Judy's Miracle (Paperback)

Reviews

Reviewed by Bernie W. - 30 September 2012

Review written by Bernie Weisz, Historian, Vietnam War September 29, 2012 Pembroke Pines, Fl. U.S.A. Contact: [email protected] Title of Review: " Dads Don't Rape Their Daughters, Do They?" Judy Moore’s 125 page book will take longer to read than Tolstoy’s epic “War and Peace,” the intensity is so overwhelming. In fact, this memoir is so excruciating, if it doesn't make the hair on your neck stand up, you have no pulse! The subject matter is highly revolting, right along the lines of accounts of Nazi Concentration Camp victims, witch burning, Christians being fed to lions or Medieval impaling. A sensitive person reading Ms. Moore’s book will find that anything more than small doses of “Judy’s Miracle” at one time to be mind-boggling. A vicarious read is impossible, except for the few tortured souls that have had the courage to write about parental sexual abuse and rape. The uncommon denominator is that fortunately most of society has not shared this experience. The majority of former sexual abuse victims keep a veil of silence about their experiences with everyone, i.e. family, friends, etc., simply because they do not think anyone would really understand. In some respects, the entire subject of a father methodically raping his prepubescent daughters and the children miraculously surviving it, coming back to adulthood somewhat intact and actually carrying on with a conventional life is a feat beyond what the normal person will ever have to experience or achieve. Judy Moore was one of four sisters born to Calvin and Josephine, born innocently in 1960 into a world of living hell. Hailing from La Plata, Maryland, Judy had an elder stepbrother named Charlie and three younger sisters. Gwen, the youngest and most fortunate, would escape the incest. Judy, Daphne, and Darlene would not. For almost two decades, the girls would be subject to the sexual perversions of their father, whom they simply referred to as “Calvin.” Indolent, psychologically conniving and perverted, Judy wrote; “The only thing he seemed to have on his mind was S…E…X.” Within the pages of this spellbinding account, Judy recreates the poverty the family endured, the methods Calvin used to trick the girls into sexually abusive situations and his sick methods of hiding it from his wife, Josephine. Forced child labor, sexual slavery and incest whirl around Judy. When Calvin would make a play for the other girls, Judy would offer herself to Calvin, stepping up to the plate as a protective sacrificial lamb. How did Calvin, from aged three to early adulthood have the ability to convince these girls to comply with his sadistic immoralities? Judy elucidated; “He was unbelievably skillful at figuring out what a kid wanted and then used it for his evil purposes.” Growing up “dirt poor,” Judy describes a miserable childhood of torture and paternal debauchery. Episode after episode of rape, fondling and vice is graphically described by the author. Hurting for fatherly love, it is a true tragedy that the author actually asks the reader; “Dads don't rape their daughters, do they?” Judy would become the main target of Calvin, whom her current husband Neil succinctly labeled in a scathing “forward” and an indignant “afterward” as a “psychopathic predator.” In the mists of this degeneracy, Judy attempts to covey to the reader her martyrdom: “Even as young as I was, I knew what he was up to and would sacrifice myself to him, hoping that he would leave my little sisters alone. It didn't work.” In an aberration of familial debauchery, Judy’s following comment shows the depths of a mentally ill father run sexually amok; “It was as normal to me as playing with dolls or games of hide and seek with the other kids; that is until I got older and started to realize just how sick and perverted it was.” Only Neil, her second husband, would help her lead a life relatively free of shame and guilt, hence the title of this book. Things would go from bad to worse. As an adult Judy would be attacked by a delinquent rapist. After she could not convince the authorities to convict this hood, he was set free. After learning that her defiler went on to rape and murder a young mother shortly after Judy’s attack, her guilt was magnified. History is full of incidents of rape even on a mass scale. Most recently, the Japanese behavior in Nanking, China, where Nippon forces in 1937 raped an estimated 20,000 women and killed a quarter of a million innocents. There is also the Soviet conduct in Post W. W. II Europe, particularly conquered Berlin. In May of 1945, victorious Russian troops raped an estimated two million female Berliners, regardless of age or infirmity. Even more recently were the Bosnian Serb “Rape Camps” where from 1991 to 1999 an estimated half million Muslim and Croation women were sexually tortured. While there is no way to measure one atrocity against another, the raping of a fathers of his daughters appear to be one of the most abhorrent. Putting it in perspective, Judy lamented in her depersonalization the following comment of a forever lost childhood; “I felt as if it was all a dream, or as though I was watching a movie about someone else’s life.” Neil most succinctly summed up fathers that rape their children as follows; "sick individuals praying on the weak and vulnerable." Questions as to how the abuse ended, what happened ultimately to Calvin and Judy's truly miraculous recovery from this horror must be read to discover this!