didn’t say, “I did it.” He said, “my sister didn’t, my brother-in-law didn’t, my nephew didn’t, and I was the only one there, so I guess it must have been me.” See how that works? He took zero responsibility but claimed all the victimhood.
His third marriage was spent mostly separated from his wife. Until she became pregnant. It seemed like they were going to stay together and have a baby together when the unthinkable happened.
Ray met a girl, they hit it off, and he slept with her. She then revealed she was 16 years old. He continued to engage in sex with her, knowing it was illegal.
Furthermore, he took video and pictures of them having sex, and sent them to a female friend in California.
How he finally got caught? He told on himself to a veterans group member. The member talked to the leader of the group, who contacted law enforcement.
Ray’s mugshot.
My brother’s name was splashed all over the local newspaper. He was on the evening news. News that I used to work for.
https://www.idahostatejournal.com/members/local-veterans-group-member-arrested-for-alleged-sexual-battery-with-teen/article_9c737362-36f5-5ad5-b02a-c4aa596054c6.html
https://www.eastidahonews.com/2019/02/man-sentenced-to-prison-after-bragging-about-rape-of-teen-girl/
Luckily, it seemed like my former coworkers either didn’t know we were related, or knew and didn’t want to reach out to respect my privacy and the privacy of my family. Either way, I’m grateful.
Since he’s been in prison, he’s been determined to place blame at other people’s feet. He blamed my parents for (in his eyes) being abusive growing up. He blamed the girl because she was apparently selling herself online to other guys at the same time she was with him. He blamed his lawyer for not doing a good enough job defending him. He even blamed the guy who turned him in, and said it was absolutely disgusting that he was reveling in it.
Not gonna lie, if I turned in someone for statutory rape, I’d be happy about that as well.
It’s been since 2019 that he’s been in prison. I’ve tried to communicate with him, as has my sister, and our parents. But when his parole hearing came up, it was very obvious he still hadn’t learned anything. We wrote letters. Mine essentially said he needed more help than jail could provide, but he also still felt no guilt about what he’d done. He only felt bad that he was suffering consequences.
I also included a brief description of what he’d done to me when I was 12, and said that I still felt guilty about not saying anything sooner. If I had, perhaps he would have gotten the help he needed.
At his parole hearing, he used language like, “I unfortunately created a victim,” and focused a lot on what he was experiencing in the prison system. He did talk about the programming he was going through, and said he felt ready to rejoin society.
No mention of his son. No mention of the word regret, or sorry, or anything.
It was shortly into his prison sentence that I told him I wanted to be estranged from him. That I felt it was best until he could change. His reply was that we both had to earn trust back. Uh-huh. Sure. He’s still contacted me since then. I didn’t answer when he called.
Things changed again when I finally told my parents what he’d done when I was 12. They came unglued on him.
As it stands now, only my mother will take his calls, and it’s because she simply can’t fathom not talking to one of her children. I’ll never understand the pain she’s gone through with all this.
So, what do you do when you have a sibling who has caused so much pain to so many people, not just in your family? I honestly don’t know. But I know that I celebrate and cherish the relationship I have with my sister.
Cassy and me. I don’t even know where we were when she took this photo.
I love my sister. She works hard, she’s raising two amazing kids, and she married one of the best guys I know. She struggles with her own health, but always tries to make time for family.
Essentially, I feel like we’re a family of four. And I have to say, deep down, that I will always care what happens to my brother. But that doesn’t mean I need any active part in his life. I refuse to let myself be manipulated by him again, or feel lesser than him. It wasn’t until I cut contact that I actually felt more sure of myself, more confident, and less like I was crazy.
So, Happy Siblings Day to both of my siblings. My sister is in my life to remind me of how wonderful it is to have such an amazing friend in a sibling, and how important family can be. My brother is in my life to remind me that no amount of shared blood means I need to put up with abuse, manipulation, and the effects of poor decisions made by someone else.