Gynni laughs with an air of comfort, sharing her harrowing childhood with a practical stranger. “After a few years of mostly mental and verbal abuse, he and my mother came up with this idea for ‘family time.’ Basically, they would get my sisters and me together and have sexual education and exploration orgy sessions. It started with real light stuff, but it got … bad … very quickly. This went on for several weeks, sometimes two or three times a week. … Then that behavior started to spread to everyday life. My step-father would make me wear my mother’s lingerie and walk around the house. And if they thought we were bad for whatever reason, we were whipped on the back with a belt, stripped down and tied to a bed. … I later found out that my sister got the brunt of it. My step-brother was raping her in addition to everything else. One day my step-father decided I needed to learn how to perform [a sexual act]. But I couldn’t do it. I started gagging. So my mother did it, like it was supposed to be a ’learning experience.’ But after that, I don’t think she could go through with it any more. It just all stopped then and there.”
A couple years later, details of this came out to a family friend. The friend began to pry for more information about what had happened to these girls. When it was all told, Gynni’s mother and step-father were arrested and sentenced to 20 years in Texas prison, where the family had relocated just years prior. They remain behind bars today. Gynni was institutionalized, or put in “the system,” as she calls it, bound for a teenage of bouncing between foster homes.
“For so long in the system, I was such a bad kid!” she claimed. “I was always getting into fights and instigating stuff. I was in this one home when I was 13, and there was one Crip and one Blood living there as well. And we sort-of formed a little power triangle. We were always sneaking out or inciting violence. There were fights all the time. I was close to going to juvenile lockdown at several points because I was so out of control. … Then there was the date-rape situation.”
Gynni recounted how this particular foster home, one of about 10 she saw between the ages of 13 and 18, allowed “host families” to move in to a separate part of the house, but were otherwise off limits to the girls living there.
“Well, this one host family had a 16 year old boy. He was 3 years older than me. And he was just as bad as anyone in the foster home. … One night, when I was sneaking out of my room, going out the window to do who knows what on this huge, 11-acre ranch they kept us on, I thought I’d go around to the other windows to see who else was awake. Well, I tapped on this guy’s window thinking it was his older brother, a friend of mine. But he was the only one awake, so we both snuck out and spent the night out on the ranch. We ended up in the back of a utility van, and before I knew it, he was raping me. When I told the directors of the [foster home], it just made everything worse for me. Everyone liked him, and a few days later he had to move. The issue was never addressed in counseling, nor was the perpetrator charged, nor was any restitution provided.”
One problem with foster care, says Gynni, is that when a child is told to relocate, they have hours to days to pack all their belongings that might not reach their next destination with them. On most occasions, there was no time for saying good-byes or collecting information in order to keep in touch. “Every time the state moved me, I lost everything. All my toys, my clothes, my friends. Over and over I was stripped of everything I had. It just became a way of life. It made me very rebellious and angry. When I was 16, I began to utilize the counseling resources given to me after my repressed memories came back to me. It was like a horrible movie. I just kept seeing flashes of what my mother and step-father did to me, and I didn’t know how else to confront it.”
However, in this hardship she had an unexpected intervention from two people she insists God put in her path.
“[Names withheld] were so great to me,” said Gynni. “My court advocate and lawyer, between the times I was 12 until I got out of the system at almost 17, truly saved me. They were there for me when nobody else was. They were the only real family that I had ever known, and they became lovers after meeting while working on my case.”
Gynni insisted that TNC not publish their names, due to the fact that her court advocate and lawyer are both women and rather well-known in the Dallas area. “Their presence completely turned my life around,” she said. “And when I was 17, they adopted me! I had been thinking about asking them to do it, but I wasn’t sure if they would. When I finally asked, the immediate answer was ‘No way!’ I mean, I didn’t realize it at the time, but in order to do that they would have to come out to all their co-workers and bosses. It would have been a lot to ask of anyone. But a couple weeks after I brought it up, I found out that they went ahead and started the legal process. They came out to all of their associates and friends, but most of them knew it anyway. Still, it was a big leap of faith, and they did it all for me.”
Within a short amount of time, Gynni’s life took its first turn for the better. She spent her senior year in a public high school, living a normal life in the suburbs of Dallas. “It was like a dream come true, and I could never thank them enough,” she said. “My behavior improved. My attitude completely changed. Everything was just how I had always dreamed it would be. I had a normal life for once: loving parents, a beautiful house, a great group of friends at school. It was everything that I never got to experience my whole life.”
At 19, Gynni got a job at The Nelson Center in Denton, a non-profit treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. She worked in the girls’ wing, giving hope to those who were in the same place she had been for so very long. But it was not easy.
“The Nelson Center had its share of problems at the time, though they’ve since changed administrators and taken steps to reform,” she said. “Back when I worked there, some of the staff would mistreat kids and throw them around. They called it ‘take downs’ and ‘required restraint,’ but it was really just abuse. There were a lot of fights, sure, but most of the girls looked up to me because I had been through it and done something positive with my life.”
Little did she know, she was about to have an encounter with destiny.
“One day, as I was sitting outside of The Nelson Center, a bunch of girls were brushing my hair,” said Gynni. “It was strawberry blond at that point. I don’t know … I thought it was kind of cute. But then I saw Chris for the first time, and I just froze.”
Chris walked out on the patio where the interview was taking place and sat down on a chair across from Gynni, placing her feet in his lap, massaging her toes between his thumbs and index fingers.
“Yeah, I saw her out of the corner of my eye and we just locked gazes instantly,” he said. “I kept walking and she just stared at me. But I had to go back to work. I was just on a cigarette break. So the next time I saw her, I let my hair down and you know, kind of walked back and forth trying to get her attention while not acting like I was, ah, trying to get her attention.”
“He was so cute!” said Gynni. “I saw him a couple times after that. Turns out he and I both worked at The Nelson Center; he was in the boys’ wing, and I was with the girls’. Finally, I just had to go talk to him, so I made up some excuse to go off the wing when I saw him at the front desk out in the yard. The first thing I said to him was, ‘Nice hair, man!’”
“Gynni is such a strong and beautiful person,” said Chris. “After she came and talked to me just once, we were instantly drawn together. We spent almost three days just talking and talking. It was amazing.”
Then, a strange twist of fate brought them together permanently. Gynni was living in Denton at what she called “a Fry St. flophouse.” Her roommate, unbeknownst to her, was selling a variety of hard drugs out of her apartment. Once, when Chris was visiting, her roommate said some things about her that concerned him greatly.
“He was calling her all sorts of things, saying stuff that I knew couldn’t be true,” said Chris. “So I told her what he’d said, and she was furious.” When Chris and Gynni went to the apartment, they discovered a multitude of college-age druggies strewn about the small living-quarters.
“I went inside and asked Chris to stay in the car,” said Gynni. “I confronted my [expletive] of a roommate, and a fight broke out. I ended up having to restrain him, and I was pretty surprised that I could do it. But I took him down, and left the apartment. I haven’t looked back since.”
Chris offered Gynni a place to stay while she got her living situation back in order. A few weeks later they became romantically involved. Within two months, Gynni discovered she was pregnant with their first-born son. She was 19 years old.
“It was just crazy!” she said. “Here I was, in-between apartments, and I had just met this guy. Well, we get to talking over all that time we spent together …” Gynni looked at Chris and grasped his hand. Chris looked up and smiled. “Turns out we had very similar backgrounds, dealing with childhood sexual abuse,” he said. “She and I helped each other to deal with our issues. I felt complete, and for once, I knew I wasn’t alone in this.”
Nine years later, Chris and Gynni are happily married. They have a boy and a girl, Caleb and Liberty, and live in a cozy enclave in Denton, where together they run Building Block, both working as advocates for abused children.
“It was such a rush, and it hasn’t always been easy,” said Gynni. “It was instant everything! Instant love. Instant future … Instant family! When I really sit and think about it, I can’t believe that I’m here, now. But that’s just one of the funny ways life works out, you know? My experiences made me want to be a good mom, but I had very few examples of healthy functional families as a kid. I spent much of my free time researching this issue as a teenager, in order to break the cycle of abuse, which people in the system had implied I was predisposed to perpetuate. And Chris, being in the same boat, has been figuring it all out right along with me.”
Today Gynni is employed at a Montessori school in Denton , working with children. Chris and Gynni serve as two of the founders of Building Block, and Chris has published two highly acclaimed books, making a name for himself as a child safety activist, author and journalist. They serve as amazing examples of people who made it through the pain and despair of childhood sexual abuse, and work to bring that message to others now where they once were.
“Its is just amazing to me today that we can move on and overcome anything, and turn around to help other kids who know all too well the feeling of being abandoned after such terrible abuse,” said Gynni.
“You know, every day I’m thankful that Gynni and I met,” said Chris. “From the first time I saw her, I knew there was something special about her. … Not too long thereafter I had delivered my two beautiful children with my own trembling hands. And here we are.”
“If we can overcome, anyone can,” said Gynni. “We know we love each other, and now we have every reason to bring that message of hope to those forgotten kids who think they’ll never make it out of the system. Abuse is not the end of the world, for us or for them.”
