A 63-year secret, and what made her share it

Roy Moore is a victim, he assures us. The target of a Democratic plot to paint him as a child predator. This, after accusations surfaced that he once molested a 14-year-old girl and pursued three other girls, ages 16 to 18. This week, three more women have come forward, saying Moore molested or pursued them when they were teens.

“To think that grown women would wait 40 years ... to bring charges is absolutely unbelievable,” Moore said.

Jan Shone is a victim, too. A real one. She doesn’t find it at all unbelievable that women would wait 40 years to tell their stories.

She’s waited 63 years to tell hers. “I’m 66,” this grandmother of six tells me. “I’ve never told.”

Moore’s belief that decades-long silence shows the women must be lying prompted Shone to invite me to her Chandler home. The only person she

has ever told — besides her father — is Lou, her husband of 47 years. Even then, she never told the ugly details.

“We didn’t tell. No one believed us,” Shone said. “But not a day goes by that I don’t think about the things that happened to me.”

Shone says she was 3 or maybe 4 years old when it started, during visits to her grandparents who lived nearby in Southern California. She remembers often being left alone with her grandfather, who proceeded to take his pants off and tell her she needed to clean him.

Apparently, there was only one part of his body that needed cleaning, which would continue until he, well,

you know.

She recalls that he kept a jar of soap nearby for her use, and an empty coffee can for his.

There were games as well: searches for quarters in his pants (read: not his pockets) and another game involving marbles. Enough said.

“Then he’d take me to the store and I could pick out whatever I wanted,” she told me.

Shone says she wound up with a lot of accessories for her Barbie dolls and a lot of resentment for having to visit her grandparents.

She can’t explain why she didn’t tell anyone. She doesn’t know.

She suspects he threatened her into silence, or maybe she was just too young to understand. She does recall once, when she was 7 or 8, telling a cousin that her grandfather didn’t mind being seen naked. Her grandfather was furious when he found out and told her that was private, just for the two of them.

Their “special time” ended when she was 11 or 12, and still she didn’t tell.

“You think it’s just you, that you’re the only victim,” she said. “You don’t think, ‘Gee, I’d better tell someone, because he’s probably molesting other little girls.’ You don’t think like that. At least, I didn’t.”

She was 17 when her father came into her room one night and shut the door.

“He said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but the police are coming to arrest your grandfather,’ ” she recalled. “The people who live in the house behind them swear he’s been doing things to their little daughter.”

“I said, ‘Um, I’m not surprised.’ And the look on my dad’s face. He said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I’m not surprised. He did a lot of things to me when I was a little girl.’ It didn’t go any further. My dad didn’t ask me what or anything.”

No charges were brought then, or later, when other neighbors called to say her grandfather was standing naked in a window. (She would later learn that he was taken to a psychiatrist to have the behavior “scared” out of him.)

Shone said she was her in mid-20s when her father finally told her mother. That led to a furious phone call from her mother.

“She said, ‘This is all a bunch of lies.’ Then she hung up,” Shone said, recounting the call. “That’s pretty much the last closeness we had.”

Shone went on to have a great life, raising her own children and enjoying her grandchildren. Jan and Lou are retired now, living half the year in California and half in Arizona.

But the experience of being molested? It’s never far away, she says.

It’s there in the family relationships she lost. It’s there in the guilt she now feels about remaining silent all those years ago. Might another child have been saved had she spoken up, she wonders.

And it’s there in the betrayal she feels. For decades after her grandmother’s death, she wore her grandmother’s wedding ring. It was a gift, she said, and a connection.

Then, 11 years ago, as her own 5-year-old grandchild was visiting, she suddenly realized that her grandmother would always find an excuse to leave her alone with her grandfather, whether it was to take a nap or to go shopping.

“My grandmother had to have known,” she said. “Why would she have disappeared at all the perfect times? Always. I took that ring off and I gave it to Lou, and I said, ‘This is a family heirloom. It should stay in the family, but I don’t want ever see it again. Ever.’ ”

Roy Moore may think a woman’s long-held silence means she’s lying when she finally speaks. Jan Shone can tell you that silence broken doesn’t equal deceit. That silence is the result of experiences that leave victims unable, for whatever reason, to speak.

And she’ll tell you that those long-ago experiences never fade away.

“People say, ‘Oh it was 40 years ago, it was 63 years ago, and it ends,’ ” she said. “But it doesn’t. It doesn’t ever end.”