The untold story of how the Catholic Church abuse of Trevor Martin led him to Taylor Swift
Deanna Hampton flips through a photo essay book her son Trevor created as a high school project.
She stops at a page dedicated to Trevor’s first girlfriend, Abigail.
The photo shows Abigail looking adoringly at Trevor, a mop-headed teenager who won pole vaulting competitions and could become lost in art projects.
“Our relationship didn’t last very long,” Trevor wrote. “I broke up with her.”
Deanna then looked up from the photo and revealed a surprise.
“Taylor Swift wrote a song about their relationship and breakup.”
Abigail, Trevor and Taylor attended high school together in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Abigail and Taylor remain close friends.
At a May concert in Nashville during her wildly popular “Eras” summer tour, Swift paid tribute to Abigail.
“I feel like if I give you one piece of information you’d know exactly what song I was about to play,” Swift told her adoring fans, hinting that the song is about her “beautiful, redheaded high school best friend.”
The song she sang that night, “Fifteen,” describes Abigail dancing around her room at that age, in love for the first time.
“Fifteen’s” most consequential line is, “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind, and we both cried.”
The boy is Trevor, who at the time was still keeping a terrible secret about what had happened to him when he was a child living in Calaveras County and attending Mokelumne Hill Church.
Trevor Martin would later say he was repeatedly sexually abused by a priest, Michael Kelly, who fled to Ireland in the midst of a criminal investigation. Kelly is the subject of a Sacramento Bee investigation that probes how he has managed to escape prosecution.
Though known to many “Swifties” for her friendship with Taylor, Abigail is a private person. But, told the details of The Bee’s investigation, Abigail said she was opening up because she wants “justice for Trevor,” and for other victims of childhood sex abuse not to feel ashamed.
Abigail told The Bee that after their breakup, she and Trevor reconnected and became close friends.
“I think about him every day.” Swift’s country pop-song “Fifteen,” which she sang at the Grammys in 2009, inadvertently captured something complex and tragic, although neither Taylor nor Abigail had any idea at the time.
Deanna Hampton knew something was wrong. She just didn’t know what.
She recalls while still living in California trying to break through to her troubled son.
“All Trevor would say was, ‘Mom, something happened to me.’
Did something truly terrible happen? Or was it tween angst?
“No matter how much I plied, he would never go further than that.”
Trevor’s older sister, Melanie Tuscher, also recalled how her brother would disappear into a dark world.
“You could get so close to him. And then that darkness would hit. And he would shut off, and none of us knew how to explain it in our world,” she recalled. “My mom and I, neither of us could have imagined that what happened happened.”
Recently divorced and not knowing how to deal with a troubled Trevor, Deanna decided that a change of scenery would be good. The family moved to Hendersonville, where two of Deanna’s sisters lived.
It was there at Hendersonville High School where Trevor, Taylor, and Abigail’s lives collided.
“I was two years older, so I didn’t pay that much attention,” Melanie remembers. “There was just this redheaded girl and blonde girl running around our backyard.”
Deanna also remembers.
“They were all really close for a time,” she recalls. “It felt like this beautiful breath of fresh air for Trevor.”
Deanna remembers the time Taylor and Abigail pranked Trevor by climbing through his bedroom window to wake him up one morning.
“I loved him from the first day I met him, “Abigail said of their initial connection. “He was unhinged, not in a destructive way or an angry way, just how free he could move in this world. To me at such a young age, it was, wow, uncharted territory.”
Melanie recalls that side of Trevor as well. “He had a very generous, sweet side. My brother could walk into any situation and make people feel comfortable. He could be a very strong, free person.”
But like so many victims of abuse, Trevor had a hard time maintaining romantic relationships. In Abigail’s words Trevor “freaked out” and distanced himself from her.
At the time, Abigail says she couldn’t understand.
“‘Why today?’” she asked herself. “‘Why not yesterday? Is it me?’”
Now she knows.
“The fact is, he was processing so much trauma. And to be processing that silently on his own while trying to navigate an intimate relationship with the first person he fell in love with. … No wonder he wasn’t able to give all of himself.”
Sitting underneath a metallic work of art Trevor created, Deanna says she loves that Abigail and Trevor’s connection at 15 was captured in a Taylor Swift song.
“Whatever 15 love is,” she said, “he got to feel it. I’m so grateful for that.”
An artist of universal appeal, Swift has taken on social issues in her songwriting, tackling the topic of child abuse in another song. The critically acclaimed “Seven” from her 2020 Folklore album weaved ethereal images of childhood with adult reflections of a friend she later understood had been a victim of domestic abuse.
“Fifteen” remains special to Abigail for a variety of reasons.
“When Taylor was performing it on her tour in Nashville, to see the whole stadium singing every single word, that was really a beautiful moment.”
Abigail, now 33, thinks the song resonates because “you talk to anybody, and everybody remembers their first love, right? Whether it was a beautiful thing, or it was incredibly heartbreaking. We have these people in our lives. Regardless of how many people you’ve dated, there’s always that one person that made an impact. And Trevor was my impact.”
Still, Trevor never shared his abuse story with Abigail. She did not know that Trevor testified in front of a grand jury at age 20, or that he was devastated that his abuser had fled to Ireland and was living freely, despite being indicted for crimes against Trevor.
Abigail only learned of the abuse after Trevor died in a base-jumping accident in 2016. Deanna told her in an emotional phone call.
“To be honest, my first reaction was I was mad at him because I had shared everything about myself with him. He was there for everything. He’s the first person I would call. We would talk for hours and hours.
“And he let me in on all of his, except for this one.
“And so the first thing I felt was, why couldn’t we talk about that? And then I felt shame for having that feeling. Because this isn’t my trauma.”
Abigail told The Bee that she hopes other victims of childhood sex abuse learn from Trevor’s courage in speaking out, and from the pain that the shame caused him.
She wishes that Trevor had opened up to her more.
“At least he would have known he doesn’t have to process this alone,” she said. “Nobody’s going to look at you like you’re broken. I’m sure as hell not gonna look at you like you’re broken. I’m gonna wrap my arms around you even more.”
She also hopes that coming out about the context behind the breakup in “Fifteen” will help someone else who is struggling.