Helen will say that all I ever cared about was money.
She will present herself as the victim.
This has always been her narrative. It is also false.
What I cared about was having a life.
I cared about my passion for skiing, my friends, and the possibility of a future — maybe even a family.
I cared about being protected when I was hurt.
When Helen was injured, she demanded care and attention, and I gave it — despite her ongoing yelling, hostility, and abuse toward me while I was trying to help her.
When I was hurt, she sent me away to recover alone in convalescent and refused to see me. Not when I arrived on the plane, not when I was healing. Not once.
She demanded empathy while offering none.
Above all, I cared about working — about building something meaningful, about dignity and independence. These were not values Helen supported. They were things she actively undermined.
The felony I was charged with and ultimately plead to was a plea Helen coerced me into. It arose from a confusion surrounding a $150 dinner. Through cruel, manipulative, and violent means, she pressured me to plead to a charge that would not have stood up in court. She told me that if I did not comply, I would be nothing to her and could walk home from the courtroom, as she would report the car stolen. I was in college and financially dependent on her at the time.
At the court hearing, she was not there.
She destroyed my hopes for a future.
It destroyed my life as I knew it. The life I could have had.
This was not an accident.
It was not a misunderstanding.
It was control.
Later, Helen threw away my skis — the material objects that mattered more to me than anything else in the world because they represented who I was, what I loved, and what I had earned for myself. On those skis, I earned an invitation to train with the U.S. Ski Team in Chile. She never allowed me to go.
Instead, she did everything in her power to ensure I would never ski again after receiving that invitation. She even yelled at me for trying so hard and said she just sent me to ski camps to get rid of me in the summers and on weekends. In the off-season that year, she removed me from our mountain home and told me I would never ski again. I was never given the chance to say goodbye to my friends, my coaches, or the sport that had become the bedrock of my life — and my sanity in an insane home.
At the same time, she gave Jessica, my sister, a home worth over $1.5 million so Jessica could have dogs. I have never received anything from Helen. Only a car which I moved into after I graduated high school when I was 17, as the time she was still collecting child support. She even refused to put the car in my name, but my trust ran so thin, I said I would sleep on streets if it wasn’t in my name. That is the only time she ever relented on anything. I slept in that car for a year before going to college, on a full ride academic scholarship.
Jessica, my “sister”, was a person who tormented me throughout my childhood.
A person who threatened me with weapons.
A person who injured me so severely that a knife penetrated my skull.
When I tried to get help — when the police were called because I had a knife hanging out of my head — Helen yelled at me for allowing a police record to exist. At the time, she had three boyfriends and openly bragged that it was “her time.”
Jessica was rewarded for tormenting me. She did so relentlessly. In Helen’s own words, she “hated me for being born.” That is not an instinct one is born with - it is taught.
She protected the abuser.
She punished the victim.
When Helen treated my mother-in-law like a servant, I tried repeatedly to stop it. My wife did as well. My mother-in-law did as well. When the behavior continued, they left the trip early.
Helen responded by saying she had removed me from her estate — something I had not even known existed — and that the money would instead be given to Ed and his family.
Helen then disappeared from my life for five years while I was going through a divorce and needed emotional — and some financial — support. Despite being thirty at the time, the felony she had coerced me into meant I had only been able to work for only one year of my adult life. I had no savings and only minimal income for someone starting out in life, with student debt accrued during the years I could not work but still needed to survive while in graduate school.
For nearly a decade prior, job applications could legally require disclosure of a felony and all of them did. I received not a single response from over 200 applications submitted over nearly a decade.
Removing the felony was not easy, and it was never fully removed. Later, when I received an offer for a $200,000 per year job at Citibank — after passing all background checks, being cleared to work, and leaving my prior job — they realized they had never run fingerprints. I never started. I never received a call on my start date. If it had not been for widespread pandemic assistance in 2020, I would have been homeless.
Earlier in my life, while still in college, I broke both of my arms. I had no help. Helen refused even to see me, to care for me, and sent me to convalescent home to heal. Years later, when I broke my shoulder, there was again no help.
I endured those injuries alone.
After five years of no contact in my thirties, when I saw Helen again, she was drunk and complaining about how she had broken both her arms — and later her shoulder, on the same side as mine — and how it had affected her golf game. Listening to her complain about not being able to play golf, as though this were a great loss not only to her but the game of golf itself and deserving of monumental sympathy, this made me physically ill.
What disturbed me was not her injuries. I would not wish those injuries on anyone — not even her.
What disturbed me was the contrast.
She pleaded for sympathy for the same injuries I had endured without care, while remaining completely oblivious to the cruelty, indifference, and outright attacks she had directed at me during those same moments in my own life — including dismissing my injuries and taking my sport from me entirely.
For the first time in my life, I felt no empathy for someone who was suffering. That realization made me sick. I had never experienced that before. I felt like her — and I was disgusted by that realization.
I have never believed karma to be a punitive force. But if it exists at all, it revealed itself there. If I am honest, I felt a small sense of vindication — not because she was hurt, but because her suffering finally mirrored what she had denied me. It was nothing I ever wished for, but the irony was impossible to forsake
The night before, when I saw Helen for the first time after five years, she approached me, hugged me, and said she “loved” me — this was in front of Ed, her new husband and I felt immediate revulsion. The gesture was not for me. It was a performance for him.
I have no memory of ever being genuinely embraced by her or cared for in anyway. I remember being yelled at, belittled, and hiding in my room to escape her, but never ever feeling safe near her. So that embrace made me physically ill. To this day, I have never felt so violated — not even by police officers who later assaulted me while falsely claiming I was resisting arrest. I was not. Even after five-years of not seeing her, her first action was to use me for her benefit – to lie – fake love, to fake care, and to do it at my expense.
To this day, I tense when I hear a garage door open, because that sound once signaled that her rage and abuse were imminent – she was home. I even cringe at my own name, which is why I changed it.
Helen enjoys a comfortable life.
She lives in a nice home.
She eats well.
She is supported.
Everything she has comes from money extracted through child support and lawsuits.
She is constantly involved in litigation.
Her stability has not come from sustained work, contribution, or care. It has come from court orders, settlements, and money taken from others through coercion.
She speaks as though she earned her life.
She did not.
She built it on family destruction, legal pressure, and the suffering of children, while presenting herself as morally superior.
When I told Ed where her money came from, Helen showed him false documents. The facts are that Helen received $1,800 per month per child, plus additional benefits, courte settlements, and legal fees, and still extracted additional benefits to pay for things for his children Helen refused to.
I want to add one final concern. Ed — a person I once liked and respected — has struggled with alcohol use for years. I believe Helen exacerbated that problem rather than helping it.
Now, as Ed struggles with dementia, I am genuinely concerned for his safety and well-being. Based on my lived experience with Helen, I fear that he may be vulnerable to the same patterns of control, manipulation, and abuse that defined my own childhood and adult relationship with her. I am not asserting what happens behind closed doors. I am stating concern — grounded in history — for a person whose capacity to protect himself is diminishing.
There is nothing I find redeeming in Helen.
She lies to her husband.
She lies to me.
She lies to the world.
Worst of all, she lies to herself about where her money came from — money built on the suffering of children she abused or allowed to be abused.
Helen is not a victim.
She is a liar.
A thief.
And a fraud.
She has four offspring. None of them speak to her.
There is so much more that could be said. I will just say one last thing:
If you enter the home of Ed or Helen, you enter a home paid for by Helen’s womb, you drink from that same source and eat from it too. That is the truth of the matter.
Everything in this letter is a fact.
It is time for the truth.