3 hope their pain will shield others
Survivors of sexual assaults as children recall trauma
Her father walked into her bedroom saying he was going to shut off the Xbox.
“He didn’t,” Kayla Cash said. James Pistawka, of Akron, sexually assaulted his daughter instead. “I was 12 years old,” Cash said.
Now 24, she still remembers the night clearly. She says she was shocked and confused. She didn’t understand precisely what had hap- pened but her instinct was to get away.
So Cash ran. Then “I locked myself in the bathroom and waited until he went to sleep.”
Cash is one of three survivors who spoke to reporters from the USA TODAY Network Ohio about the uncomfortable details of their past trauma. The women share two wishes: that people believe children if they disclose similar uncomfortable situations; and that children are taught how to recognize sexual abuse and protect themselves from it if they can.
Cash’s story: From trauma to telling – and hoping to be believed
For Cash, the abuse in her bedroom was the beginning of a yearslong ordeal of her father lying, first to her mother, then all the way through a trial in Summit County Common Pleas Court, where he was convicted.
Cash did not know right away that two of her sisters, one older, one younger – all Pistawka’s daughters – had been sexually abused by their father, too, around the age she was. That first night, hiding in her grandmother’s bathroom, Cash felt alone and afraid.
She called her cousin and confided in her. The cousin told her own mom, who told Kayla’s mom. And Kayla’s mom came to get her at the light of dawn, Cash said.
“She confronted him. She was livid. She was out-of-her-mind mad,” Cash recalls.
Her parents shared parenting roles, though they’d never married, and Kayla’s mom was her primary parent.
After Pistawka defended himself with a lie, Cash said, her mother wasn’t sure the extent of what had happened but recognized Kayla was uncomfortable. “Mom tried to keep me away after that,” Cash said.
Cash told a school guidance counselor about the abuse, and the counselor reported the assault to the police. But when two officers came to her mother’s home, they said there was no evidence of a crime and they couldn’t pursue charges.
Police launch an investigation after all
Months later, a police detective called Kayla’s mom and said he’d learned of similar accusations from her sisters and would investigate.
Still 12, Cash catapulted into a torrent of emotions.
“There was, like, relief, almost, that someone finally was listening,” Cash said. “It felt guilty, because someone else had to get hurt. There was a little bit of hope,” she said, “that we would get him before he could assault my youngest sister.”
Testifying in court as a teenager against her dad
Cash was 14 years old and turned 15 during her father’s trial in 2015.
Her sisters were there with her, and all three girls were comforted by Avery, a therapy dog that the prosecutor’s office had acquired to help traumatized victims.
Still, Cash said she had no idea how hard it would be for her to see her father again.
“Seeing him in court was …” Cash paused and shook her head. “It was jarring.”
And although she’d been coached about what would happen, she felt unsure in the courtroom.
“It was really hard to figure out who was a friend and who was an enemy,” she said.
All the while, Pistawka sat and watched from the defense table, frighteningly close to her, Cash said.
“I remember thinking … he could just, he could take one lunge to reach out for me.”
The trial was grueling. “That is the most physically tiring thing I’ll ever do. It’s just exhausting, mentally, physically,
emotionally,” Cash said.
Pistawka, now 44, was convicted of three counts of rape, plus nine counts of gross sexual imposition and sexual battery. He was sentenced to 15 years and now is in the Noble Correctional Institution in Caldwell.
“It felt like justice for a moment, after I heard the word ‘prison,’” Cash said. “But then, it very quickly turned into, what do you mean only 15 years?”
Cash’s advice to victims: Someone will believe them
Now Cash, of Rootstown, Portage County, advocates for victims’ rights with her story, and she’s a victim’s advocate in the court system.
She still is traumatized by memories of the abuse, her sisters’ abuse and the experience in court. “I don’t think it will ever stop,” she said after a pause.
As part of her healing, Cash changed her last name from her father’s to her mother’s; her husband has taken Kayla’s last name.
She says she’s always wary of her safety and has taken self-defense training.
She is always aware that her dad will be released from jail in 2030. “I don’t know if I’ll have to hide,” she said.
She tried to repair relationships with her father’s family and is close to her grandpa again, she said. But before she and her grandmother could come to terms, Cash said, “my grandma passed away.”
It was a dark time for Cash. “I would go to the movies by myself, while everyone was at work and school, and just sit in a theater by myself and cry.”
Despite all that she’s done to care for and strengthen herself, Cash remains aware that the sexual assault changed her inside. She still has vulnerabilities. “Trust is the first thing to go,” she said.
She keeps moving forward – vowing to change what she can. She hopes that the cultural taboos of child victimization will end with more survivors standing up and more adults believing children who come forward.
“I’m never going to be quiet. I don’t want to be quiet,” Cash said. “If I can change the perspective of one person that is hurt, I will consider it a success. I just want them to know that someone will believe them. Someone out there will believe them.
“And that support will change their lives.”
Survivor Miranda Leboeuf: ‘I was taught that it wasn’t abuse’
In 1992, Miranda Leboeuf was just 7 years old when she faced her father in a courtroom for the first time.
Her father, Richard Decker Jr., was charged in Washington County Common Pleas Court with gross sexual imposition for molesting Leboeuf and another younger girl he babysat.
Leboeuf got on the witness stand and denied the abuse happened because she loved her dad.
“I was taught that it wasn’t abuse; it was love and that me and my father had a special relationship,” she said.
The jury could not reach a verdict. Decker took a plea deal and spent 60 days in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor by giving the other girl alcohol.
Decker would continue to sexually abuse and rape Leboeuf until she moved out at age 18. She would not face her father in court again until last year.
She repeatedly covered for her father to the authorities
Multiple reports were made to law enforcement and children’s services throughout Leboeuf’s childhood and every time those authorities came knocking, she would deny her father abused her.
An adult walked in on Decker sexually assaulting Leboeuf as a teenager, and, even after that report, nothing happened.
The assault occurred when children’s services in Ohio could not interview kids without their parents present. Decker was there for every interview and Leboeuf was terrified of going home with him if she told the truth.
He convinced her to distrust authorities and that life in her mother’s custody would be worse.
“I am the oldest child, so I believed it was my job to keep us three children together and the only way to make that happen was to keep the awful secret,” Leboeuf said.
She also harbored conflicting emotions about Decker – her only parent for a long time.
“Although my dad was responsible for a lot of bad in my life, he was also the only person that ever brought any good into my life and so it was easy for me to focus on the good and ignore the bad,” she said.
Getting sober and confronting her father
On her 11th birthday, Decker began giving Leboeuf drugs and alcohol to better take advantage of her.
A few years ago, she turned to God for strength and was able to regain sobriety. Leboeuf took stock of her life. For the first time, she told somebody, her thenhusband, about the sexual abuse. And she ended her relationship with her father.
But she would need to confront her dad again because a few months later, Leboeuf learned a detective was contacting people from her childhood. The officer had uncovered several of Decker’s victims.
“There was a child that was still underage that was a victim of his and they were around the same age as my oldest child,” Leboeuf said. “And if it was my oldest child and someone had information to help, I would want someone to help. So I decided to participate in the investigation.”
But many victims, like Leboeuf, had no physical evidence. Many of the sexual assaults happened years earlier.
So Leboeuf wore a wire and visited her father. “And for approximately 45 minutes my father spoke with me about it,” she said. “I was really just trying to understand like, why he thought it was OK. Because I know for a fact that he doesn’t consider what he did abuse.”
The recording helped force Decker to take a plea deal.
Finally, facing her father years later
Last year, three decades after the first trial, Leboeuf faced her father in the same court again.
This time, he was facing sentencing for 11 counts of rape he was convicted of involving Leboeuf and eight other victims when they were 5 to 17 years old.
A Washington County judge sentenced Decker, then 63, to 25 years in prison. Leboeuf accepted the plea deal offered by prosecutors because one of the victims in the case was still a minor.
“She didn’t need that extra trauma (from going through a trial),” Leboeuf said.
Leboeuf – wearing all red and a T-shirt emblazoned with #Metoo – read from a prepared statement.
“You were supposed to love me and show me what unconditional love was as a father and daughter. You failed,” Leboeuf said in court. “You taught me to be loyal to you when you never had my best interest at heart. You manipulated me at every level of my life. You broke me.”
Leboeuf hopes her father dies in prison.
Fighting for kids like her
Leboeuf wants Ohio children to be armed with the information needed to report their abusers. That’s why she traveled to Columbus last year with her children in tow to testify at the Ohio legislature in support of Erin’s Law.
“If someone would have taught me a different narrative than my abuser’s narrative, it would have changed everything,” she said. “Had I been taught body safety and the difference between good secrets and bad secrets, it would have changed my whole world.”
Ohio is one of just 13 states that has not passed Erin’s Law, which would require public schools to teach students, school staff and parents about child sexual abuse prevention. Republicans and Democrats have introduced the bill multiple times in the Ohio General Assembly over the past seven years but failed to pass it.
Survivor Sophia Fifner: From teenage victim to advocate
Sophia Fifner remembers all the details. The house was white with black shutters. Inside, there were a couple of couches and a coffee table with several bottles of liquor on it. Dressed in a favorite outfit, she wore faded blue jeans, a pink-and-black striped top and her favorite sweater.
And 17-year-old Sophia, a high school girl, joined friends and strangers in this house for a college party in Gahanna in 2003. There, they played cards, talked and drank. She wasn’t used to liquor. Her strict conservative and religious parents in Pickerington strongly disapproved of alcohol.
When she felt woozy, Fifner recalls, she made her way down the stairs to a dark and musty basement and passed out on a mattress.
She awoke with a man raping her.
“I didn’t have the word for rape,” she said. She felt terror.
“I froze.”
But when he got up, Fifner flung herself off the mattress and charged upstairs. She rushed to her girlfriends to describe what had happened, but they figured she was unduly alarmed. Her parents had never spoken of sex, let alone rape, so Fifner did not know how to define what had happened to her.
The girls all knew they’d drunk too much to leave the party, she said. They spent the night in the house.
Finding the words to explain what happened
In the morning, early, Fifner grabbed her cellphone and punched in the number of a trusted friend. She’d known the girl since the fifth grade, but the two had drifted apart. Still, Fifner felt compelled to talk to her.
“I am so glad I called her,” she said during a recent interview, her voice breaking before she got up to get some tissues.
Because the friend believed her. “She helped me understand that what happened to me was wrong, that I needed help, and that I needed to go to the hospital,” Fifner said. And with sympathy, the old friend swooped in to pick up Fifner and drive her to Mount Carmel East hospital.
Fifner, now 36 years old, says she’s told her story dozens of times. But when she does, she can never be sure when she’ll experience unexpected waves of emotion – and if or when the tears will spill.
At the hospital, Fifner met with a sexual assault nurse examiner for a rape kit. “She was very compassionate,” she recalls.
Fifner gave a statement about the rape and what preceded it. Her parents showed up, and she was afraid they’d be angry, but it appeared they weren’t, though they were concerned, she said.
Trooper tells victim: ‘I think you’re lying’ about being raped
Not long after that day, police called Fifner’s parents and told them the parents of the man she’d accused of raping her didn’t think it had happened, Fifner said. Police asked her go to Franklin County Children’s Services to get a polygraph exam. (Just five years later, in 2008, police, prosecutors and other public officials were prohibited from requesting a polygraph of a sexual assault victim.)
They were questioning her honesty, she recalled: A state trooper who was assigned to administer the polygraph test did not believe her.
“She was (standing) above me,” Fifner said. “She said, ‘I think you’re lying.’ ”
The trooper told her to change her statement, Fifner said, but she refused and left without taking a polygraph.
No one was arrested for the rape. For years, Fifner struggled with what had happened to her.
She went to Miami University and tried to live like other young women in college. She went to a party. But a wave of terror cascaded over her while she was there. Fifner was having a panic attack, and she fled the party feeling ill and in tears.
She can list time after time when the panic set in, including this one about 10 years after she was raped: “I was in Washington, D.C., for a work conference. And we were having dinner. There was a lot of alcohol consumed,” Fifner remembers. “I started to see and feel flashbacks in my mind from the rape. I felt very unsafe.” She excused herself and did not return.
She still experiences setbacks and anxiety, she said.
Seeking justice, being denied because rape kit wasn’t tested
In 2015, Fifner began trying to resolve her trauma within the criminal justice system.
She learned that she was not alone in being victimized as a girl and particularly as a Black girl, because 1 in 4 Black girls will be sexually abused before they’re 18, according to the American Psychological Association.
“I was a Black girl. I was a cheerleader,” she said. Her perpetrator was a white man and a college student, she said.
And when Fifner went back to the Gahanna Police Department in 2015, she said, the police incident report on her rape had misinformation.
She persisted in 2017 after the #Metoo movement caught hold. Again, she sought justice. But again, she was stymied.
“I contacted the Ohio Crime Victim Justice Center to help with my case. They contacted the (Ohio) Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Gahanna Police Department for additional information,” Fifner said. “Unfortunately, the Ohio Crime Victim Justice Center was notified that my (rape) kit was never sent to BCI and that the kit was destroyed by the Gahanna Police Department, according to the case report.”
Finding her voice, sharing her story
Fifner turned her efforts full steam on advocacy for sexual abuse victims, especially Black girls and women. A resident of Columbus with her husband and two daughters now, she has been actively speaking out for girls and women for years.
“I have been a longtime supporter of women’s rights,” she said. “But the catalyst for taking action was my desire to heal. For years, I experienced the chronic pain of anxiety and panic attacks. And my unresolved trauma was impacting my work and my relationships.”
In Ohio, Fifner testified in favor of Marsy’s Law, which seeks to give crime victims dignity and meaningful rights in the justice system.
Ohio voters passed a Marsy’s Law amendment in November 2017 and it took effect in February 2018. In the legislature, the Ohio House of Representatives passed the bill for Marsy’s Law in May 2022, and it was sent to the state Senate, where it’s been assigned to the judiciary committee.
Fifner also came forward to testify in favor of Erin’s Law, which requires public schools to teach age-appropriate child sexual abuse prevention. Thirty-seven states have passed the law. In Ohio, the bill requires child sexual abuse prevention teaching in kindergarten through sixth grade and sexual violence prevention for grades seven-12. The House of Representatives bill passed in 2022 but has stalled in the Senate, with opposition from a conservative lobbyist regarding its content.
Fifner is a corporate philanthropy executive. But when asked what she does, she says this: “I advocate for survivors of sexual assault.
“Because no person should endure this kind of trauma.”