Soren Daniel Hayes Trauma Narrative Versions 1, 2 & 3

Posted on August 27, 2026September 21, 2026 by Alice Fawcett

Before reading Soren’s trauma narrative, start with my May Substack article: “The Boy With the Keyblade — The Trauma Narrative of Soren Daniel Hayes.” It unpacks the bizarre, tragic lore of Soren Daniel Hayes and the narrative ahead won’t land without it. Consider it required reading before we go any further.

To briefly summarize: Soren Daniel Hayes (Aliases: fawnsyndrome, shyfawn, sicklefawn, hurtc0re, faggotuglyhfukcingdickballs, umbillicalnoose, necrochotic, necromutilomania, oathful, Dark Link The Assassin, androeciums, sacrificalis, oathful, soratoys) was a female-to-male transsexual Indian orphan adopted by a wealthy, progressive white couple on the Pacific Northwest coast. This self-insert fanfiction, which other Tumblr users colloquially branded Soren’s “trauma narrative”, went through three revisions during its circulation. It followed him through years of histrionic performance and online manipulation. That indulgence followed him to the end. After post-operative complications from a phalloplasty, Soren died by suicide.

A word on the piece itself

When I published that May article, I linked a Moebox file throughout the text for those who wanted to read all 3 versions of Soren’s Trauma Narrative compiled into a single document. But now that I have my own WordPress blog, I’ve decided to archive the entirety of the “Trauma Narrative” here for permanent posterity. And let me be absolutely clear (lest there be any confusion) I did not author the preceding work of fiction. I want to emphasize that this is fiction, as in not real. It is the self-insert headcanon of an incredibly isolated, mentally ill young adult. That said, it’s honestly not a terrible read. Soren wasn’t a bad writer though a bit gratuitous at times, perhaps, but not without a certain raw talent.

Available with the downloads at the bottom of the page is the following extra content: an Instagram screenshot gallery of the third version, and a single master compiled trauma narrative with annotated notes on the key differences between versions—including Kayla’s death, Mousy (added in V2, absent from V1), and Kimberly (present in V1 and V2, absent from V3).

Original Trauma Narrative (Version 1)
Revised Trauma Narrative (Version 2)
Final Trauma Narrative (Version 3)
Trauma Narrative Download – PDF, eBook Format **Extra Content Included**

Original Trauma Narrative (Version 1)

Hello, i have decided to post my trauma narrative here….my heart is beating really fast but i’m trying so hard to be open & honest & my blog has always been a coping mechanism. I know i risk a lot with this, people saying “i dont believe you” or just being mean. Please be kind. i dont wish for anyone’s sympathy, i just want to put it out there & maybe help other people. Ive posted pieces of this before but this is the current most complete one.

my name is soren. i am seventeen years old. i was adopted at six months old. i’ve always been close with my mom. i think that’s important to say. i’ve never had many friends but she’s always been there, for the most part. her and my dad have never really gotten along well. it is sad and frustrating. it was in preschool that i realized there was something not right with my body. i was not like the other boys, my parents dressed me in skirts and kept my hair long. i learned my body was that of a girl’s. i was scared to ask my parents as i always possessed a buried fear that they would view me as strange and send me back to the orphanage. when i was eight, i was close with a girl named jessica. she told me her father molested her. i was scared, so i told people. things were confusing for a long time. she didn’t like me anymore. it was okay though, i like to think the police fixed things. when i was nine, i moved to seattle and i was diagnosed with clinical depression. i met a boy named danny and a girl named sam. we became inseparable. they were my best friends in the whole entire universe. sam had animals for everyone she loved, danny was a lion, i was a fawn, and she was a wolf. so there we were. they introduced me to music that would stay with me forever, my chemical romance, joy division, crystal castles, hole, the smiths, etc. we smoked cigarettes together, played in the forest, and made flower crowns. danny and i huffed paint thinner in his dad’s apartment and he told me that he was born with a birth defect, that people labelled him as “transgender” but that’s not what he was, he was a boy, he was not “transitioning” to or from anything because he had always been a boy and that was that. i had struggled with the exact same thing since early preschool and when he confided in me, i told him i was a boy too and was scared i was gonna be trapped forever. they started calling me “sora”, the name of the main character of our favorite video game instead of my birth name and danny cut all my hair off.

a few weeks before my tenth birthday, i went to spend the night at sam’s house. i was very much in love with her even though we were only children. we had even kissed already. i felt very grown up. she was very tall and she had these blue blue eyes. that afternoon, we were playing kingdom hearts in her room on an emulator on her computer. her father came in and he started to scream at her and i was scared. he called her a whore. he started beating her with his fists. in the face. over and over. the theme of destiny islands, sora’s home was playing because the game was left on in the background. she just coiled into herself and let him hit her. she fell on the floor. he kicked her, said something, and walked out. i didnt know what to do. i was frozen. she didnt move. i reached out and touched her shoulder. she had such a bony shoulder. she rarely ate. i felt it moving and knew she was crying. i moved the hair out of her eyes. she said go home. and i said no. she tried again. i said i wouldnt leave. i took her in the bathroom and washed off her face. she was so pretty. i brushed her teeth because there was blood in her gums. i wanted to kiss her but knew it was not a good time. i sat down on the bathroom tile because i was secretly scared to go back out but didn’t want her to know. she came and sat down next to me. i let her put her head in my lap and she layed down and pulled her knees to her chest. she was shaking so i knew she was crying again. she didnt want me to know that she was scared too. i leaned down and put my lips on the top of her head and combed my fingers through her hair. i knew her eyes were closed so i thought i could lie to her. i said that we were on a boat to destiny islands. and she said yeah? and i said yeah, we’re almost there. we’re gonna get married under the paopu tree. she said she was excited and could feel the boat moving. i rocked her back and forth a little to make it seem more real but i started giggling so i think she knew i was lying. but she didn’t care. that’s why i love her so much.

we went back to her room and she let me sleep in her bed with her. she held me very close and i could feel her breathing against my back. when i woke up, i couldnt feel her next to me anymore. i looked up and her father was standing over me. i realized his eyes are the same as hers and that made me very sad. he took off my clothes so i didnt feel like a boy anymore. i tried not to cry because i knew sam wouldnt cry. another man, jason, came in with her. she was not wearing any clothes either and i didnt want to look because i loved her too much. there was a bag over her head and her hands were tied behind her back. and that was the beginning. rape is a very vile word but it is what happened. i held sam’s hand. he put a gun inside me and then held it to my head, told me he was going to kill me, but when he pulled the trigger, nothing happened. it was just a game to them, it was the first of many. they laughed at the way i reacted. i thought it couldn’t get any worse but they dressed us in large t shirts and hurried us outside in the dark. no one saw. they stuffed us into the trunk of a car, duct tape across our mouths, ropes around our wrists. i asked sam if we were going to die. she said she didnt know. that was the first night i saw her darkness. they took us to a warehouse. there were other girls in dresses and shorts and pajamas, some wearing nothing, some tied up the same way sam and i were.. some very pretty. i didnt feel pretty. we were all anywhere from 7 years old to 15 at the very oldest. i was a small, scrawny kid, 4′3 and 47 pounds at 9 years old. i didnt know what time it was. at first, i wouldnt let go of her hand. she said it’ll be okay, you have to let go and i started crying again and i hated it because girls dont like boys who cry. but i let go. and i was given my first client and a quota to fill of $600. i saw eight men to accomplish this. this was a very low number in comparison to what it normally would be but i was naive and believed it to be the worst. i lived like this for almost three years, being sold and bought, forced into child prostitution and pornography. they said they would kill my mom and sister if i didn’t comply. i won’t talk about everything that happened only because there is too much but i will highlight the few most important points.
my connection to sam changed; i lost sight of the space between us, i couldn’t tell we were different people. they videotaped us a lot, i was made to hurt her. she always took care of me. she always protected me. i would be dead without her. it is not love i feel for her; it is beyond adoration and devotion.

i started to develop stockholm syndrome for her father. i fell in love because he was always gentle when he took the duct tape off. it was always daddy daddy daddy daddy, master master master master. all the men liked to be called daddy but in my mind, he was the one and only. there were so many times when he could have killed me and didn’t and i am so grateful for that. i started to believe i deserved all of it. i began to sympathize with him. sometimes he even said i was beautiful. he had the same eyes as her. there were many times, that during the act, i would dissociate to destiny islands. my identity as sora protected me so much.

the fourth day i was there, i met a girl named kayla. she was seven years old. she had blonde, blonde hair and she wore mary janes with stickers all over them. she loved rainbows and pink roses. she became sam and i’s best friend. we loved her so much. she was the light in that utter darkness. when we had clients together, we would jump on the hotel bed before they arrived. she was our little bunny. her favorite color was pink and she wanted to be a princess when she grew up. she had birthday dreams and she even stole pudding out of a client’s refrigerator for my 12th birthday and was beaten nearly to death for it.

the first girl i saw killed was a girl named anna. she had her head in the stars. she had a little teddy bear she would always hold on to. she was always saying her brother would come and save her and we believed her. she said his name was blake and he was in the military so he would come and save her. he didnt though. her pimp brought her into the main room of the warehouse where all of us had been gathered to watch the spectacle. everyone knew she had gotten an std. he held her by the hair and said “this is what you get if you’re a fucking whore” and he shot her in the head. the sickening sound her skull made as it met concrete is something i will never forget. right up to the moment she was killed, she said “please wait my brother is coming.”

i saw six girls killed in total, including anna, but i will only talk about two others. i saw a girl burned to death, i saw a girl bleed to death, i saw a girl stabbed to death but those are the ones i will not talk about them right now. jason was usually in charge of disposing of the bodies and he took me with him most of the time. after he learned that i preferred to be referred to as a boy, he insisted that i was his “little buddy”. he would say that i wasnt like the rest. the days kept moving on without anna. i learned to cope, swallow my pain, and move on. i will explain the mechanics of the warehouse. each girl had her pimp, most commonly the one who had kidnapped her or who she had been sold to. sometimes it was a family member, like in sam’s case, but that was rare. girls came and went pretty often, whether they were killed, arrested for prostitution, sold to another ring, or taken somewhere else. the warehouse was a gathering place, i served the majority of my clients there but sometimes i was taken to a hotel or their homes. in the warehouse, there was a room called the “pain room”. it was decked out in all your greatest and latest bdsm gear. it was where we all feared the most. there was one device that i especially hated that held your mouth open. i spent a lot of time there. fun times. they’d chain you down, and fire a gun around you, and you’d shut your eyes, waiting for one of the bullets to hit you, hoping one of the bullets would hit you. there were a variety of “punishments” that we would undergo if we didn’t do something correctly (for example, if we screamed or cried when we weren’t supposed to or vomited while giving oral or whatever), most common were the “hanging punishment” and the “dunking punishment”. there were different variations of each but usually, the hanging punishment was where you’d have a noose tied around your neck and you’d have each foot, on tiptoe, on two separate stools spread apart so that’d you have to balance yourself while being beaten or raped amongst laughs of “haha dont hang yourself, bitch!” the dunking punishment was either in a bathtub or bucket of water and was exactly what it sounds like. sometimes you’d have a bag on your head, sometimes not. spiders were used a couple of times, put inside us and being forced to eat them. i couldn’t eat spaghetti for years after that but in the past few months, i just started to again. i had bites everywhere that hurt for a long time. they put their cigarettes out on us a lot, a habit that sam took up on herself when we got older. another humiliation that was popular, though not considered a punishment, was having a collar fastened around your neck and walked like a dog. “bad dog” was a favorite insult and for some reason, one of the ones that remains most prominent in my mind. needle play was also a big thing, usually small ones, through the surface of your skin. it was more scary than actually harmful. Sam always did both kayla and i’s make up for movies. We’d sit on a hotel bed, heels and glittery dresses, hair tied up, ten years old. kayla and anna would bicker over whos makeup sam did first. she would have to reapply mine multiple times because i kept crying that i was a boy. one of the first things they did, in the first few weeks i was there, was carve the word “whore” in my arm with a knife. branding. seven years later and the scar’s still there. i tried to cover it with make up and it worked for a few months but i ended up lying and telling my parents i did it to myself and that was when i went to the hospital for the first time. we were forced to hurt each other a lot, rape one another and torture each other. while it was always done with reluctance and regret, it definitely turned all of us against one another. i once turned in girls who had ran away because they “hurt” sam. I will always feel guilty about that.

i was drugged a handful of times with sedatives but when i was ten was the first time i was administered heroin. i was ordered for a small party. when i was dropped off, five men circled around me and it started immediately. they shot up and then stuck the needle in my arm. it was a strange experience i dont remember much. i kept crying which i normally never did. but it was nice. the next thing i remember clearly was sitting on the couch in the arms of a man who was talking to me softly and another one was making me eggs for breakfast even though it was 3 am. another man left to get more drugs. they said weird things like”don’t stand too close to the door baby they’ll see you.” i buried my face in the man’s chest, i didn’t know what was going on. but i felt powerful. powerful and confused. heroin became a somewhat common occurrence after that.

i tried to run once. it was one of my first clients and i was serving him in his home. i freaked out and bit his dick while giving him a blowjob. i ran out of the room naked as fast as i could and into the field behind his house and i just kept running until i felt roberts arms around me. he had been sitting in the car outside waiting for me. he started beating me up. “you like that, you little cunt?” i was brought back to the client who was bleeding and forced to masturbate for him. both my eyes were black and my nose was bleeding.

beginning when i was almost 11, a man named Louis (i don’t know if that was his real name, probably not) became obsessed with me and stalked me. he would leave love notes in my backpack and never saw any other girl but me. he said very nice things and bought me ice cream. sometimes he would even come see me at school. he left voice mails on my cell phone. i thought he loved me, i felt safe with him. he was never violent, always gentle. so i told him i was a boy. that was the only time he hit me. he took me to his house and after we fucked, he left me alone on the bed while he took a shower. i went through his dresser drawers and found his journal. there were pieces of my hair and one of my socks taped to one of the pages and descriptions of myself that i couldn’t bear to read. i found a photo of his wife and daughter and i wondered if he did this shit to her. probably. i walked to the refrigerator and ate a strawberry yogurt. the house was so quiet. i forgot i wasn’t wearing any clothes. i sat on the tile. and then it hit me. how completely fucked up the entire situation was. and i cried. i started wailing and threw the yogurt at the countertop. he came running out and held me. he stroked my hair and told me it was going to be okay. and god, i believed him. and we fucked again. and i wanted sam. and i wanted to go home. when i was 12, his messages got increasingly more desperate. eventually he told me, if i couldn’t marry him and go to the east coast with him, we were over. he came to pick me up. i stood outside the warehouse by his car and he kept saying “come on baby girl, we gotta go, let’s go, we gotta go.” but daddy came out and started yelling at him “you can’t take my product.” and then he drove away. and i never saw him again.

for my 11th birthday, daddy told my parents he would take sam and i on a three week long “camping trip”. i insisted that i didn’t want to go but i had been staying indoors a lot because i was so terrified and in a traumatized state that they told me i had to get out more. we were driven with a group of other girls to the outskirts of bakersfield in northern california. most of the girls were drugged but i had proven myself calm time and time again so i was drugged a lot less often by the second year. there was another warehouse like place there with bunkbeds that we all slept in. well that some of us slept in. depending on her pimp and her performance that day some girls had to sleep in dog cages. i brought a small bag of clothes and other travelling stuff that they took away the minute i arrived. we worked day and night. i didn’t get to be with sam or kayla most of the time. we would only see one another in the evenings when we ate if none of us had night clients. every night, there was always some girl sobbing in her bed. i learned to ignore it. there was nothing i could say to fix it, there were girls coming in and out of the room all night so it was nearly impossible to sleep. i would always end up in sam’s bed, sniffling and trying not to cry and letting her hold me and sing me to sleep. the days went by so slowly. i crossed off the days in a little notebook i kept under my pillow. i only had three weeks. the other girls would be there forever. i was taken to an anonymous clinic during this time and treated for two stds. everything hurt. so many times i’d beg “kill me, please just kill me”, it was pathetic. four days before i was supposed to go home, sam and i were chained up in a basement for a porn movie. she was really weak because of her eating disorder on top of the fact that we hadn’t eaten for two days and had been working nonstop in very physically demanding situations. she didn’t complain at all though. we had already been in the basement for three days, and for the first few days sam would talk to me and sing to me and try to keep me in high spirits but by the end of the third day she was quiet and just let her head hang. it smelled fucking awful, we hadn’t been allowed out of the shackles on our wrists so we couldn’t shower and the men’s idea of “showering” was splashing cold water on us. we were both cut up a great deal and the ground was stained with dried blood. i thought of a horror movie that i had watched with danny. i really wished i could be with him. i wondered what he would have said if he was there with us. One of them stuck the barrel of a gun in my mouth, something i was used to and held me by my hair and said puke and he kept thrusting the gun into the back of my throat until my gag reflex finally kicked in. When they forced sam and i on each other they cut each of our tongues for the blood. Years later, we experimented with this on our own. after our work with the group, they were unsatisfied with sam’s performance. one man left and came back with a hammer and a nail. he took her hand and she said “bambi don’t look baby look away” i shut my eyes just in time. i heard her scream though. they put a bag over my head with a small hole near my mouth so i could breathe. the fourth day went by and the bag was never taken off. then the fifth. they finally fed us but i was still unable to see with bag on my head and we still were chained to the wall with our hands behind our backs so i had to press my mouth to the ground and find the food like a mouse. sam hadnt spoke to me for the two days i had had the bag. i wondered if she still had the nails in her hand. i wondered if she was dead. on the sixth day, i heard her scream, the first noise she had made in days. i couldn’t see anything, obviously, and i knew better than to talk out of turn but she just kept screaming. i started kicking my legs in their shackles and then i couldn’t take it anymore and i started crying. i hadn’t cried the entire trip except at night. i started blabbering “pleas e dont hurt her riku riku please dont hurt riku” i felt a fist come down on the top of my head and i shut up. finally, after about two hours of sam’s cries, they took the bag off my head. the light, despite there being barely any in the basement, was nearly blinding because i had only seen the dark cloth of the bag for almost three days. i blinked a lot before locating the outlines of sam’s body. she was laying in a pool of blood. there was two huge gashes on the insides of her thighs that were still bleeding and she was bleeding from her vagina, one slash on her throat that wasn’t as bad, and one across her face. i was shocked by this. they were usually NEVER allowed to touch our faces because that would decrease our value. but more than that, her stomach had a word etched across it, not in blood but black ink. she had been tattooed. it wasn’t the first time, we each had small “daddy’s” on the insides of our legs, but this was huge. it said “forsaken”. i didn’t understand it and i was too tired to try to make sense of it. they let us out of our shackles after that and replaced them with handcuffs but at least we weren’t chained to the wall anymore. sam and i crawled across the floor as fast as we could towards each other and slept as close as we could to one another on the floor in the middle of the room. the next day, daddy came to pick us up and we went home. it was strange putting on clothing again because we had been naked the past week in the basement. we took a normal small car home instead of the van. kayla wasn’t with us. when i got home, daddy gave me back the little backpack i had embarked on the trip with, all the clothes inside still clean and unworn.

then there was j who only bought me once but it was still an experience that i remember prominently. he took me to his apartment and it was filthy. i had been in disgusting places before but this was especially gross. for the first hour, he didn’t touch me. he ordered me to sit on the kitchen floor and i did so happily, if not a little confused. there was pot of boiling water and he opened the pantry and brought a cageful of squirming rats to the stove. and for the next hour, my ears were filled with rats’ screams as he dipped each head first into the boiling water. every time i tried to look away or cover my ears he would yell at me to pay attention. when it appeared he had become bored, he dumped them all into water then walked over to me, undoing his belt and holding it above his head. “get on your fucking knees.” i had heard that so many times before. i was already sitting so i just changed my position. he brandished the belt over my head and hit me with it. he assaulted me then stood up and pressed his shoe into the side of my face. “clean yourself up.” i had also heard that many times before. i quickly dressed and wiped off my face. it was such a strange experience, fucking on that dirty carpet with the sound of rats squeaking and crawling around us.

there was a period of time that i became very angry. i started yelling and becoming aggressive with people that weren’t involved in the abuse. i even began fighting with danny even though he was one of the people i loved most in the world. eventually i couldnt contain myself and my violent behavior carried over to the warehouse. jason and i were fucking in one of the downstairs rooms and i was on my knees and he was on my back and i turned around and bit his arm and wouldnt let go. he smashed my face into the ground and thats when i lost it. i dont remember much but throwing myself at him and it was a whirl of tooth and nail and fists until finally he had me in a hold with my arm twisted behind my back. “ill break your fucking fingers, bitch” it was like those words didnt reach me i was still trying to fight him off. and that when he did it. snapped my first finger. the pain rushed through my whole body and i screamed. “say you love your daddy.” that made me mad so i started kicking again. second finger. i felt spit dripping down my chin and for a split second i realized just how fucking off the wall i had become. and that made me want to cry. so i started crying. and i said i want sam. i want my mommy sam. and he said “say im daddys fucktoy!” i kept mumbling and sobbing. third finger. my whole arm was on fire. i dont even remember. i said yea sir im daddys i am i am. when i went home i told my parents i had gotten my hand stuck in a door. sam backed me up.

there were many days i never even went to school. i would meet sam or daddy there and go to the warehouse or to a client’s house. daddy picked me up and transferred me to my client’s car in a mcdonald’s parking lot. i was stuffed into the trunk, as usual, and tried to sleep. we drove for a long time. when we finally parked and they opened the trunk, there was nothing but trees in sight. that wasn’t too surprising, we were in washington after all. they picked me up and carried me into the woods since my hands and feet were still bound. when i saw a cabin the first thought that came to my mind was this is so fucking cliche. i thought of danny’s horror movies again. they tied me to the bed and i thought this is so boring. “we’re gonna kill you, cunt” yeah, yeah, okay, okay. i’d heard it all before. i sat there, almost rolling my eyes. i was scared, of course, but it was almost funny. i’d had so many guns held to my head and knives to my neck and lighters to my face i had given up that any of them was actually going to do anything. i could take a group too. i took pride in that. i would joke with sam all the time that i was the best gang rape victim around. “no one’s gonna find your body.” cool, i thought, i can’t wait. the main one took out a knife. i was getting so cocky, so confident that i met his eyes and stared at him. he didn’t like that at all. he slapped me hard across the face. “who the fuck do you think you are?” i remembered how much danger i actually was in and composed myself. i had gotten so apathetic the past few months. they did the gang thing, that sucked. my arrogance disappeared with that. i wasn’t going to cry but i wasn’t going to challenge any of them anymore either. and then he knelt down and did something i wasn’t expecting. he stuck the knife inside me and i couldn’t help but scream and oh god i dont want to fucking write this anymore im going to puke it hurt so bad all i saw was red it felt like i was going to puke. he thrust it in and out and each hurt more than the last. i bit my tongue until it bled to try and keep from screaming but it was useless. i started crying and saying i want sam, i want sam, sam sam sam sam, daddy daddy daddy sora sora sora sora sam sam. finally he stopped, gave me a small final slash across my thigh, spit in it, and stood up. i felt forward on my face and curled up but it was excruciating to move and i was laying in a puddle of my own blood. i brought my knees to my chest and starting hyperventilating. i just kept repeating sam i want sam where’s riku. i felt incredibly weak, my vision was fuzzy, and i could feel the warm blood run down my legs. the next thing i knew, i was back at sam’s house, sitting in her bathtub, while she pressed a washcloth gently between my legs and talked softly to me. i could hear daddy outside the bathroom on the phone yelling at someone. i didn’t care. i wrapped my arms around sam’s neck while she washed me off and said mom mommy sam riku mom i love you i love you. she kissed the top of my head.

sam became pregnant with her father’s child when we were twelve. we pretended i was the father because we needed a way of letting our minds pretend and escape. that made me happy. it also made me laugh. it made me feel like a grown up. she wanted to name her Shiloh. we made up stories about how we would go to her first day of kindergarten and go to the zoo with her. a few months went by, and she wasn’t showing at all so we thought we could get away with it. we figured she could have the baby and hide her in danny’s closet or something. we thought daddy had no idea. but one day she wasn’t at school and her dad came to pick me up. he brought me into the house and into her room. she was tied to the bed and i knew she had been there all day. her eyes widenend when she saw me. he told me to go to the bathroom and i did. jason was there. he brought sam in, all tied up. i hat ethis part so much i wanna scream he gave her a coat hanger abortion and she was tissue. shiloh was tissue. he smashed her head into the toliet seat and the wall because she tried to fight back and sam never ever fought back. i tried to do something but jason held me back and god, he would not stop laughing. usually, it didn’t bother me, let them get their kick, but this was our baby. i started screaming and he shoved his fingers into my mouth. he started stripping me and i didn’t try to resist. sam was sobbing. daddy shoving it in and then taking it out and re-positioning it. there was so much fucking blood between what he was doing and the beating. “i want my baby, i want my baby” sam kept saying. It was scary because sam never got upset but she was sobbing and blubbering. jason got up and i was free but i still didn’t move. he turned on the bathtub and it quickly filled with water. daddy picked her up and dropped her, kicking and screaming into the tub. jason picked me up and put me in the water with her. i don’t know why. the water was blood red, sam was still bleeding profusely from between her legs. she had her hands over her face and was breathing heavily. it was over. “no one would want a whore for a mother anyways.” he said and left us and told me to get ready, that we were going to the warehouse. after they were gone, i climbed out of the tub, stained with my best friend’s blood, took some of the globby gore that i assumed was our daughter and wrapped her into two pieces of toilet paper. i still keep shiloh in a locket that danny gave me. i crawled over to sam who was still in the water, helped her out, and pulled her into my lap. i buried my face into the top of her head and she didnt talk again for a week.

they tried to make her talk but i dont think she was there, not really, her eyes were dull and her jaw was slack and sam wasnt inside there. she came back though,eventually. the day she came back, it was in the evening,and i danced with her on the deck and it was cold. i dont know why i danced with her. i just felt like it was the right thing to do. she let me lead her around the small patio in a very childish and clumsy way. she even smiled a little when i tried to do dumb things like spin her in circles. i hadn’t seen her smile in a very long time and i really love her smile, i love it a lot, it is one of my most favorite things in the entire world. when we were done she said im sorry. and her voice was very very quiet. i said you have nothing to be sorry for. and she put her finger tips on my eyelids and kissed my forehead. she said im sorry again. but i didnt say anything this time because i knew she would be sorry for the rest of her life no matter what.

there was an event that would occur every once and awhile called a “blowjob circle”. a group of 20 or so men would sit in a circle and pass the girls around on their knees. this wasn’t as bad as it sounds because it was quite simple. but there was a five year old girl this time who, it was physically impossible for her to perform correctly. the rest of us watched her out of the corners of our eyes. she was tonguing the tips half heartedly and we knew one of them was going to do something to her to punish her sooner or later. eventually she got to robert. “what the fuck are you doing?” all of us froze because we knew what was coming. he tried to shove it deeper down her throat until she puked. i made eye contact with sam and we both knew. he grabbed her by the hair and threw her down on the floor. she was crying now, loud, obnoxious sobs. oh god shut up shut up you’re just making it worse, i thought. “shut the fuck up, you fucking whore!” i wanted to melt into the ground i didn’t want to see. but it was like roadkill, you couldn’t look away. he got a pair of pliers and crouched over her, forcing her mouth open. her screams were awful and i started shaking. the circle had disbanded and everyone was watching the pair now. blood started pouring from her mouth and before i could see any more i felt sam come up behind me and her hands were over my eyes. i could still hear it all though. she held me closely. she very often covered my eyes when the bad things happened and i could never thank her enough for that. the girl was taken away in the van a few days later and none of us ever saw her again.

halfway through the third year, when i was twelve, i was working a client with kayla. i dont like to talk about this. i hate all of this. he was a newbie, very virgin in sadism, and fucked with a gun he didn’t know anything about. it was loaded. kayla was shot point blank and her fucking blood splattered on me. she wasnt supposed to die. he dropped the gun and ran and i screamed as loud as i could and kept screaming until sam was with me and the two of us were holding our baby bunny on the cement floor. we didn’t talk at all. this was our worst nightmare after shiloh. there were no words, no comfort possible. eventually, jason came and tried to pull us away but i wouldn’t let go. At last, i did though. jason brought me with him to get rid of her body. i sat in the passenger seat in silence. i had done this before but i never fucking thought it would be kayla’s body in the plastic bag. we drove to the same place as always. he made me bury my best friend. daddy had to come pick me up before i was done because of the time. i was grateful for that.

the worst thing was kimberly. I cant talk that well about it. I will say it in simple facts. I was tied up in the downstairs of the warehouse with daddy and jason because that is where they did movies. We were waiting for the second girl and the customers to come. Finally a pimp i recognized came down the stairs holding a girl i only vaguely recognized as the new girl they had just brought in. The other customers hadn’t arrived yet so the girl and i talked in whispers. I learned her name was kimberly but that wasnt her real name. I told her about Sora and the keyblade just like i told all the other girls. She seemed interested. She said she had been kidnapped awhile ago but was just transferred here. She said this was the worst place she had ever been in. I didnt know because this was the only place i have ever been in. Then the other men arrived. 13 of them. The cameras were set up. And then it started. I didnt have much trouble but kimberly wasnt used to that many and cried a lot. But for the most part, it was your typical movie. They got the devices from the corner of the room so i avoided looking over there so i wouldnt have to see what was coming next. Then i was on top of kimberly and all of them backed off. I was confused until robert handed me a gun. “Kill her.” I was confused, i thought i hadnt heard him correctly. “What?” He got mad at that. “Are you fucking deaf? I said shoot the bitch.” I turned the gun over in my hands. He said “we’ll kill you right here and now if you dont do as i say.” I didnt care. I didnt care at all. “We’ll kill sam.” I moved on instinct and put the gun to kimberly’s head. I fired. Nothing happened. And our eyes met and we both lit up and we knew it was just one of their stupid games that they always played, we just had to play along until they got off and we would be fine. So i kept pulling the trigger like they wanted. And we almost smiled at each other. And then her face exploded. Fuck i dont wnt to talk. I screamed and dropped the stupid gun and crawled away. I was wailing. The cameras were still rolling. I screamed and screamed. They started fucking her again. I said i want sam! Im sora! I want sam! The cameraman said shut this miserable animal up. He was talking about me. I vomited. Then a man went to the bad corner to get something. He walked back with a saw and all the other men backed off. He sat on top of her like i had been and started going at her neck. Fuck fuck fuck everything was dead quiet all you could hear was the saw cutting flesh then the saw cutting bone then her head just rolled. The camera was still rolling. I vomited again and fell forward into my own puke and blood. I mumbled into it i want sam i want my mom my mom my mom daddy daddy daddy. I looked up. Her mouth was open when she died. One of the men had picked up her head and they were taking turns going at her mouth. Gos. Fucking ycj fucj fuck fuck did d cjdjsnf it has taken me six months just to write this little part it hurts so much i only saw that for probably a minute before daddy picked me up and hurried me upstairs. He started kissing me all over and saying oh fuck fuck im so sorry baby im sorry fuck im sorry. And all i said was i want sam. And he went and got sam. And we went home.

after that, he let me go. i think it was beyond even him. he didn’t come after me. i don’t why. they say less than 1% of people like me ever escape. i’m a junior in high school now. i can see my parents. i can have friends. i can play with my dogs. i can live. they never had the chance. we were never people. we were never anything but ways to generate income and sate the most evil kind of debauchery. i dont know why im not dead. its not fair. kayla shouldn’t be dead, anna shouldn’t be dead, nicole shouldn’t be dead, clara shouldn’t be dead, hannah shouldn’t be dead, kimberly shouldn’t be dead, i should. i should have run. i should have run. but i was so scared of being killed and now i try to do it to myself, it’s so ironic. but i did run. i ran back to my parents. i left them behind, the ones who were still alive. i got out, i lived, i loved. less than 1%. would they hate me for it? would they hate for running, not looking back, and sitting here shaking and trying to forget? does sam hate me for it? for leaving her in that warehouse? they remained locked inside that horror, to be broken, to be killed. less than 1%. less than 1%. they were people. they were just children. i got out because he left me go. i did not run away. i was not rescued. it was all his choice. i was lucky. he let me live. i dont know why. i didnt deserve it, i dont. everything afterwards seems so insignificant, or rather, it didn’t affect me, it feels like i have finally created a callous. sam and i attended different middle schools but i would see her around town, once in the doctor’s office with a million shards of glass wedged in her foot, i knew who had done that. we talked and met in secret when we could, still very scared because of how potentially dangerous it was. i switched schools because of bullying due to trans stuff, i got beat up a lot. when we got into high school, sam and i were a lot more open about our relationship, i started going to school in the city and she would come see me almost every day. we did a lot of drugs, she developed a meth addiction on top of her already present heroin addiction and she got arrested once and that was scary. but god, we were so happy. we were so in love. she started working as a prostitute on her own to pay for her addiction and it broke my heart. once we were walking in seattle and man came up to us and he said to her “i’ve seen your pussy” and she didn’t even blink and replied “yeah half the world has, suck my clit”. she was so blunt but still sweet and had that dreamy aura about her that said she had her head in the clouds but knew how to use a knife. we were attached at the hip, i would follow her to all her modelling photoshoots and she would hang around my school and we would go to parties and make out on the roof and pick flowers and read to each other and it was like we were children again minus all the abuse. when we were 14, we slept together for the first time that wasn’t being forced by abusers. it was the first time i had sex consensually. She made me feel safe. she was my wolf girl, brutalized and so she became brutal herself. she fought a lot and got in trouble a lot. her $3 goodwill dresses and leather jackets and floral prints and white t shirt that said “i’m dreaming of being a cloud” and black t shirt that said “evil, wicked, nasty, and mean” all ended up in my closet somehow. but she still had that child in her, the child that said “if i wear my red shoes i’ll be safe”. She used her body as a battleground and grave and canvas and built off the tattoos she was forced to get, getting a little rainbow and bunny for kayla, her daughter’s initials with angel wings, and a fawn and the words “just like heaven” and “dearly beloved” for me among other things. she was always nuzzling her face into the top of my head or kissing the corner of my mouth or had a protective arm around me, it was all subconscious, i think, that maternal instinct after everything we had been through together, she was always very very protective of me. Although bad things happened too, i walked in on her purging a few times, something that had been happening ever since i met her and i would sit on the floor with her and we would just talk for a long time. She developed a sort of speech problem where she stuttered a lot and at times, couldn’t speak in full sentences or talked in “word salad”. there were sometimes when she lost control of herself, with the hallucinations and delusions she had experienced since we were children and she would become violent. she broke all the plates in the kitchen and tried to choke me once. she was on speaking terms with oblivion and was only afraid of herself, and enjoyed sex as a competitive sport. she always told the truth and that’s why she is never to be believed. she felt at home in gas stations and hospitals. i could sit and watch her paint for hours. she should not be misunderstood as heartless though bored by cruelty. she looks out for other girls and will turn a wild party into a quiet group of drunk girls sitting on the kitchen floor, braiding each other’s hair, and telling secrets while the boys are left to entertain themselves. i have loved her for eight years and i will never ever stop.

i went through all the cliche stuff, self harm, an eating disorder, addiction. i tried to kill myself a lot. spent a lot of time in hospitals. danny moved away, and his mother outed as him as transgender to his school. he was beaten up and gangraped on his way home. he hung himself in his bedroom. i was the last person he talked to. i moved back to california and it was awful leaving sam and the few other friends i had. i continued using benzos and oxycodone regularly to deal with the flashbacks i got. i slept with girls who hated themselves and made them hate themselves even more. i killed animals for a little bit but eventually got over that. the hallucinations got worse, i heard him, felt him, saw him, and i still do. the dissociation increased as well. one night, i woke up on the train tracks near my house with no idea how i had gotten there. i’ve found myself on the floors of random people’s houses calling for my mom, banging my head head on the wall, i couldn’t stay in school because i left the classroom so much. i started taking testerone. i felt awful because danny didn’t get to. i got my name legally changed to soren daniel, soren for sora, daniel for my brother, danny. i got a mastectomy in march 2013. sam was the first person i showed my new chest to and she cried out of happiness because she knew just how far i had come. in july 2013 i was hospitalized for my eating disorder. sam and i recovered together, eating meals together on skype. i did weight restoration and went through a treatment program. a few months later, i was put in another treatment center and only two weeks after that i was sent to a long term facility in utah. there, i was discovered as transgender and beaten up and raped by a fellow patient. i only stayed there for a few months before telling my parents what had happened. i was talking to sam every day up until january 2014 when she went missing. she was part of the super bowl trafficking so the fbi investigated. about two months ago, they found her body in minnesota. they think she was killed last year around her birthday. i ache every fucking day for her. My heart is in pieces and it will never ever get better. I miss her so much. I currently have an open case with the fbi, i am just working with evidence and planning the right time to act. i spent three months in another residential treatment center after i tried to hang myself with jumper cables. my mom found me hanging unconscious and gave me cpr. so much has changed. Im trying to stop using drugs all together now. i left a world where i was scared for my life every day. the shame, guilt, and fear are still constant but for the first time in years, i can say i don’t actively want to kill myself. the thoughts are still there and i always possess the potential to act but they are not as strong as before. i think the mind has ways of surviving. sometimes i look at the cigarette burns they left on me, the word “daddy” he carved into my thigh and “whore” across my forearm and im excited to try and make friends, im tired of being lonely, tired of being sad, tired of being scared, im ready to talk about what happened to me, im ready to live my life and i grew up like a child does, am one still who thinks the world is beautiful.

Revised Trauma Narrative (Version 2)

my name is soren. i am seventeen years old. i was adopted at six months old. i’ve always been close with my mom. i think that’s important to say. i’ve never had many friends but she’s always been there, for the most part. it was in preschool that i realized there was something not right with my body. i was not like the other boys, my parents dressed me in skirts and kept my hair long. i learned my body was that of a girl’s. i was scared to ask my parents as i always possessed a buried fear that they would view me as strange and send me back to the orphanage. when i was 5, i was walking on the tidepools with my mom when she fell and broke her leg. this was very traumatic for me at the time so i was put into therapy. we would go every week to a little office by the beach and soon my therapist started molesting me. he told me not to tell anyone so i didn’t. entering kindergarten, i met a boy named david and we became very close. he lived right down the street from us so i would spend most hours of the day with him. his father started molesting me when i was 6 and this lasted until i was 8 when he died from a heart attack. both of these incidents don’t really bother me much at all anymore but its interesting to see how my psyche was preconditioned to be a victim; i was vulnerable. when i was eight, i was close with a girl named jessica. she told me her father molested her. i was scared, so i told people. things were confusing for a long time. she didn’t like me anymore. it was okay though, i like to think the police fixed things. when i was nine, i moved to seattle and i was diagnosed with depression. i was struggling in public school so my parents had me transferred to a small montessori school. there were only about 9 kids in my grade level (3rd grade to 6th grade). there was a girl named sam who no one really liked, they called her r*tarded and crazy because she spun around in circles on the playground and her hair was dirty and she was very skinny because she never ate. she talked to herself and to people that no one else could see. she always came to school with bruises. she never made any effort to talk to me and every time i tried to talk to her, she ran away. the first time she talked to me, i was sitting at a table and she rushed up and stared at me and she asked “do you know who courtney love is?” i was taken aback and i just wanted her to think i was cool even though i had no idea who courtney love was. “yeah….uh…she…uh” i answered. “you don’t know, do you?” and then she ran off again.

a few weeks after i had transferred to the school, they had a sleepover at the school and we were all crowded into the upper el classroom, watching the princess bride on the small television. i was sitting with all the other children, my head in sam’s twin sister’s lap, and sam was crammed into the corner of the room. i tried to catch glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye whenever i could and when i did, i would always catch her staring at me, wide eyed. i wanted to ask her to come sit with us but i also wanted the rest of the kids to think i was cool and they hated sam, they said if she came too close to you, she’d give you rabies. i kept watching her and she kept watching me, she was biting on her fingers, and blood was dripping down her hands. i never asked her to join us.

that night, as we were all sleeping in the lower el room, i woke up to the sound of running water and the bright glare of the bathroom light. the door was open so i went to see what was up. i was welcomed by sam with her head underneath the running faucet. she had closed the drain so the sink was filling up. this was only the second time i had talked to her. i asked her what she was doing and she said she was trying to drown herself. i said you cant drown yourself in a sink and then she said something about how many babies die in sinks every year. i told her she wasnt a baby and we went back and forth for awhile until we were both angry and i went and woke up the teacher and told her sam was trying to drown herself in the bathroom and then i called my mom and had her come pick me up.

i also met a boy named danny. he was good friends with sam and eventually, over the summer, all three of us became inseparable. they were my best friends in the whole entire universe. sam had animals for everyone she loved, danny was a lion, i was a fawn, and she was a wolf. so there we were. we smoked cigarettes together, played in the forest, and made flower crowns. danny and i huffed paint thinner in his dad’s apartment and he told me that he was born with a birth defect, that people labelled him as “transgender” but that’s not what he was, he was a boy, he was not “transitioning” to or from anything because he had always been a boy and that was that. i had struggled with the exact same thing since early preschool and when he confided in me, i told him i was a boy too and was scared i was gonna be trapped forever. they started calling me “sora”, the name of the main character of our favorite video game instead of my birth name and danny cut all my hair off and sam kissed me. it was my first kiss and i was glowing.

throughout this entire time, i was never allowed to go to sam’s house. both sam and danny consistently warned me against it. i didn’t understand, i was so head over heels for sam, i thought it was just a matter of her not liking me enough or something.

a few weeks before my tenth birthday, sam finally invited me over to her house for the night. i was so ecstatic that i ignored danny’s warnings and precautions. i was so happy i was filled with dreams of holding sam’s hand and kissing her cheek before going to sleep. when i got there, her mom opened the door and i ran upstairs. i passed by her sister’s room which was pink and pretty and filled with nice things. so when i opened sam’s door, i was not prepared for what greeted me. the room was completely bare except for a dirty mattress on the ground and what looked like a dog cage at the foot of it. i presumed it was for their dog, demyx, but i was wrong. sam was all smiles when i saw her. “don’t you like my room? it’s so pretty!” i was confused by this and without meaning to i blurted out “no??” she looked so hurt by this and i felt immediately guilty. “no but look! i have this doll and she’s so nice to me we talk a lot!” she picked up the only object in the room, a blonde little doll and started twirling it around in the air. eventually, sam ran downstairs and came back up with an armful of watercolor sets and paper and we sat down on the ground and painted. she talked to me about flowers and her dreams and i smiled to myself, listening to her was always so comforting, it almost made being in this barren room okay. my heart swelled, i was so in love with her. i looked up to see that she had dripped yellow paint onto her shirt collar. before she could respond, i stood up to get her a new shirt from her closet but when i opened it, there was nothing there. that moment, was when i knew that i had gotten myself into something far worse than i had imagined. “my daddy keeps my clothes for me” she sounded sheepish. it felt like a lump had formed in my throat.

a few hours passed and then i heard the door open, her father came in and he started to scream at her and i was scared. he called her a whore. he started beating her with his fists. in the face. over and over. she just coiled into herself and let him hit her. she fell on the floor. he kicked her, said something, and walked out. i didnt know what to do. i was frozen. she didnt move. i reached out and touched her shoulder. she had such a bony shoulder. i felt it moving and knew she was crying. i moved the hair out of her eyes. she said go home. and i said no. she tried again. i said i wouldnt leave. i took her in the bathroom and washed off her face. she was so pretty. i brushed her teeth because there was blood in her gums. i wanted to kiss her but knew it was not a good time. i sat down on the bathroom tile because i was secretly scared to go back out but didn’t want her to know. she came and sat down next to me. i let her put her head in my lap and she layed down and pulled her knees to her chest. she was shaking so i knew she was crying again. she didn’t want me to know that she was scared too. i leaned down and put my lips on the top of her head and combed my fingers through her hair. i knew her eyes were closed so i thought i could lie to her. i said that we were on a boat to destiny islands. and she said yeah? and i said yeah, we’re almost there. we’re gonna get married under the paopu tree. she said she was excited and could feel the boat moving. i rocked her back and forth a little to make it seem more real but i started giggling so i think she knew i was lying. but she didn’t care. that’s why i love her so much.

we went back to her room and she let me sleep on her mattress with her. she held me very close and i could feel her breathing against my back. when i woke up, i couldnt feel her next to me anymore. i looked up and her father was standing over me. i realized his eyes are the same as hers and that made me very sad. he took off my clothes so i didnt feel like a boy anymore. i tried not to cry because i knew sam wouldnt cry but i did anyway. he forced my legs apart and started fucking me. i didn’t know what was happening, i had such a small idea of what sex was, all i knew was that it hurt and i could feel blood on my legs. i started crying for sam without realizing it and eventually, he got so irritated with me that he started yelling “you want sam? you want sam? okay ill get sam” and he walked to the door and yelled downstairs. another man, jason, came in with her. she was not wearing any clothes either and i didnt want to look because i loved her too much. there was a bag over her head and her hands were tied behind her back. and that was the beginning. i remembered that her mother was in the room down the hall so i started screaming louder even though one of them would hit me every time i did, but all i heard from the other room was the sound of the television volume being increased. my heart dropped. her father laughed in my face, “no one’s going to save you.”

they took us into the bathroom, held our heads under the water in the bathtub until i felt like i was about to pass out, but then at the last moment, they would pull my head back up. again and again and always back again. b (sam’s father, thats how im going to refer to him) held a gun to my head, and then fucked me with the barrel, told me he was going to kill me but when he pulled the trigger, there was nothing. he and jason laughed uproariously about this as if it was the funniest thing to them. it was just a game to them, it was the first of many. they laughed at the way i reacted. i thought it couldn’t get any worse but they dressed us in large t shirts and hurried us outside in the dark. no one saw. they stuffed us into the trunk of a car, duct tape across our mouths, ropes around our wrists and ankles. i asked sam if we were going to die. she said she didnt know. that was the first night i saw her darkness. they took us to a warehouse. there were other girls in dresses and shorts and pajamas, some wearing nothing, some tied up the same way sam and i were.. some very pretty. i didnt feel pretty. we were all anywhere from 3 years old to 13 at the very oldest. i was a small, scrawny kid, 4′3 and 47 pounds at 9 years old. i didnt know what time it was. at first, i wouldnt let go of her hand. she said it’ll be okay, you have to let go and i started crying again and i hated it because girls dont like boys who cry. but i let go. and i was given my first client. there was a small blonde girl in the room with me when the man walked in. i was going to learn that her name was kayla and she was going to become one of my very best friends. he chained me to the wall and he fucked us both. he sliced off a piece of my thigh and put out his cigarette in it, then dumped salt on it. after he was done with us, he told us to get out of the room. i didn’t know where i was supposed to go but i was sort of in a daze so i wandered out of the room and down the hall to the door at the end. i opened it, somewhat surprised that it was unlocked. nothing in the universe could have prepared me for what i was about to see. it was like a human slaughterhouse. there were little girls hung from the ceiling by meat hooks through the skin in their backs. the smell of shit, piss, puke, and rotting flesh overwhelmed me. i was paralyzed. the screaming was unbearable. rape, murder, or a corpse on the ceiling or wall. my only goal was to find where sam was. maybe this wasn’t real, maybe this was all a bad dream. i just had to find sam. so i kept walking but when i slipped on a tongue was when reality hit me in the back of the head and i fell on the ground and wrapped my arms around myself. i was shutting down, i couldn’t cope with any of this. i was only like that for a moment before i felt hands pulling me up. it was jason. “hey kiddo, get the fuck up. we have work to do.” he led me through the hell room and out into another empty hall. finally, we went into a room with sam. she was strapped to a table and 8 men were around her fucking her and cutting her with blades. when our eyes met, she lit up and smiled “hi sora!” i think, out of everything that happened, that was one of the things that broke my heart the most. this level of abuse and horror was so normal to her and she felt she deserved it so much that she was just able to say oh hi! and what made me sick, was that i felt arousal, i thought she was so pretty like that. i felt arms around me, strapping something to me. it was a strap on and i was told to rape sam. so i did. and i didn’t know how and i fumbled and everything hurt, and i crawled to the corner of the room where i was gangraped and then it was like everything happened in a blink. suddenly, sam and i were touching knees in the trunk again and then we were laying on the dirty mattress in her room and then her mother was asking me what i wanted for breakfast and then my dad was picking me up. i lived like this for almost three years, being sold and bought, forced into child prostitution and pornography. they said they would kill my mom and sister if i didn’t comply. i won’t talk about everything that happened only because there is too much but i will highlight the few most important points.

my connection to sam changed; i lost sight of the space between us, i couldn’t tell we were different people. they videotaped us a lot, i was made to hurt her. she always took care of me. she always protected me. i would be dead without her. it is not love i feel for her; it is beyond adoration and devotion.

the girl i met the first night was named kayla. she was seven years old. she had blonde, blonde hair and she wore mary janes with stickers all over them. she loved rainbows and pink roses. she became sam and i’s best friend. we loved her so much. she was the light in that utter darkness. when we had clients together, we would jump on the hotel bed before they arrived. she was our little bunny. her favorite color was pink and she wanted to be a princess when she grew up. she had birthday dreams and she even stole pudding out of a client’s refrigerator for my 12th birthday and was beaten nearly to death for it.

another friend i made was a girl named anna. she had her head in the stars. she had a little teddy bear she would always hold on to. she was always saying her brother would come and save her and we believed her. she said his name was blake and he was in the military so he would come and save her. he didnt though. her pimp brought her into the main room of the warehouse where all of us had been gathered to watch the spectacle. everyone knew she had gotten an std. he held her by the hair and said “this is what you get if you’re a fucking whore” and he shot her in the head. the sickening sound her skull made as it met concrete is something i will never forget. right up to the moment she was killed, she said “please wait my brother is coming.”

i saw so many children die. i saw girls burned to death, i saw girls raped to death, i saw girls stabbed to death. jason was usually in charge of disposing of the bodies and he took me with him most of the time. after he learned that i preferred to be referred to as a boy, he insisted that i was his “little buddy”. he would say that i wasnt like the rest. i learned to cope, swallow my pain, and move on. i will explain the mechanics of the warehouse. each girl had her pimp, most commonly the one who had kidnapped her or who she had been sold to. sometimes it was a family member, like in sam’s case, but that was rare. girls came and went pretty often, whether they were killed, arrested for prostitution, sold to another ring, or taken somewhere else. the warehouse was a gathering place, i served the majority of my clients there but sometimes i was taken to a hotel or their homes. in the warehouse, there was a room called the pain room. it was decked out in torture devices and tools like many of the other rooms but it was where most of the live streaming went on. there was a monitor set up at one end, and an anonymous man would give order through it. for example, he could say he wanted to see her legs cut off and that would be $400 so he would pay that and then the girl’s legs would be chopped off. all of this was conducted through the anonymous internet browser, Tor, most commonly known for silk road. sam and i became the poster children for our pedophile ring. my name was bambi and hers was cherry. here is a screenshot from tor, detailing us.

there was a contraption that was called the “fucktoy machine” and you’re entire body would be forced into a box and only your legs and genitals would be exposed. your stats (your age, ethnicity, weight and height), a picture of you smiling on your soccer team, and your price would be listed next to that opening. men would come and fuck you as they pleased but the worst part was that you couldn’t see them coming because your head was covered, all you would feel is a sharp pain and it’d be happening.

there were a variety of “punishments” that we would undergo if we didn’t do something correctly (for example, if we screamed or cried when we weren’t supposed to or vomited while giving oral or whatever), most common were the “hanging punishment” and the “dunking punishment”. there were different variations of each but usually, the hanging punishment was where you’d have a noose tied around your neck and you’d have each foot, on tiptoe, on two separate stools spread apart so that’d you have to balance yourself while being beaten or raped amongst laughs of “haha dont hang yourself, bitch!” the dunking punishment was either in a bathtub or bucket of water and was exactly what it sounds like. sometimes you’d have a bag on your head, sometimes not. spiders were used a couple of times, put inside us and being forced to eat them. i had bites everywhere that hurt for a long time. they put their cigarettes out on us a lot, a habit that sam took up on herself when we got older. another humiliation that was popular, though not considered a punishment, was having a collar fastened around your neck and walked like a dog. “bad dog” was a favorite insult and for some reason, one of the ones that remains most prominent in my mind. needle play was also a big thing, usually small ones, through the surface of your skin. it was more scary than actually harmful. one of the first things they did, in the first few weeks i was there, was carve the word “whore” in my arm with a knife. branding. seven years later and the scar’s still there. i tried to cover it with make up and it worked for a few months but i ended up lying and telling my parents i did it to myself and that was when i went to the hospital for the first time. we were forced to hurt each other a lot, rape one another and torture each other. while it was always done with reluctance and regret, it definitely turned all of us against one another.

for my 11th birthday, daddy told my parents he would take sam and i on a three week long “camping trip”. we went on many “trips” together but never for that long. i insisted that i didn’t want to go but i had been staying indoors a lot because i was so terrified and in a traumatized state that they told me i had to get out more. we were driven with a group of other girls to the outskirts of bakersfield in northern california. most of the girls were drugged but i had proven myself calm time and time again so i was drugged a lot less often by the second year. there was another warehouse like place there with bunkbeds that we all slept in. well that some of us slept in. depending on her pimp and her performance that day some girls had to sleep in dog cages. i brought a small bag of clothes and other travelling stuff that they took away the minute i arrived. we worked day and night. i didn’t get to be with sam or kayla most of the time. we would only see one another in the evenings when we ate if none of us had night clients. every night, there was always some girl sobbing in her bed. i learned to ignore it. there was nothing i could say to fix it, there were girls coming in and out of the room all night so it was nearly impossible to sleep. i would always end up in sam’s bed, sniffling and trying not to cry and letting her hold me and sing me to sleep. the days went by so slowly. i crossed off the days in a little notebook i kept under my pillow. i only had three weeks. the other girls would be there forever. i was taken to an anonymous clinic during this time and treated for two stds. everything hurt. so many times i’d beg “kill me, please just kill me”, it was pathetic. four days before i was supposed to go home, sam and i were chained up in a basement for a porn movie. she was really weak because of her eating disorder on top of the fact that we hadn’t eaten for two days and had been working nonstop in very physically demanding situations. she didn’t complain at all though. we had already been in the basement for three days, and for the first few days sam would talk to me and sing to me and try to keep me in high spirits but by the end of the third day she was quiet and just let her head hang. it smelled fucking awful, we hadn’t been allowed out of the shackles on our wrists so we couldn’t shower and the men’s idea of “showering” was splashing cold water on us. we were both cut up a great deal and the ground was stained with dried blood. i thought of a horror movie that i had watched with danny. i really wished i could be with him. i wondered what he would have said if he was there with us. One of them stuck the barrel of a gun in my mouth, something i was used to and held me by my hair and said puke and he kept thrusting the gun into the back of my throat until my gag reflex finally kicked in. When they forced sam and i on each other they cut each of our tongues for the blood. Years later, we experimented with this on our own. after our work with the group, they were unsatisfied with sam’s performance. one man left and came back with a hammer and nails. he took her hand and she said “bambi don’t look baby look away” i shut my eyes just in time. i heard her scream though. they put a bag over my head with a small hole near my mouth so i could breathe. the fourth day went by and the bag was never taken off. then the fifth. they finally fed us but i was still unable to see with bag on my head and we still were chained to the wall with our hands behind our backs so i had to press my mouth to the ground and find the food like a mouse. sam hadnt spoke to me for the two days i had had the bag. i wondered if she still had the nails in her hand. i wondered if she was dead. on the sixth day, i heard her scream, the first noise she had made in days. i couldn’t see anything, obviously, and i knew better than to talk out of turn but she just kept screaming. i started kicking my legs in their shackles and then i couldn’t take it anymore and i started crying. i hadn’t cried the entire trip except at night. i started blabbering “pleas e dont hurt her sam sam please dont hurt sam” i felt a fist come down on the top of my head and i shut up. finally, after about two hours of sam’s cries, they took the bag off my head. the light, despite there being barely any in the basement, was nearly blinding because i had only seen the dark cloth of the bag for almost three days. i blinked a lot before locating the outlines of sam’s body. she was laying in a pool of blood. there was two huge gashes on the insides of her thighs that were still bleeding and she was bleeding from her vagina, one slash on her throat that wasn’t as bad, and one across her face. i was shocked by this. they were usually NEVER allowed to touch our faces because that would decrease our value. but more than that, her stomach had a word etched across it, not in blood but black ink. she had been tattooed. it wasn’t the first time, we each had small “daddy’s” on the insides of our legs, but this was huge. i didn’t understand it and i was too tired to try to make sense of it. they let us out of our shackles after that and replaced them with handcuffs but at least we weren’t chained to the wall anymore. sam and i crawled across the floor as fast as we could towards each other and slept as close as we could to one another on the floor in the middle of the room. the next day, daddy came to pick us up and we went home. it was strange putting on clothing again because we had been naked the past week in the basement. we took a normal small car home instead of the van. kayla wasn’t with us. when i got home, daddy gave me back the little backpack i had embarked on the trip with, all the clothes inside still clean and unworn.

then there was j took me to his apartment and it was filthy. i had been in disgusting places before but this was especially gross. for the first hour, he didn’t touch me. he ordered me to sit on the kitchen floor and i did so happily, if not a little confused. there was pot of boiling water and he opened the pantry and brought a cageful of squirming rats to the stove. and for the next hour, my ears were filled with rats’ screams as he dipped each head first into the boiling water. every time i tried to look away or cover my ears he would yell at me to pay attention. when it appeared he had become bored, he dumped them all into water then walked over to me, undoing his belt and holding it above his head. “get on your fucking knees.” i had heard that so many times before. i was already sitting so i just changed my position. he brandished the belt over my head and hit me with it. he assaulted me then stood up and pressed his shoe into the side of my face. “clean yourself up.” i had also heard that many times before. i quickly dressed and wiped off my face. it was such a strange experience, fucking on that dirty carpet with the sound of rats squeaking and crawling around us.

and then there was mousy. i didn’t know her that well. sam and i were driven to a hotel and we were told we were going to be doing a movie. we sat on the bed waiting for 45 minutes and no one came. sam stood up and walked to the door, peeking out. she opened it and walked out. i called to her, i knew we would get in so much trouble if we wandered away and he came to the room when we were out. she insisted that it would be okay. she said there was a pool and i said i didn’t care and she said suit yourself and walked away. i became anxious and chased after her. before i could stop her, she had jumped into the water. i was hesitant but was convinced after she splashed me and started giggling and so i followed her in. when you’re a kid and you’re in love and you’re in a pool, the world seems endless with possibilities and happiness. believe me. finally, the man who had bought us showed up and he was livid. he brought us back into the room and beat us and then kept mumbling about being late. apparently, the motel was not where we were supposed to be. he drove us in the car trunk to another makeshift torture chamber in the middle of nowhere. at least, it was nowhere i recognized or had been before. when we walked in, there were 5 other men and mousy. we were filmed and gangraped. this is when sam’s toe was cut off with garden shears. i was forced to eat it. mousy’s eye was torn out and they fucked the socket. by the end of the session, mousy’s limbs had been hacked off, turning her into “fuckmeat” (a term that was used when a girl’s head, legs, and arms are cut off so that they can just be used for sex). her body and her head were thrown in with sam and i into a room the size of a closet to spend the night. i was horrified and kept quiet, sitting with my back against the wall. sam, on the other hand, was completely animated and having a full on conversation with mousy’s head. the hours passed slowly and i drifted in and out of sleep. finally morning came, and when the door opened, sam finally stopped talking to mousy’s dismembered body and told the men who had opened the door “do you think i could have some orange juice?”

halfway through the third year, when i was twelve, i was doing a livestream with kayla. she was balanced on what could be called a giant saw, and weights were attached to her ankles so that slowly, the blade would slice into her vagina. eventually she was knocked off this, we were raped again, and i was tied to the ceiling by a rope that went around my neck. kayla was cut open, and they grabbed at chunks of her, putting it into their mouths. half dead, i could hear her begging them to kill her and they did, they shot her and her fucking blood splattered on me and i screamed as loud as i could and kept screaming until sam was with me and the two of us were holding our baby bunny on the cement floor. we didn’t talk at all. there were no words, no comfort possible. eventually, jason came and tried to pull us away but i wouldn’t let go. At last, i did though. jason brought me with him to get rid of her body. i sat in the passenger seat in silence. i had done this before but i never fucking thought it would be kayla’s body in the plastic bag. we drove to the same place as always. he made me bury my best friend. daddy had to come pick me up before i was done because of the time. i was grateful for that.

the last thing that happened was kimberly.. I was tied up in the downstairs of the warehouse with daddy and jason because that is where they did movies. We were waiting for the second girl and the customers to come. Finally a pimp i recognized came down the stairs holding a girl i only vaguely recognized as the new girl they had just brought in. The other customers hadn’t arrived yet so the girl and i talked in whispers. I learned her name was kimberly but that wasnt her real name. I told her about Sora and the keyblade just like i told all the other girls. She seemed interested. She said she had been kidnapped awhile ago but was just transferred here. She said this was the worst place she had ever been in. I didnt know because this was the only place i have ever been in. Then the other men arrived. 13 of them. The cameras were set up. And then it started. I didnt have much trouble but kimberly wasnt used to that many and cried a lot. But for the most part, it was your typical movie. They got the devices from the corner of the room so i avoided looking over there so i wouldnt have to see what was coming next. Then i was on top of kimberly and all of them backed off. I was confused until robert handed me a gun. “Kill her.” I was confused, i thought i hadnt heard him correctly. “What?” He got mad at that. “Are you fucking deaf? I said shoot the bitch.” I turned the gun over in my hands. He said “we’ll kill you right here and now if you dont do as i say.” I didnt care. I didnt care at all. “We’ll kill sam.” I moved on instinct and put the gun to kimberly’s head. I fired. Nothing happened. And our eyes met and we both lit up and we knew it was just one of their stupid games that they always played, we just had to play along until they got off and we would be fine. So i kept pulling the trigger like they wanted. And we almost smiled at each other. And then her face exploded. I screamed and dropped the stupid gun and crawled away. I was wailing. The cameras were still rolling. I screamed and screamed. They started fucking her again. I said i want sam! Im sora! I want sam! The cameraman said shut this miserable animal up. He was talking about me. I vomited. Then a man went to the bad corner to get something. He walked back with a saw and all the other men backed off. He sat on top of her like i had been and started going at her neck. Fuck fuck fuck everything was dead quiet all you could hear was the saw cutting flesh then the saw cutting bone then her head just rolled. The camera was still rolling. I vomited again and fell forward into my own puke and blood. I mumbled into it i want sam i want my mom my mom my mom daddy daddy daddy. I looked up. Her mouth was open when she died. One of the men had picked up her head and they were taking turns going at her mouth. i was only there for a short while longer before daddy picked me up and hurried me upstairs. And all i said was i want sam. And he went and got sam. And we went home.

after that, he let me go. i don’t know why. he didn’t come after me. they say less than 1% of people like me ever escape. i’m a junior in high school now. i can see my parents. i can have friends. i can play with my dogs. i can live. they never had the chance. we were never people. we were never anything but ways to generate income and sate the most evil kind of debauchery. i dont know why im not dead. its not fair. kayla shouldn’t be dead, anna shouldn’t be dead, nicole shouldn’t be dead, mousy shouldn’t be dead, hannah shouldn’t be dead, kimberly shouldn’t be dead, i should. i should have run. i should have run. but i was so scared of being killed and now i try to do it to myself, it’s so ironic. but i did run. i ran back to my parents. i left them behind, the ones who were still alive. i got out, i lived, i loved. less than 1%. would they hate me for it? would they hate for running, not looking back, and sitting here shaking and trying to forget? does sam hate me for it? for leaving her in that warehouse? they remained locked inside that horror, to be broken, to be killed. less than 1%. less than 1%. they were people. they were just children. i got out because he left me go. i did not run away. i was not rescued. it was all his choice. i was lucky. he let me live. i dont know why. i didnt deserve it, i dont. everything afterwards seems so insignificant, or rather, it didn’t affect me, it feels like i have finally created a callous. sam and i attended different middle schools but i would see her around town, once in the doctor’s office with a million shards of glass wedged in her foot, i knew who had done that. we talked and met in secret when we could, still very scared because of how potentially dangerous it was. i switched schools because of bullying due to trans stuff, i got beat up a lot. when we got into high school, sam and i were a lot more open about our relationship, i started going to school in the city and she would come see me almost every day. we were so happy. we were so in love. she started working as a prostitute on her own to pay for her addiction and it broke my heart. once we were walking in seattle and man came up to us and he said to her “i’ve seen your pussy” and she didn’t even blink and replied “yeah half the world has, suck my clit”. she was so blunt but still sweet and had that dreamy aura about her that said she had her head in the clouds but knew how to use a knife. we were attached at the hip, i would follow her to all her modelling photoshoots and she would hang around my school and we would go to parties and make out on the roof and pick flowers and read to each other and it was like we were children again minus all the abuse. when we were 14, we slept together for the first time that wasn’t being forced by abusers. it was the first time i had sex consensually. She made me feel safe. she was my wolf girl, brutalized and so she became brutal herself. she fought a lot and got in trouble a lot. her $3 goodwill dresses and leather jackets and floral prints and white t shirt that said “i’m dreaming of being a cloud” and black t shirt that said “evil, wicked, mean, and nasty” all ended up in my closet somehow. but she still had that child in her, the child that said “if i wear my red shoes i’ll be safe”. She used her body as a battleground and grave and canvas and built off the tattoos she was forced to get, getting a little rainbow and bunny for kayla, her daughter’s initials with angel wings, and a fawn and the words “just like heaven” and “dearly beloved” for me among other things. she was always nuzzling her face into the top of my head or kissing the corner of my mouth or had a protective arm around me, it was all subconscious, i think, that maternal instinct after everything we had been through together, she was always very very protective of me. Although bad things happened too, i walked in on her purging a few times, something that had been happening ever since i met her and i would sit on the floor with her and we would just talk for a long time. She developed a sort of speech problem where she stuttered a lot and at times, couldn’t speak in full sentences or talked in “word salad”. there were sometimes when she lost control of herself, with the hallucinations and delusions she had experienced since we were children and she would become violent. she broke all the plates in the kitchen and tried to choke me once. she was on speaking terms with oblivion and was only afraid of herself, and enjoyed sex as a competitive sport. she always told the truth and that’s why she is never to be believed. she felt at home in gas stations and hospitals. i could sit and watch her paint for hours. she should not be misunderstood as heartless though bored by cruelty. she looks out for other girls and will turn a wild party into a quiet group of drunk girls sitting on the kitchen floor, braiding each other’s hair, and telling secrets while the boys are left to entertain themselves. i have loved her for eight years and i will never ever stop.

i went through all the cliche stuff, self harm, an eating disorder, addiction. i tried to kill myself a lot. spent a lot of time in hospitals. danny moved away, and his mother outed as him as transgender to his school. he was beaten up and gangraped on his way home. he hung himself in his bedroom. i was the last person he talked to. i moved back to california and it was awful leaving sam and the few other friends i had. i continued using benzos and oxycodone regularly to deal with the flashbacks i got. i slept with girls who hated themselves and made them hate themselves even more. i killed animals for a little bit but eventually got over that. the hallucinations got worse, i heard him, felt him, saw him, and i still do. the dissociation increased as well. one night, i woke up on the train tracks near my house with no idea how i had gotten there. i’ve found myself on the floors of random people’s houses calling for my mom, banging my head head on the wall, i couldn’t stay in school because i left the classroom so much. i started taking testerone. i felt awful because danny didn’t get to. i got my name legally changed to soren daniel, soren for sora, daniel for my brother, danny. i got a mastectomy in march 2013. sam was the first person i showed my new chest to and she cried out of happiness because she knew just how far i had come. in july 2013 i was hospitalized for my eating disorder. sam and i recovered together, eating meals together on skype. i did weight restoration and went through a treatment program. a few months later, i was put in another treatment center and only two weeks after that i was sent to a long term facility in utah. there, i was discovered as transgender and beaten up and raped by a fellow patient. i only stayed there for a few months before telling my parents what had happened. i was talking to sam every day up until january 2014 when she went missing. she was part of the super bowl trafficking so the fbi investigated. about two months ago, they found her body in minnesota. they think she was killed last year around her birthday. i ache every fucking day for her. My heart is in pieces and it will never ever get better. I miss her so much. I currently have an open case with the fbi, i am just working with evidence and planning the right time to act. i spent three months in another residential treatment center after i tried to hang myself with jumper cables. my mom found me hanging unconscious and gave me cpr. so much has changed. i was raped by an ex girlfriend’s father earlier this year but Im trying to stop using drugs all together now. i left a world where i was scared for my life every day. the shame, guilt, and fear are still constant but for the first time in years, i can say i don’t actively want to kill myself. the thoughts are still there and i always possess the potential to act but they are not as strong as before. i think the mind has ways of surviving. sometimes i look at the cigarette burns they left on me, the word “daddy” he carved into my thigh and “whore” across my forearm and im excited to try and make friends, im tired of being lonely, tired of being sad, tired of being scared, im ready to talk about what happened to me, im ready to live my life and i grew up like a child does, am one still who thinks the world is beautiful.

Final Trauma Narrative (Version 3, Instagram Screenshot Transcript)

i was adopted when i was a few months old from india by a white family. my bio mother was in her early teens, impoverished, & had malaria. but the bad shit started in preschool, three men came into my classroom, pointed to a few kids including me, & we were told to go w them. surprise that entire school was wrapped up with an extreme hurtcore child porn torture snuff film ring. nd when i say torture i mean anything from ripoing off fingenails to completley flaying & skinning a 5 year old & boiling her alive. they sell videos of this shit on the deep/dark web & make millions. so theyre connected w law enforcement, the military, doctors, & can pretty much pay off anyone. ive been to two of the warehouses but there are many others in different cities, states, & countries & they all network. depending on the video, it can be relatively hard to access (need to know someone who knows someone kind of someone who knows someone kind of thing). kids & siblings were usually pitted against each other in rigged “games”. in both of the warehouses i was in, there was a full hospital set up with registered doctors, either doctors they had paid/blackmail or parents of kids who were there who agreed to work for them either in exchange for being w their kids or in place of their kids but when they got there, their kids ended up being there anyways. i got to go home almost everyday, unlike most of the other kids but they said if i said anything they would kill my family. i met a girl there named sam who i fell head over heels for & so they exploited that. she was one of the highest grossing kids & they were ecstatic when i came along. she had been in it by way of her father since she was born, so she had no sense of pain, it was crazy, she could hold her hand on a burning hot stove & smile & hold a conversation as if it wasnt smile & hold a conversation as if it wasnt happening at all. i met her two weeks into my being there, i was being dragged by a rope around my neck, & for some reason, the man dragging me stopped in the middle of the hall, in front of a doorway. i watched thru half lidded eyes at a skinny girl, on her knees, feasting on the corpse of another kid. as if in slow motion, she raised her head, and looked at me. her face was covered in blood, and when she smiled at me, it was in her teeth. she waved. i didnt wave back but i felt an incredibly strong inexplicable pull towards her, a feeling of finding someone i had been looking for but didnt know it. that was sam. her warehouse name was cherry. a “red room” video was a livestream that costed a few hundred thousand dollars to a few mill. it was where a guy could log in & watch & tell the bad guys to do whatever he wanted to see, but things had set prices. like he could say “take out her eyes & fuck the socket” & they’d say “$500” so he’d transfer that in real time to them & then they’d do it. they got kids from all over; orphanages over seas, picked em up walking home from school, thru schools like me, churches, homes for mentally disabled kids (there were a lot of downs kids), homeless shelters, mexico, etc. it was horrifying to see childrens breaking points; some it only took a scalping & a few days of gangrape to get them to rape or torture their younger siblings, other times they were out all four of their limbs before it clicked for them. sam was from seattle but everyone wanted her so she spent a lot of time visiting the various warehouses. when i was in a video with her for the first time, she took my face between her hands & stared at me, all smiles & said “youre pretty! im gonna make ur cunt hurt really bad.” we were four years old. we grew bad.” we were four years old. we grew really close over time & they noticed. when i got to 3rd grade, we moved to seattle for my dads job. by then we had about 100 “alters”, parts that broke off the main person sor(en)a. the main part didnt remember or know about any of the bad stuff that had happened, but he had a bad feeling about moving. he was doing poorly in school & by “chance”, we ended up transferring to the school sam attended & her dad picked up warehouse responsibility for me. i met a boy (trans) named danny at the school who was also part of the warehouse group, who became my best friend alongside sam (the three of us were a weird lil trio) & who was murdered by them under the guise of suicide when we were 13. his older brother was also murdered later on, when he started recovering his memories. the seattle warehouse was much bigger, its actually somewhat of the group’s hq. there actually somewhat of the group’s hq. there were roughly 600 kids there at any given time & more perpetrators than the one i had been at previously. it was “equal opportunity” if you will, all kinds of ppl were there, from the typical sadist white guy that i was used to, to satanists, military personnel looking for experiment subjects, neo-nazis, rich oil industry arab guys who just liked fucking babies, etc. it was a real party. obviously, the school sam attended was heavily intertwined w the group. that was the only school & the only “education” she ever recieved. its a miracle she even properly learned to talk, read, write, & talk. honestly, i dont think ill ever know exactly why she was ever allowed to attend school. i suspect it was her mothers doing, who had a soft spot for her deep deep deep deep incredibly fucking deep down. she had an identical twin sister who was kept in the warehouse 24/7 from birth. they had a stand-in kid as her “fraternal” twin who lived at home & another stand in kid for sam herself who they switched in n out. i dont blame or hold anything against her, it was a free ticket to living on the outside. they named me bambi, as it was sams favorite nickname she called me. in the warehouse, there was everything from medieval torture devices like the spanish pear & the wheel to modern shit & shit they made up like an electric chair that fucked you at the same time & a “stretcher” that pulled your arms and legs until they were dislocated or ripped from your body. white phosphorus bullets that burned you from the inside. scalping to skinning a childs entire body & dousing them in alcohol & setting them on fire. fish hooks in every part of ur body. eating ur own excrement. ripping out teeth, cooked over a fire, boiled alive, cannibalism, removed eyes & put wooden stakes in the sockets, sewed eyelids open or cut them off in order to pour hot oil in eyes, “stitches” with barbed wire or metal coat hangers, staple guns, firecrackers in ears, drills thru skulls, cut fetuses out of kids (one of sams daughters, shiloh, was disposed of this way) & fucked them, severed spines to paralyze, a judas cradle with hot plates under your feet so that your only two options are having the bottoms of ur feet scalded or having a sharp point impale you vaginally/anally. they had everything at their disposal. snakes that were venomoids so that you were surrounded by snakes in a dark room that could bite you but not kill you. all kinda of bugs, that theyd make you eat or shove up inside you. nail guns, bone saws, chainsaws, power drills, the ability & the means to bury one alive, dogs horses & other animals that were trained or tricked with smells to rape us, custom tasers with custom tasers with millions of volts with low amperage cuz thats what kills. there were small rivulet channels that ran alongside the walls of every room that led to a cesspool that collected all of the shit, vomit, piss, blood, & other bodily fluids & they’d waterboard us in that. with these tools, they forced me to participate in their shit, as they did with most of the kids. & so i had parts that split off who convinced themselves that they “liked” it or were evil themselves, cuz you can only be helpless for so long. i turned kids into “fuckmeat” (no arms, legs, tongue, teeth, eyes, or ears). i pulled intenstines out assholes & choked toddlers with them. i raped infants. i committed cannibalism & necrophillia. but so did everyone else. because at that level of pain & terror, you learn to obey & fast. & you learned to give up on death because death was a “privilege”, as they put it. it was actually pretty rare that anyone ever died around there, not because they were not easily replaceable, but the worst sadism is satisfied in torture without end. any kid that was successful in killing themselves, their next closest family member ended up in there the next day. they had a concoction that they called party time that they would iv you every time you passed out so there was not a moment of reprieve. at times, i would dissociate, except it was different, i really went somewhere else. sora, donald, & goofy came & took me to destiny island where we would play on the beach, & ride the zip line & eat paopu fruit. i think they were angels who took that form cuz it would be what i would be most comfortable with. they really saved me. a spiky haired idiot, a dumb dog, & an angry duck r god. on the outside, sam and i agreed that we would love each other no matter what happened in there & we were to hurt one another on the first command in order to prevent any unnecessary harm. sam was enlisted as a “breeder” cuz she was insanely beautiful & her first baby was born when we were 11. she named her ophelia & they electrocuted me & hurt me until she ate her baby alive. i was trying to tell her not to but while she could go forever being hurt herself whenever they hurt me, she lost it. the thing about sam was, she thought all of this was normal & just fine & dandy until i came along. the first night of my seattle warehouse adventure she said “dont worry sora itll be fun!” sometimes sam would just…starting fucking tearing at herself. sticking her fingers in her eyes, smashing her head on the wall, biting off chunks of skin & swallowing them. & she would just scream. they laughed at her while she did it but if it got too serious theyd intervene. one time they locked her in a room when she was like that and i was crying and i said please let her out she’ll kill herself in there! and he said so? her cunts just as useable dead as it is alive. and i kept pleading them and smashing myself against the door and they laughed and then one of them whispered something to the other, he knelt down next to me & sliced off a piece of skin from the back of my upper thigh, opened the door, & threw the piece at sam & she just fuckin devoured it. they laughed again. her whole body, from her thighs up, was covered in blood. she looked at me & we made eye contact & she was on me in a second, biting & ripping me & swallowing. i wasnt scared really, just …….really really sad. i just wrapped my arms around her nd started saying (not singing my voice was all trembly) the winnie the pooh theme song, which was her sora donald & goofy, her destiny islands was the 100 acre woods. she got off of me & started tearing her hair out. the bad guys couldnt stop laughing. nd then she said “cherry bad. bad cherry. stupid. stupid ugly stupid ugly evil.” and i said “no i think shes really nice. & smart. & pretty. & i love her.” & she completely froze & stared at me. & one of them said “aw, fuckin bambi, you broke it.” she crawled over to me and took my hands in hers and rubbed them all over her face and said lovely bambi. sweet bambi. i love bambi. i started to move closer to her but before i could, one of them picked her up & started fucking her but not three seconds had passed before she broke his hold on her, turned around & bit his dick. he started screaming trying to peel her off. the other guy tried to help him & the screams brought more. it was hanging by a thread by the time they got her off. i couldnt move i couldnt believe what she had just fuckin done. she was barking & snarling as they stretched her out spread eagle. i heard them talking but not really. someone was talking to me but i couldnt hear him. he grabbed me by my hair and started dragging me but i still couldnt respond, i was too shocked. amazed. scared of what theyd do now. so we were taken to another room. there was a huge see thru….thing?….thats shape could only be best described as one of those large spinning circles that you have to walk thru usually at the end of a fun house. except there were spikes everywhere. the kid currently inside was screaming as she went around & when she was on top, gravity caused her to slide off the spikes on top onto the ones on the bottom. it went over & over. the spikes were hot, causing cauterization, so less chance of dying from blood loss & she probably had a clotting agent. they threw the kid out & she screamed at the top of her lungs, writhing around on the floor until one of the others in the room came & put a bag over her head & dragged her off. “alright cherry step right up, you little cunt” at this point, she was back to her old self, & when the men holding her released her she bounded up to the door of the contraption on all fours & smiles. one of them turned a knob which subsequently shrunk the size of the spikes. “dont want to ruin that pretty face of urs more than u already have, seeing as its your only redeeming feature. & after the shit you just pulled, we’re gonna work you to the fucking bone & milk you for every little penny your whorecunt’s worth.” she was sitting with her limbs between the spikes & threw up a peace sign in response to the guy who had just talked. i wanted to scream and shake her. what is WRONG with you. i watched her spin to the top, and she just fell on to the bottom spikes with her arms spread out like she was flying. it went over and over and she kept falling like that, all happy, like she was in a fucking bounce house. a man came up to me. “you want us to take her out?” i looked at her again and then back up at him. “uhh….idk she looks like shes having a pretty good time.” he hit me so hard my vision went black and my head spun. i was on my back now and he pushed my legs open and fed what felt like a barbed wire inside me, with what was followed by a horrific burning. i didnt even notice but i started screaming and tears started forming and my nose started running. he tied my hands above my head so i couldnt fuck with it. i managed to say please stop. he said “cherrys a nasty little bitch. you wouldnt want to get whatever the fuck is crawling around in her would you? im just helpin u out a little, with a little bleach, youll be clean as the virgin mary.” i started kicking my legs and flopping around and shit but it was stuck there. he said “oh you think that hurts? you got another thing coming” he pushed a button on a small remote & the electricity from the barbed wire was activated. i thought of dying. i thought of sam. i thought of my mom. i tried to focus on the pain & pick it apart but it was too much, i couldnt move cuz of my hands being tied & the pain, all i could do was kind of flop around. i said stop it, stop. he said “nah, you n cherry r a package deal. one of you thinks she can rebel, well, then you both get punished. rotten luck for you tho, gettin stuck with a lil rat like her.” i dont know how long it was before he took it out and then a few of them fucked me. i was so consumed by own pain i hadnt noticed that the gentle whir of the spike machine had stopped & sam was gone. i didnt see her for three weeks. during this time (we were 12), i was expelled from that school. i have no fucking idea why i was, maybe it was the teachers trying to show mercy or discretely get me out of there, maybe it was part of their plan from the beginning. maybe it was because my mom was starting to talk shit about the poor education to the other parents & they were anxious that she was beginning to catch on (she wasnt). after that i started middle school & was bullied a lot for being trans n shit so my mom homeschooled me. sam was taken out of school completely after elementary school & her stand in went to middle school. i still hadnt told my parents so they still left me at home & so i was still occasionally picked up by the bad guys. sams third daughter, winona/winnie, was born at this time, when we were 13. come high school, things started to look up. i met another trans boy named g at school & sam was rarely at the warehouse, just left at home. it was strange, her dad fucked off, & when she came home one day, winnie was there. i mean, she was much too old at that point, they stuck to kids mostly under 10 but sometimes went up to 12 rarely. but she had made such a name for herself that she had a pretty big following that put aside their pedophiliaism to continue watching her. her dad was having an affair & wasnt at home so she took the bus to the city with winnie & hung out with me & g after school a lot. of course, in retrospect, this was all part of their plan to give us a lil bit of hope. you cant take something away if you never had it to begin with. g was kind to us, he knew only a lil bit but knew there was more unspoken because of how we both acted & how sam would do stuff like start masturbating in the middle of the grocery store or break her own fingers by bending them backwards. we were happy but still had the ghost of a gun to our heads so we still didnt tell anyone. i moved back to ca when i was 15 & thats when i told a tiny bit to my mom. it took years to finally convey the horror of it & find a therapist who was wellversed in extreme trauma. when we were 15, sam had been working as a prostitute for a good while at that point & had saved up money. after one of her customers, who was half in love with her, gave her $2,000, she took winnie, stole her moms car in the middle of the night, & drove to oregon. & they were ok for a good few months, but as it turned out, of course, they were being watched the whole time. she kept telling me she was coming to california, but she never intended to, as she knew how dangerous that would be. sam said winnie never asked for anything, she had to notice her lingering on the ice cream on the menu & get it for her cuz she would never ask. she said sometimes she’d pass out on the bathroom floor on heroin & wake up to winnie running the sink & covering her with wet washcloths & she’d say u dont have to do that & winnie would say ur my mommy. u help me all the time. & she said winnie also noticed she never ate, so she said she wouldnt either until sam did. & sam tried to reason w her & explain to her but she wouldnt hear any of it. so sam ate. they’d each take a bite, one after each other. & then winnie would stand in front of the bathroom door w her arms crossed so she couldnt puke it up & sometimes sam couldnt even get her to go to bed & she’d fall asleep there. winnie was so GOOD. she was an angel, even after all the horrific shit she was born into, she was still able to love her mom so wholeheartedly & she just understood. she couldnt articulate it obviously but she knew that sam had no control over what happened. so like if sam was being resistant & they started hurting winnie & the only way they would stop hurting winnie was that sam hurt winnie, winnie was ok w it. sam said that she said to her “im happy its you” which is almost exactly what sam had said to me multiple times before. one time it was snowing so she took winnie to a playground to play & winnie met another kid named ???? there. sam tried to sit w the other mothers & claim she was winnies big sister but then winnie came running up to her to show her something saying mommy mommy look. & all the other moms gave her a death stare & she went & sat in the car. winnie gave ???? (i forget his name) sams phone number so a few days later he called her phone asking if winnie could come over for a playdate. sam said she was “totally scared….icicles” but said okay anyway. & when she dropped her off she went to the door w her & when the two kids were gone the mother was like “you know ur damned lucky i dont call cps on yr ass. ur what? 17? 18? (she was 16) trying to raise a kid when youre nothing but a fuckup junkie. i saw your arms. whoreing around at ur age is bad enough but to bring a child into your mess? the only reason i let ???? have winnie over is cuz she seems like a sweet girl & the more time she has away from you, the better.” & sam facetimed me from the driveway on the verge of tears which i had seen only like twice before. & she said smth like “its very….hard. scary. they could skin me alive and i would laugh in their faces and now im sitting in the snow crying because some women called me a whore.” i said ur not a whore. she looked at me weird and i said “ok maybe strictly technically definition wise, u might be.” she laughed and i said “its not a bad thing that shit hurts. i think its cuz, right now, youre safe. & youve never been safe in ur life. ur defenses have been up all ur life. & finally theyre able to come down a lil. but that also means everything else comes in. its like a huge shit wave that pummels you all at once. do u think of the stuff thats happened and ever, like, ….cry?” she was quiet for a second and then said “no….but it hurts. nothings funny anymore.” and that made me cry cuz FUCK sam…saying that?? made it all really real. she was coming down. & she had never been down before. of course, by the time i saw her again in 2016 she was back to her old self. on the day she died, when we were just sitting next to each other chained up while they set up the cameras, she said “youre much braver than me. thats why today is going to happen like it is. some day, you’ll be able to say everything to some one. & then, we’ll be free. sam met this guy in oregon in a bar & slept w him & he was 27 or smth & they continued to hang out. & then i guess she got a gut feeling or smth that they were coming so she tried to break it off w him so as not to get him involved. but he kept insisting. so she told him the truth, how old she was, where winnie came from, the group, the warehouse, us, all of it. & he asked if they (she n winnie) were still in trouble & she said ur never out of trouble and once theyve touched u. & said that he loved her & she said she didnt answer cuz she didnt really love him, cared for him i guess, & he said that she didnt have to love him back, but he wanted to help her. & she kept saying no, but he finally convinced her to let him buy her & winnie plane tickets to ca & give them a ride to the airport. but then i guess she was getting shit outta her moms car or something & they were running outta time so they just took that one. & then, she said, a police car turned on its lights behind them. he came up to the window & asked for license & registration & she didnt answer & he said miss u know ur driving a stolen vehicle. and she said i know. he said get out of the car but she didnt move so he said “cmon cherry dont fuck with me”. she said he dragged her out of the car, & she had started crying & he knocked her out with the butt of his gun. she said all she could hear was winnie crying & screaming & the boy she was with, shouting. & she woke up in the warehouse with winnie nailed to the wall in front of her. i was in utah at this point, at a residential recommended by a consultant from seattle to my parents. so of course, the warehouse group was there as well. & thats when i stopped hearing from her, i got my last letter from her there, it was weird that they gave me her letters but i guess it was cuz she used a fake name & a random address & the postmark was always from somewhere different. she said that was the first time she felt really broken nd defeated and she just screamed and winnie said mommy dont cry i love you. & she said that made her mad cuz it didnt make sense, it made her mad that no matter what happened, no matter how much “she” fucked up, winnie was never mad at her. her “boyfriend” (for lack of a better word) from oregon was there as well. they tortured him for three weeks until he finally died. they also had found the lil piece of paper that the customer who gave her the $2,000 had left w the money that said to the dreamiest girl ive ever met & his phone number & they lured him there & tortured him & all that great stuff. when we were 16, my parents paid for top surgery for me, & i had been on testosterone for 3 years at this point. a man from the warehouse kidnapped sam & then when that guy took her, she kept saying she wouldnt go if winnie wasnt coming but he took her anyways. & when she saw her again was 2/3 years later here in san diego at the end. winnie was never spiteful, she loved her mom. & sam did all she could but, they always win. the man brought her to chicago & it was a year before i heard from her again. when i did, she was pregnant & just really fucked up, as always. it took a few strings but we eventually helped her get into a psych ward where she was for a few months. we sent letters every day & talked on the phone every saturday. i proposed to her & we exchanged rings & then we were engaged. until g told them where she was in exchange for $, but in retrospect, they probably knew all along & just used it as a reason to isolate me, cuz theres no way you can disentangle yourself from them or get away once youve been involved. in oct 2016, they came to my apartment while 2016, they came to my apartment while my parents were at work, raped me & my dogs & put the little one in the dryer & then took me to the socal warehouse, where it had all started. when i got there, there she was, hanging upside down, being waterboarded in blood, her hair shaved off, skinny as a twig. when her head came up & she saw me she smiled & waved vigorously & it was like the first time i saw her. it took three days of torture for them to get me to lay a hand on her cuz i knew this was going to be the end. & so did she. i wanted to endure as long as i could just so i could be in the same room with her for a little bit longer. but i couldnt. winnie, who was 7 yrs old then, was lying off to the side. they forced sam to cut her up into fuckmeat. she eventually died, luckily. & then sam said to me “dont cry sora it was always going to end like this….no other way, really. do what they tell you, its ok if you take my tongue, ive always been able to say hi to you without even opening my mouth. even when my fingers are in my mouth, i can touch your heart. you are my favorite person i have ever said hello to…..thank you for saying you love me because i love you too, i do. its not scary if you do it.” so i did it. all while two cameras circled us like hawks. but it was like all the sound in the world was turned down & it was just me & her & my fingers touching her skin. i fucked her with a knife strap on. i ripped off her fingernails & toenails. i took out her eyes (nd ate them) & stuck fish hooks in the sockets, i skinned & cooked her exposed flesh with a flamethrower. i cut off her hands & arms & legs. i thought, well, if this means she gets to die, then its ok. i cut open her stomach & made her drink the juice from the end of her intestines. i hammered nails all throughout her body. she didnt make any noise besides laughing. & when she felt me open her mouth to remove her teeth & tongue she said “its such a pretty day & i have to go. when i go, please do not try and find me. do you understand? you cant follow yet but ill be waiting. be brave, sora, little hero…it wont be long. ill see you next time!” & i wanted to punch her, how could someone face a long torturous death at the hands of their best friends with words on par with going away for the weekend? i started crying & as i pulled out her tongue she said dont cry dummy. she was my best friend, my lover, my mother, my very dearest & most precious best friend of 15 years. & i was finally giving her the mercy & escape she deserved so why did it feel like my chest was gonna cave in? i shot nails into her gums. i told her she was pretty. i told her she was my best frien d and that i loved her. that i was sorry i was weak. she said no youre not weak youre weak. she said no youre not weak youre just not superman!! and no one is. i kept thinking what if i had done x y or z different. would i still be here cutting up my soulmate? would i still be surrounded by cameras, being livestreamed to thousands of men jacking off, scooping out the love of my life’s eyes? eventually, after all of her senses were gone, & she was not much more than a bloody hunk of raw meat, they carefully impaled her thru her vagina onto a tall wooden stake out thru her mouth. thru her breaths, & the rise and fall of her stomach, she kept spelling out “i love you” in a mix of morse code & a language we made up, in case something like this were to ever happen. i watched as she kept breathing for 20 minutes. at that point, it was time for me to go home so i ran up & hugged her, the last time i ever touched her alive. i was brought back the next day & she was still alive. finally, one of them handed me a chainsaw. i said i love you im sorry even tho i knew she couldnt hear me. & then i cut her head off. i fell on my knees & held her head to my chest & started screaming obnoxiously & i couldnt stop even tho, in my head, i was telling myself shut up!! shut the fuck up! but i couldnt. so one of them said “you wanna be a baby? you wanna scream like a fuckin infant? well then lets put u where babies go” they pulled her body off the stake, a few of them fucked it, & then cut her vagina open & smashed her bones in her pelvis with a sledgehammer & shoved my head up inside her. i couldnt breathe but then i thought “this isnt such a bad way to go. ive always wanted to be in here & sleep forever.” in the latter half of october, i shot up a gram of heroin & took 18 mg of xanax & was in a coma on a ventilator in the icu for a week & a half. so there you have it. theres much more but this is a very compressed, a quick summary. im already being annoying and obnoxious and im sorry for that. i just started writing and went off but i did go back and tone it down a lot. im not posting this for sympathy or whatever & i dont expect you to believe me really & i dont care either, its just….im so tired of hiding, disclaimers, filtering myself, for the sake of those who haven’t experienced it. why should i protect everyones safe lil ignorant havens by keeping my mouth shut? but really, thank you if you read this far its really kind of you and i appreciate it a lot. its been two years since sam died, i was taken various times during my time in san francisco, october 2016 obviously, october 2017 & again in january 2018 (they burned my genitals & cut off my clit so that ill “never have a dick”, but jokes on them i recently found out you dont need to have a clit to have bottom surgery), but besides those times, things have been pretty quiet. now i just spend my days slowly ruining my moms sanity by telling her everything that happened in therapy. thats one thing, i have wonderful parents that im really grateful for. im not brave. or strong. im running away with my tail in between my legs, im not gonna try & find a law enforcement agency thats not involved, i barely got out alive & im not running any chances of ending up back there. i know im a bad person for knowing whats happening to thousands of kids & doing jack shit but im terrified, i know i dont deserve to fall asleep next to my mom but by some miracle, i do. idk whats gonna happen. probably going to end up killing myself in the next few years but until then, i want to let as many people know that this shit exists. & to cherish their younger siblings/family members, fuckin hold em close cuz you dont know when it could be the last time. im not going to apologize for finding the survivors within myself & letting them out anymore, no matter how obnoxious i look making scenes in the grocery store or how crazy i look. cause i grew up like a child does, am one still, who thinks the world is beautiful.

Trauma Narrative Download – PDF, eBook Format

The following documents include three extras: a gallery of Instagram screenshots used to transcribe the third version of the Trauma Narrative, a master compiled trauma narrative with annotations, and a version-change breakdown (covering Kayla’s death, Mousy, Kimberly, Sam’s description, and the ending).

Soren Daniel Hayes – Trauma Narrative Download

Soren Daniel Hayes – Trauma Narrative_eBook Format Download

Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick/Junk Food” Girl

Posted on May 28, 2026September 21, 2026 by Alice Fawcett

One of the most revealing TikToks of Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick Girl”, is one in which she hauls a large speaker through the street, dressed in traditional Chinese children’s clothing. An AI narration explains in that familiar hollow, robotic female voice that she is off to work. We cut to her performing TikTok dances in a crowded street while passersby poke and prod her, smartphones raised, each hoping to capture their own viral moment.

“Girl” is hardly an appropriate word for Xiao Xiao as she is 39 years old. She is a street performer from rural Sichuan, China, born with Seckel syndrome and primordial dwarfism. She stands just over a meter tall and weighs less than fourteen kilograms. Xaio Xaio’s father left when she was young, with her disability being given as the reason, so her mother raised her alone. The two receive modest government allowances from the local Disabled Persons Federation and Women’s Federation, which have supported them since 2011.

Her body always appears worn, pained, covered in scrapes and bruises. Whether self-inflicted from the kicking and flailing that won her Western internet fame is unclear. In several videos she appears with a large wound across her face, which heals slowly over time into what looks like an unset broken nose. What caused it is never addressed, of course nobody in the comments section thinks to ask.

Source: Tiktok. Screenshots from various Xiao Xiao videos spanning over a dozen profiles (Full profile list available at the bottom of the article)

Scroll through the comments of any Xiao Xiao video and you will find image after image of shoes, switches, and paddles, objects associated with corporal punishment in the rural, impoverished households of the Global South, posted with gleeful suggestions of beatings. It is a particular kind of cruelty, one that reveals more about the commenters than they intend. There is something about Xiao Xiao, be it her size, her volatility, her unruliness, that triggers in a certain type of viewer a sadistic, primal desire to inflict pain. The same impulse drives the monkey torture communities that have flourished in the obscure corners of YouTube and TikTok: small, vulnerable, visibly distressed creatures made into objects of entertainment for a perversely sadistic audience.

Source: TikTok — screenshots of comment sections from various Xiao Xiao videos spanning over a dozen profiles (Full profile list available at the bottom of the article)

It doesn’t seem that Xaio Xaio’s mother initially set out to become her exploiter. When her mother began selling homemade honey, she began filming her daughter to help sell it on a social media platform called Kuaishou. Their profile was a way to document their lives, build an audience, and sell honey that supplemented their government allowance. It worked well, and the account grew to 140,000 followers. People were drawn to Xiao Xiao, intrigued by her size, her expressiveness, and her volatility.

It was not the first time Xiao Xiao had been put in front of a camera – as a child she had appeared on television, paraded as a curiosity, her small body treated as spectacle. Her mother claims she was never compensated for these appearances.

There are reports, difficult to verify, of a Chinese documentary or television segment featuring a child matching her description, a small girl from rural Sichuan with primordial dwarfism. Whether this is Xiao Xiao is not certain. Her name translates roughly to “little little,” a generic term of endearment applied to small children, which makes tracing her history through Chinese-language sources considerably difficult. She is not the only girl with primordial dwarfism to have received media attention in China under that name.

In August 2022, village officials reviewed the Kuaishou profile, found several videos to be inappropriate, and requested its removal. The Chinese government had begun cracking down on accounts deemed to showcase antisocial or inappropriate behavior around this period, so the account was permanently banned. When Xiao Xiao’s Kuaishou account was banned, rumors of her death began circulating online. She later resurfaced through Mei Niang Xinxin’s Douyin lives in mid-2023, and by September of that year a clip of the two was circulating across every platform globally.

Mei Niang Xinxin is a man in his forties from Sichuan who began featuring Xiao Xiao in his Douyin livestreams. A cross-dresser and singer with an established following, he is known for his loud, performative energy. Douyin live performance operates on a gift economy: viewers send virtual gifts during streams which convert into real money for the performers. The more compelling the content, the more gifts flow. Xiao Xiao’s presence, her dancing and the unpredictability of her outbursts, helped the streams generate significant engagement. Wolong appears in the background of several of these videos as well. She is another woman who exists in Xiao Xiao’s orbit without ever quite entering the frame fully.

The power differential is obvious, but Xaio Xaio is a middle-aged woman who has been navigating these arrangements her entire life. She seemingly has spent nearly four decades being poked, prodded, filmed, monetized, and managed by people who benefit from her presence more than she does. Xaio Xaio naturally has a short temper, something local officials noted in their 2022 investigation.

The TikTok account @chinesejunkfood2023 reposted the clip with Mei Niang Xinxin in September 2023. It received 16 million views. Within days of the clip going viral, Western TikTok had named her “Kick Girl” first, then “Chinese Kick Girl,” then “Chinese Junk Food Girl” after the account that had introduced her to them. On FlopTok, a corner of TikTok organized around ironic celebrity worship and heavily edited fan content, she was absorbed into an existing collection of meme figures. Fancams were created, edits circulated, and a whole aesthetic apparatus was built around her image by people who had watched a twenty-five second video.

In Latin America, Xaio Xaio’s distinctive hairstyle, her high pigtails bound with multiple rubber bands, loose pieces hanging down, spawned a trend called “Penteado Xiao Xiao,” were young women recreate the look on TikTok for their own engagement. During Halloween, Japanese TikTok users dressed as her, performing street dances in qipao, which generated its own cycle of “cultural appropriation” outrage from Chinese media.

In 2024, Xiao Xiao’s mother was allegedly jailed for exploitation. The details beyond this are sparse on English language Tiktok and the Chinese sources are difficult to verify through translation alone (a caveat that applies to much of what is known about Xiao Xiao’s life) where the distance between what happened and what was reported and what was then translated and then paraphrased on TikTok by an AI voice narration is considerable and worth keeping in mind.

What is known is that someone stepped in to fill the vacancy her mother left. Reports variously identify this person as a coworker, a neighbor, a cousin, a collegue she had a crush on. The inconsistency is either a translation problem or a reporting problem or both.

She is still livestreaming on TikTok. Recent videos confirm she is alive, which is worth stating plainly given that rumors of her death have circulated more than once. Whoever her current handlers are appear to be leaning into deliberate ambiguity about her age, listing it anywhere from 9 to 26 on her English-language profile. Xiao Xiao is being dressed in increasingly juvenile outfits: toddler-style princess dresses in soft pastel colors. The AI narrations added to her TikToks push the same angle, framing her circumstances as maximally pitiable to drive engagement. All of it is calculated to reframe her on-camera meltdowns as the endearing fits of a child rather than the justified rage of a grown woman who has spent four decades being managed by people who profit from her presence more than she does.

Additional Reading

Know Your Meme. “Xiao Xiao / Chinese Kick Girl.”

Video Archive

To view or download the complete set of Xiao Xiao videos referenced throughout this article, visit the Internet Archive collection here.

Tiktok Sources

In Her Own Language: The Untold Story of Amanda Baggs

Posted on May 19, 2026September 21, 2026 by Alice Fawcett

Amanda Melissa Baggs (also known by her later legal name Amelia Evelyn Voicy Baggs, and online as ballastexistenz, cussinanddiscussin, and withasmoothroundstone) was a disability rights advocate based in Burlington, Vermont. Born in Mountain View, California on August 15, 1980, to Ronald and Anna Baggs, she relocated from California to Vermont in 2005, reportedly to be closer to a friend. She would remain in Burlington until her death in 2020.

Amanda identified as genderless and nonbinary, preferring the neopronouns sie/hir and ze/zer. She also identified as a lesbian and described herself as ‘cognitively disabled, physically disabled, chronically ill, developmentally disabled, and psychiatrically disabled’. As an adult, she claimed to have lost all functional speech and communicated exclusively through a text-to-speech device.

Within disability and autism advocacy circles, Amanda was widely known and broadly celebrated. She created a website titled ‘Getting the Truth Out’ in response to a campaign by the Autism Society of America, arguing that the ASA’s messaging reduced autistic people to objects of pity rather than recognizing their autonomy and inner lives. She spoke at disability conferences, collaborated with researchers at MIT who were studying autism, and maintained two long-running blogs (Ballastexistenz and Cussin’ and Discussin’) which together built her a devoted online following over nearly two decades.

Amanda’s reach extended beyond advocacy circles in January 2007, when she posted a video to YouTube entitled ‘In My Language.’ The video, which depicted Amanda engaging with her environment in ways she presented as characteristic of severe autism before transitioning to a typed narration delivered via text-to-speech device, became the subject of multiple CNN segments and earned her a guest blogging spot on Anderson Cooper’s blog, where she answered audience questions via email. The video’s cultural footprint reached even into the art world with “video artist” Mark Leckey citing Baggs’ stated empathic relationship to inanimate objects as something he found himself envious of and incorporated the singing from ‘In My Language’ into his own video work ‘Prop4aShw.’

The widespread media attention proved to be a double-edged sword. Among the viewers who encountered Amanda’s story through CNN were former classmates and acquaintances, several of whom came forward with accounts that directly contradicted the narrative she had spent years constructing.

Peers who knew Amanda Baggs at Simon’s Rock College (a selective institution for academically gifted teenagers) describe her as high-functioning, verbally fluent, and socially engaged. According to these accounts, Baggs underwent a dramatic change after heavily abusing psychedelics in 1995, leading to a psychotic break and an eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia. After extensive doctor shopping, she received a diagnosis of low-functioning autism around the age of 20, and began building her public identity around it, all while producing writing that was, by any measure, articulate, sophisticated, and inconsistent with the severe disabilities she claimed.

In spite of multiple testimonies from her former classmates, the medical inconsistencies that ran through her claimed diagnoses, and questions that had quietly circulated in online spaces for years, Amanda remained a respected and broadly celebrated figure in disability advocacy circles. None of it was enough to prompt serious mainstream scrutiny. She died quietly from respiratory failure on April 11, 2020, at the age of 39, largely unquestioned to the end. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published obituaries celebrating her life and legacy, with neither publication seeing fit to examine the questions that had long surrounded her story.

Amanda Baggs’ story is not a simple one of deliberate deception. It is a case study in how trauma, mental illness, and a desperate need for identity can converge. She was either the most remarkable case of adult-onset autism ever documented, or she wasn’t autistic at all. The truth, as the evidence strongly suggests, is more complicated than either answer.

Before the Diagnosis

Amanda was considered academically gifted from an early age, and at just 14 (younger than even the typical Simon’s Rock student, who usually enters at 15 or 16) she was accepted to Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, a highly selective institution specifically founded for intellectually advanced students who have outpaced their conventional school curricula.

Those who knew Amanda there describe a young woman who bore no resemblance to the profoundly disabled person she would later present herself as. Former classmates recall her as verbally fluent and socially engaged – eating in the cafeteria with friends, playing the flute, attending classes and participating in discussions at a normal level. She had a boyfriend with whom, by her own account to peers at the time, she was sexually active. Her former classmates consistently maintain that there was nothing that suggested any form of autism, low-functioning or otherwise.

The witness testimony against Baggs’ autism claims is both extensive and credible. Neuroscientist Daniel Drucker, who was one of her closest friends at Simon’s Rock, stated plainly that she ‘didn’t appear or claim to be autistic in 1994-5’ and was ‘brilliant, creative, had an active and healthy set of personal and romantic relationships and was not disabled in any way,’ noting her heavy LSD use of approximately 200 micrograms per day for many months. Ophelia Austin-Small, a psychology PhD candidate with over a decade of professional experience in disability services who lived with Baggs’ family in 1997, provided the most detailed account. She describes a normal, verbally fluent teenager who attended classes, ate in the cafeteria, went rock climbing, played the flute and harp, attended the prestigious Johns Hopkins CTY program, and was the youngest student ever accepted to Simon’s Rock. Austin-Small also provided the single most damning detail about the autism claim’s origins: that Baggs had befriended an autistic girl through a special education peer program, became fascinated by autism, attended conferences, and researched communication devices before eventually claiming the diagnosis herself. Bjorn-Erik Townsend, another former classmate, confirmed she was ‘functional and capable of normal human communication,’ and a former teacher who came forward publicly wrote simply: ‘I knew her when she was fourteen and she was definitely not autistic then. You don’t get autism.’

In 1995, during her time at Simon’s Rock, Amanda began using psychedelics heavily. Former classmates describe a period of approximately three months during which she was using LSD and psilocybin on a near-daily basis. The consequences were severe and rapid. Amanda began claiming to be an elf and reported hearing voices, made suicide attempts, and exhibited increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior. She eventually withdrew from Simon’s Rock and entered a psychiatric institution.

A December 1995 email written by Baggs under the username ‘Galig-Nightsong Dulin’ and sent to former Simon’s Rock classmates, presenting an elaborate account of her claimed Dissociative Identity Disorder — complete with named alternate personalities including an ancient elf named Galiganinda, a nine-year-old child named Katy, and an entity called Dark Mind (the same DID diagnosis she would publicly retract two years later in 1997).

A diagnosis of schizophrenia emerged from this period — and by most accounts, it was the most accurate diagnosis Baggs would ever receive. Her mother, Anna, reportedly refused to accept it outright, and what followed was an extended period of doctor shopping that would set the template for the decades to come.

A journal kept by Baggs during her 1996 stay at the Shepherd Treatment Centre (later circulated among former friends and authenticated by neuroscientist Daniel Drucker, who knew her at the time) documents in granular detail a young woman in the grip of genuine psychosis. Written under her then-username ‘Nightsong,’ the entries span May through September 1996 and describe auditory hallucinations, paranoid delusions about government conspiracies, a belief that staff members were poisoning her food, and a persistent, agonized conviction that she was an elf being forced to accept a human identity against her will. They also document a painful, medicated struggle to accept her schizophrenia diagnosis. A struggle her own doctors noted was being actively complicated by her mother’s refusal to accept it alongside her. ‘I wish Anna would accept my diagnosis as I have,’ Baggs wrote in May 1996. ‘I don’t like it, but I don’t deny it anymore. But I can’t change her opinion any more than she can change mine.’

Later that year, she began publicly identifying as having dissociative identity disorder (then more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) claiming this to family, friends, acquaintances, and online communities. She maintained this identity for roughly two years before publicly retracting it in 1997, acknowledging she had been deceiving both herself and others.

Born-Again Autistic

Amanda began claiming her autistic identity around the year 2000, at around 20 years of age. She claimed to be severely low-functioning, and non-verbal. The immediate issue is that autism is a developmental disorder, meaning that it is present from birth, with signs typically emerging between 18 and 24 months of age. No credible medical framework supports the idea that a person can develop severe, non-verbal, low-functioning autism at the age of 20, after having spent their teenage years attending a selective college, maintaining friendships and engaging in romantic relationships. The CDC notes that signs of autism spectrum disorder are typically identifiable by age 2 and reliably diagnosable shortly thereafter, meaning that a child with the severity of autism Amanda claimed to have would have been identified long before adolescence, let alone adulthood. The notion that it went entirely undetected through her gifted education, her college enrollment, and her years of apparently normal social functioning is not a medical grey area but a complete impossibility. Nevertheless, Baggs built a platform on this claim, and for a time, it worked extraordinarily well.

In January 2007, Baggs began uploading videos to YouTube documenting what she presented as her experience of severe, non-verbal autism. One of these, titled ‘In My Language’, went viral. The video depicted Amanda engaging in repetitive behaviors and interacting with her environment in ways she presented as characteristic of severe autism, before transitioning to a typed narration delivered via text-to-speech device, arguing that her way of experiencing the world represented a valid form of cognition.

The video became the subject of multiple CNN segments, earned her a guest blogging spot on Anderson Cooper’s blog, and caught the attention of CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who dedicated a 2007 piece to Baggs and her story. Her case was also taken up by the New York Times’ Well blog in 2008, where health journalist Tara Parker-Pope examined the video and its implications for public understanding of autism. For a brief period, Baggs was held up by the neurodiversity movement as proof of their central argument that autism is a different way of being, not a disorder to be treated or cured, and that the apparently silent and unreachable might have more to say than the world had given them credit for.

What Baggs could not have anticipated was that the widespread media coverage would reach beyond the disability advocacy circles that had long accepted her story, and into the lives of people who remembered her differently.

By mid-2007, former classmates and acquaintances from Simon’s Rock College had begun coming forward, first to CNN and then across various online platforms, expressing their confusion and alarm at how Baggs was presenting herself. Their accounts were consistent and credible as several held advanced academic positions, including a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD candidate in psychology with over a decade of experience as a mental health professional. None recognized the person being celebrated on CNN as the Amanda Baggs they had known. Naturally, CNN, the New York Times and Wired did not meaningfully engage with these accounts. Go figure.

Cat-Facilitated Communication

Central to Amanda Baggs’ public platform was a single, powerful claim: that a person who appeared to the world as severely cognitively impaired was, in fact, communicating coherent, sophisticated, and philosophically rich thoughts through typing. It was a compelling narrative and for the families of genuinely nonverbal, severely disabled people, it was an emotionally loaded one. It offered the possibility that their loved ones, too, might have rich inner lives that the world had simply failed to access. That hope, real and understandable as it was, is precisely what made the claim so worth examining carefully.

The method Baggs used to communicate sits within a broader and deeply controversial tradition. Facilitated Communication (known as FC) is a technique developed in the early 1970s and popularized in the United States throughout the 1990s, in which a person with severe communication impairments is assisted by a facilitator who supports their hand, arm, or shoulder while they type or point to letters on a keyboard or letter board. Proponents claimed it unlocked hidden intelligence in people with severe developmental disabilities, allowing them to communicate for the first time. The reality, as decades of controlled research have demonstrated, is considerably more troubling.

The American Psychological Association formally rejected FC as a valid therapeutic technique in 1994, finding that in controlled conditions the communication produced invariably reflected what the facilitator knew rather than the subject. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and numerous other major medical bodies have since reached the same conclusion.

Baggs was an open supporter of FC, a position that should itself have prompted harder questions from the journalists who covered her. According to her Wikipedia page, Baggs claimed to use FC independently — but offered at least one detail that should have immediately strained credulity among even her most sympathetic readers: that her cat, Fey, was her most effective facilitator. A claim she elaborated on in a 2006 newsletter published by the Autism National Committee, in which she described Fey as moving her limbs around to assist her communication. A cat. Listed, without irony or editorial challenge, on a Wikipedia page that multiple journalists consulted while covering her as a legitimate disability advocate.

Amanda maintained that she could not boil water without extreme difficulty, that she regularly forgot how to stand up, and that she required caregivers to visit twice daily to assist her with basic personal hygiene. She claimed to be frequently unable to recognize emergency situations. Yet Amanda was apparently able to film, edit, and upload YouTube videos, manage multiple blogs, file her own medical directives, and engage in sustained, sophisticated online advocacy.

She also claimed, at various points, an IQ of between 135 and 160, placing her in the exceptionally gifted range, before later revising this figure down to 85, a drop of at minimum 50 points. A cognitive decline of that magnitude would represent an extraordinary and largely undocumented medical phenomenon, one that would typically be the subject of significant clinical interest and documentation. Whatever the true nature of her conditions, Amanda produced a body of written work that was, by any honest measure, entirely inconsistent with the profound cognitive impairment she claimed. Her blogs read like the output of a highly intelligent person, one with a sophisticated command of language, medical terminology, and rhetorical argument that sat in direct contradiction with virtually every claim she made about her own abilities. The platform Amanda Baggs built rested entirely on the acceptance of a claim that her own output consistently contradicted.

The Munchausen Question

There is a term for what Amanda Baggs may have been doing, and it is not malingering in the conventional sense. Munchausen syndrome is a psychiatric condition in which a person fabricates, exaggerates, or induces physical or psychological symptoms in order to assume the identity of a patient. It is not primarily about financial gain, which distinguishes it from straightforward fraud. It is about the attention, care, sympathy, and sense of identity that comes with being sick. People with Munchausen syndrome often become highly knowledgeable about medicine and tend to accumulate diagnoses while resisting getting better. They tend to become extraordinarily invested in their medical equipment and procedures as symbols of their illness and identity.

By the time of her death in 2020, Amanda had accumulated a list of diagnoses that strains credulity even when considered individually, let alone collectively. She claimed, at various points, to have been living with schizophrenia, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, PTSD, depression, and cognitive disability. On the developmental side, she claimed low-functioning non-verbal autism and intellectual disability, despite having previously claimed an IQ of between 135 and 160 (a figure she later revised down to 85, representing a drop of at least 50 points that she never adequately explained). She also claimed obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, synesthesia, and Irlen syndrome (a controversial condition affecting visual processing that is itself not recognized by mainstream ophthalmology).

Physically, her claimed conditions included gastroparesis, chronic aspiration of food into her lungs, a brain abnormality dating to age 13, something she described as ‘similar to myasthenia gravis,’ trigeminal neuralgia (widely considered one of the most painful conditions known to medicine), a hypermobility disorder causing deformity of her hands, adrenal insufficiency, PCOS, sleep apnea, bronchiectasis, asthma, a craniofacial abnormality, bladder dysfunction requiring a surgically implanted electrical node, recurring meningitis, and, in the final months of her life, functional blindness.

The feeding tube is perhaps the single most revealing element of Baggs’ medical history. A gastrojejunal feeding tube (the type she used) is a significant surgical intervention, typically reserved for patients who are genuinely unable to maintain adequate nutrition through oral feeding, most commonly those who are severely underweight or medically fragile. Baggs was neither. She was, by all visual evidence, significantly obese — a fact that created an immediate and glaring contradiction with her primary justification for the tube, which was gastroparesis.

Baggs herself acknowledged, in various blog posts, that she had to fight her doctors to obtain the tube. In the world of Munchausen syndrome, this is a familiar pattern: the patient who is not genuinely ill enough to warrant an intervention they have become fixated on obtaining, pushing until a doctor, worn down by persistence or liability concerns, finally acquiesces.

She documented it obsessively. She photographed it. She wrote about it at length. She described, without apparent embarrassment, a practice of eating candy and then removing it from her stomach through the tube into a vessel she referred to as her “burp cup”.

She wrote in detail about bodily functions, medical procedures, and the mechanics of her various conditions in ways that can described as having a fetishistic quality. Her blog read less like someone managing illness and more like someone deriving something from it.

Her blog, Ballastexistenz (the name itself a German term meaning “ballast existence,” a reference to the Nazi concept of lives not worth living, which she apparently adopted as an ironic identity) was a sustained, years-long performance of medical suffering. Every caregiver who questioned her was an abuser. Every doctor who declined to provide a requested intervention was evidence of systemic ableism. Every challenge to her self-reported symptoms was proof of society’s failure to believe disabled people. The framework was constructed, whether consciously or not, to make scrutiny impossible.

Whether or not Baggs met the clinical criteria for Munchausen syndrome, the pattern of her behavior over two decades is difficult to explain any other way. The diagnoses escalated steadily over time, each one more dramatic than the last. Getting better was never, in any documented instance, something she appeared to want. And through all of it, being disabled remained the fixed center of her public identity, the thing around which everything else in her life was organized, documented, and performed. It would be easy, and lazy, to dismiss Amanda Baggs as simply a liar. The fuller picture is considerably more complicated, and considerably sadder.

Baggs was, by her own account, a child who had already experienced serious trauma before she ever set foot on the Simon’s Rock campus. She disclosed, in a blog post written just weeks before her death, that she had been sexually abused between the ages of 11 and 15 by a family member, and earlier accounts from people who knew her suggest the abuse extended to at least one other male relative.

In this context, at the age of 14, she was sent away from home to attend one of the most academically demanding institutions in the country. Simon’s Rock College attracts students who were, in their previous schools, almost universally the smartest person in the room. For many of them, arrival at Simon’s Rock is the first time in their lives that their intelligence does not automatically set them apart. For a child already carrying the weight of unprocessed trauma, already fragile in ways that her academic performance had perhaps obscured, this collision with peers who were equally or more gifted may have been genuinely destabilizing.

The drugs were almost certainly a factor but the question of why a gifted 14-year-old with apparent prospects begins using psychedelics compulsively is at least as important as the pharmacological consequences of doing so. Self-medication, escape, and the search for an altered sense of self are not uncommon responses to unprocessed trauma. The breakdown that followed may have been, on some level, inevitable.

When Amanda Baggs broke, she received something she may never have adequately received before: care. Attention. The suspension of expectations. Nobody was asking her to compete, to perform, to be exceptional. Her mother, whatever her failings, rallied around her. Doctors paid attention to her. Online communities welcomed her. The identity of a disabled person, it turned out, came with its own form of status. One that did not require her to out-think or out-achieve anyone or defend her place at the top of any hierarchy. It simply required her to suffer, visibly and persistently.

An autism diagnosis, particularly the specific presentation Amanda adopted, of a profoundly disabled person with a hidden inner life, offered something uniquely powerful. It was sympathy without being pitied and permanent without being terminal. It positioned her not as someone who had fallen apart, but as someone who had always been different, always been misunderstood, always been more than the world had given her credit for. It transformed a history of dysfunction into a narrative of neurodivergent identity. And so she built her life around it, not just her public persona, but apparently everything. Her hobbies were reframed as stimming or therapy. Her pets became service animals. Her appearance, the ungroomed facial hair she explicitly refused to remove, the medical equipment worn visibly rather than concealed, became markers of authenticity, evidence of how sick she really was.

Whether she knew, on some level, what she was doing is a question that cannot be answered with certainty. It is entirely possible that by the end, Amanda Baggs had been sick for so long, and had invested so completely in that identity, that the original choice (if it ever was a fully conscious one) had long since become invisible to her.

The Final Blog Entry

On April 10, 2020, Amanda Melissa Baggs posted to her WordPress blog for the last time. It was a short, disoriented entry, written from what she described as a state of delirium. She had been in and out of the hospital. She was struggling. She died the following day, April 11, 2020, in Burlington, Vermont. She was 39 years old. Her mother reported that the cause of death was believed to be respiratory failure.

Respiratory conditions (sleep apnea, bronchiectasis, aspiration) had featured prominently in her long catalogue of claimed illnesses. Whether any of them were genuine, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated will never now be fully known. What can be said is that a 39-year-old dying of respiratory failure is not implausible for someone with her lifestyle and documented health history, whatever the true origins of that history were. Years of obesity, inactivity, and medical interventions of uncertain necessity take their toll regardless of the motivations behind them. In this sense, the ending of Mel Baggs’ story is not so much ironic as it is tragic – a person who spent decades performing sickness may ultimately have made herself sick in the process.

Laura Tisoncik, posting on Baggs’ social media accounts the day of her death, wrote that the world had lost a great activist and an amazing human being, and that Mel lived on in a powerful legacy of ideas and values. Within the disability advocacy community, this was the dominant response. Tributes poured in. The New York Times ran an obituary. The Washington Post followed. The Art of Autism published a tribute. She was remembered as a pioneer, a trailblazer, a person who had changed the way the world thought about nonverbal autism.

Her Wikipedia page, to this day, presents without qualification the version of Amanda Baggs that she constructed for public consumption: the nonverbal autistic savant, the disability rights pioneer, the woman who taught the world that a different kind of mind was still a mind worth having. The testimonies of those who knew Baggs before her autism identity was constructed were, for the most part, quietly ignored. The journalists who covered her moved on without accountability. The communities that had elevated her had too much invested in the narrative she embodied to examine it carefully. And so, the story was never fully told, not while she was alive, and not after her death.

Sources

Baggs’ Own Writing

Media Coverage

Witness Testimony and Controversy

Interviews

Donna Williams Interview with Amanda Baggs, July 2007

Medical and Scientific Sources

The Boy With the Keyblade: The Trauma Narrative of Soren Daniel Hayes

Posted on May 18, 2026September 21, 2026 by Alice Fawcett

Between roughly 2012 and 2016, Tumblr was the internet’s most concentrated ecosystem of performative suffering. The more extreme your pain, the more engagement your posts received. Flower crowns and cigarette burns, soft grunge and eating disorders — Tumblr users built a whole visual language around the aestheticization of damage, with a reward structure that treated disclosed trauma like social currency. Ashley Anne Isaacs, who built an online following around her very public struggle with anorexia, was just one of these infamous figures — if you haven’t read that piece, I’d suggest starting there.

In 2015, a user posting under the name Soren Hayes (Tumblr: fawnsyndrome, shyfawn, sicklefawn, hurtc0re, faggotuglyhfukcingdickballs, umbillicalnoose, necrochotic, necromutilomania, oathful; MCR Forum: Dark Link The Assassin; Instagram: androeciums, sacrificalis, oathful, soratoys) published the first version of a document they referred to as their “Trauma Narrative” on their blog. It claimed to be a first-person account of nearly three years spent as a child sex trafficking victim in a Seattle warehouse operation. It was written with genuine literary skill. It was also, in every material sense, a fabrication.

A full compilation of Soren’s Trauma Narrative is available to download here: https://files.catbox.moe/2x4fo2.zip — the zip file contains two formats of the complete document (Standard and eBook-formatted PDF), including all three versions of the narrative and a master edition combining them into a single running text.

The person at the center of the narrative (a girl Soren called Sam) knew the truth better than anyone. In 2016, when contacted by an anonymous user from Lolcow.farm, asking about the posts and trauma narrative, she replied:

“The boy we’re talking about is just a very mentally ill person and it’s just very sad this is the path it’s gone down. Nothing they say is true. When I knew them, they were just a little kid that liked Kingdom Hearts and had a weird mom. They only went to my house once and it’s nothing like they described. They made A BUNCH of fake profiles, and it was pretty scary for a while, but now it’s just old news. I wish they would get help honestly, because nothing that comes out of their mouth is true, except for the fact that they have a mom.”
Samantha Stowell, March 2016

The Tumblr Trauma Ecosystem

Tumblr was not a social network in the way Facebook or Instagram were social networks. Tumblr was both a blogging platform than a subculture aggregator – a place where aesthetics and identities centralized around shared interests rather than personal networks. Sitting somewhere between the confessional rawness of early 2000s Myspace and the curated self-presentation of modern Instagram, it occupied a strange middle ground: personal enough to feel intimate, and yet public enough to build an audience. Teenagers and young adults found each other across geography through shared darkness, and what they built together was a visual language as specific and recognizable as any subculture with pale skin and flower crowns, thrift store dresses and self-harm scars, soft focus photography and song lyrics about drugs.

To understand why it worked, you have to understand why some of us found this type of content beautiful – it was beautiful the way anything built around real feelings tends to be, even when those feelings are painful. I’ll admit I’m not a disinterested observer. Tumblr gave me, like it gave a lot of teenagers back in the day, a digital space to build an identity through image and language. It was a place to find a self in the collision of aesthetics and feeling before I knew how to articulate either.

Entire followings were built around a particular kind of image: beautiful, clearly unwell, vulnerable. Pale skin photographed in natural light, flower crowns, worn thrift store clothing, bands like The Smiths, My Chemical Romance, and Crystal Castles, whose entire project was the elevation of suffering into something worth listening to. There were specific figures: bloggers like Ginger Bronson/Kayla Day, a poet and musician whose confessional writing about trauma, addiction, and survival attracted a devoted following and Michelle Alessandra/Shmegeh, whose photographs made extreme thinness look ethereal and otherworldly.

They were not performing, per se. Or they were performing the way anyone performs when they make art out of their own life. The line was genuinely hard to find. Either way, the platform’s reward structure didn’t discriminate. Disclosing trauma online generated followers, community, and protection. Being a victim of something sufficiently extreme made you seen and beloved in a way that ordinary suburban adolescent loneliness never could. The more extreme the suffering, the more devoted the audience.

This is the structural condition that made what happened next not just possible, but in a certain light, logical.

In 2015, a user posting under the name Soren Hayes (fawnsyndrome, shyfawn, sicklefawn, hurtc0re, faggotuglyhfukcingdickballs, umbillicalnoose, necrochotic, necromutilomania, oathful) published a document they referred to as their “Trauma Narrative” on Tumblr. It claimed to be a first-person account of nearly three years spent as a child sex trafficking victim in a Seattle warehouse operation.

Soren’s Trauma Narrative

The document Soren posted in April 2015 opened with a preamble that established its own vulnerability before launching into an account that claimed to begin when Soren was nine years old, newly moved to Seattle, and befriended a girl named Sam. What followed was extraordinary in its scope and its brutality: kidnapping, sado-masochistic child sexual abuse contained within a warehouse trafficking operation and multiple murders of children witnessed firsthand. It was written in all lowercases, which gave the piece a tone that felt rawer and more vulnerable, like something typed in a state of barely controlled distress.

Upon immediate analysis, it becomes apparent that the work is a fabrication. The narrator’s voice is too controlled in the wrong places and sardonic and darkly witty at moments where genuine trauma would produce something less theatrical. At one point, while being driven to a cabin in the woods to be killed, Soren’s internal monologue is: “this is so fucking cliche. I thought of Danny’s horror movies again.” This is a literary voice performing world-weary detachment. It reads like a fictional character who has been written to seem hard, not like a child in danger.

Some scenes are almost comically absurd in their gratuitousness. At one point, Sam’s father bursts into the room while the two children are playing Kingdom Hearts on a PC emulator and beats the shit out of Sam without warning or explanation. Soren takes care to note that the Destiny Islands theme was playing softly in the background as the beating occurred. For those unfamiliar with the Destiny Islands theme, I have included it below (in the spirit of full journalistic transparency).

Plenty of other scenes read more like adolescent fantasy than anything resembling the actual experience of a trafficking victim. A client who boils rats alive one by one before getting to the actual abuse, atmosphere-building that belongs in a corny horror movie, not a trafficking narrative. The spider scene, in which spiders are inserted into the children’s orifices and then eaten, followed immediately by the remark that Soren couldn’t eat spaghetti for years afterward. Sam, locked in a room mid-psychotic episode covered in blood, being calmed down by Soren humming the Winnie the Pooh theme song. And perhaps most memorably, Sam spending the night locked in a closet with a dismembered corpse, having a full animated conversation with the severed head, then greeting the men who open the door the next morning by asking if she could have some orange juice.

The horror in Soren’s trauma narrative escalates with a fictional logic, each section trying to outdo the last, piling on detail with the compulsive energy of a high school fan fiction author. The details are specific in all the wrong places- gratuitously precise about torture devices and punishments, while being vague about anything that could be independently verified. The “best gang rape victim” line, delivered as sardonic self-assessment from Soren’s protagonist/self-insert, is perhaps the most telling moment in the entire document. No survivor frames their own victimization this way in genuine recall. It is the kind of dark gallows humor that gets written about trauma survivors in fiction. Then there is the spider detail: spiders inserted into the children’s bodies, forced consumption. Gratuitous to the point of absurdity, and very specifically the kind of shock content that circulated in dark corners of the internet, Soren demonstrably frequented.

Threaded through the entire narrative, functioning as its emotional skeleton, is Kingdom Hearts. The protagonist identifies as Sora, the game’s main character. The love interest is Sam, written as somewhere between Kairi’s tenderness and Riku’s darkness. When Soren comforts the injured Sam on a bathroom floor, he tells her they are on a boat to Destiny Islands, that they will get married under the paopu tree, and rocks her back and forth to “make it feel real”. It reads exactly like a teenage fan fiction writer’s idea of a tragic romantic scene, not a memory.

Sam herself is the clearest tell of all. Though Sam is based on a real person Soren encountered, she is not a person in this narrative but a literary archetype — and a fairly predictable one for that specific era of Tumblr culture. The vulnerable wolf girl; brutalized, and so she became brutal herself. Three-dollar thrift store dresses and leather jackets. A white t-shirt that said “i’m dreaming of being a cloud.” She had her head in the stars. She was only afraid of herself. She felt at home in gas stations and hospitals. She looked out for other girls and would turn a wild party into a quiet group of drunk girls sitting on the kitchen floor, braiding each other’s hair, telling secrets. Readers of a certain corner of Tumblr will recognize this character immediately, because she already existed there, under the name Ginger Bronson.

Ginger Bronson was the stage name of Kayla Day, a poet, musician, and blogger who was one of the more recognizable figures in Tumblr’s dark underground circa 2012-2016. Her writing was raw, confessional, and genuinely beautiful in its own right — a stream of consciousness dispatches about trauma, addiction, poverty, and survival. Her visual identity was specific and instantly recognizable: tattoos, many of which had been given to her against her will by an abuser, photographs of herself that made devastation look beautiful. She did runway modeling, including work connected to Yves Saint Laurent. She was, in the language of that world, extremely real.

Sam’s fake Facebook page, created and maintained by Soren, used Bronson’s photograph as its profile picture and claimed Sam had modeled for Yves Saint Laurent — exactly what Bronson had actually done. This is not aesthetic inspiration. This is identity theft in service of a narrative, the appropriation of a real person’s real trauma to lend credibility to a fiction.

The deeper connection is harder to prove but impossible to ignore. Sam’s entire personality maps almost perfectly onto how Bronson presented during her most active period — the dreamy dissociation, the protective maternal instinct, the eating disorder, the drug addiction, the tattoos given by an abuser, the quality of being simultaneously feral and tender. Soren didn’t just borrow Bronson’s image. He borrowed her entire identity and gave it to a character.

What Soren constructed was a character study, complete with a protagonist, a love interest, a supporting cast, and a carefully maintained aesthetic, borrowing its emotional architecture from Kingdom Hearts, its central character from Ginger Bronson, and its authority from the Tumblr ecosystem that had taught its author exactly what a “trauma narrative” was supposed to look and feel like.

Revisions to the Trauma Narrative

Soren didn’t write one version of this story. He wrote three.

The first, posted in April 2015, established the baseline: the Seattle warehouse, the Kingdom Hearts mythology, Sam as a Ginger Bronson surrogate, and the cinematic pacing. The first version included a keyboard smash buried in the post tags: “Gos. Fucking ycj fucj fuck fuck did d cjdjsnf.” A simulation of a writer so overwhelmed by their own material they lose motor control, a technique, borrowed from the same Tumblr aesthetic vocabulary that produced everything else in the document.

Six months later, in October 2015, a second version appeared. The pain room, previously described as stocked with BDSM gear, was reframed as a Tor-based livestreaming operation, grafting real dark web trafficking discourse that had been circulating in the media onto the narrative. Most significantly, a new character appeared: Mousy, who exists in the narrative solely to be dismembered in extreme detail before having a conversation with Sam post-mortem. And Kayla’s death changed entirely. In V1 she is shot accidentally by a nervous client. In V2 she dies during a livestreamed torture sequence.

Three years have passed. In October 2018, a third version appeared under the Instagram handle “Oathful”. Gone was the Seattle Montessori school, the sleepover, Sam’s father appearing over the bed. In its place: India. An orphanage. Abuse beginning in preschool when men entered the classroom and selected children. The operation was reframed as a multinational network connected to law enforcement, the military, and registered doctors.

Across all three versions, one element remains completely stable – Sam. The vulnerable wolf girl, the dreamy dissociation, the protective maternal instinct. Everything else in the narrative is negotiable (the origin story, the deaths, the institutional scope), but Sam is not. She is the emotional core the author cannot let go of, even as everything around her gets rewritten from scratch.

The Cast

The trauma narrative had a cast of characters, and most of them were real people. Not real in the sense that the events described were real (they weren’t) but real in the sense that behind each fictional name was an actual person whose identity, image, and in some cases whose genuine trauma, had been borrowed without consent to furnish Soren’s story. This is where the narrative stops being merely a curiosity of internet culture and becomes something with documented victims.

Sam was Samantha Stowell, a girl Soren had briefly known in high school. She really had a twin sister and her father’s initials matched the initials of the abuser in the narrative. When an anonymous user contacted Samantha in 2016 to let her know Soren was still writing about her, her response was measured, reassuring that Lawyers had already been involved and It was, she said, old news. “Nothing they say is true. When I knew them, they were just a little kid that liked Kingdom Hearts and had a weird mom. They only went to my house once and it’s nothing like they described.” Her statement is worth reading in full, because it is the clearest possible summary of what actually happened.

Danny was Ashton Drew, a Tumblr user whose photos Soren had been collecting since at least middle school. Soren constructed an entire fictional person around Drew’s image: a transgender boy named Danny who huffed paint thinner, loved My Chemical Romance, made flower crowns and eventually hanged himself after being outed and gang raped on his way home from school. When Soren posted Danny’s suicide in the voice of Danny’s brother Christopher, the post went viral. A Twitter campaign, #SingItForChristopher, emerged in response. Thousands of people mourned a person who had never existed, using the face of a person who was very much alive.

When Drew eventually found out, his response captured something essential about what Soren’s behavior actually cost real people. He had been stalked for years, and his image had been used to construct a dead person. He claims to have lost years to the anxiety of not knowing what else was out there, of not being able to trust what was on the internet about him. “I hate you,” he wrote, “because you ruined about two years of my life with your little fucking game.”

Soren admits to stalking Ashton Drew when called out directly on their FawnSyndrome blog.

Despite being called out directly by Ashton Drew for stealing his photos, Soren continued using them in reference to Danny as late as 2018 — years after Drew had gone public about the stalking.

Then there was Lindsey Baum. In October 2015, Soren posted a screenshot from a missing persons database (a photograph of a real ten year old girl who had gone missing in 2009) and implied she had been part of the trafficking ring. A real missing child, whose family had spent years not knowing what happened to her, drafted into someone else’s fiction as supporting evidence. Lindsey Baum’s remains were eventually found in 2018. She had been murdered.

Who was Soren Daniel Hayes Really?

Soren did not emerge from nowhere. Tumblr’s trauma economy had its own aesthetics, its own hierarchies, and its own reward structures. It created a specific kind of hunger in its audience for suffering that was extreme enough to be interesting, beautiful enough to be bearable, and authentic enough to justify the attention it received. Soren fed that hunger with remarkable precision – Every element of the narrative was calibrated to what the platform craved: the vulnerability, the literary voice, the romanticized relationship at the center, the Kingdom Hearts mythology, and the Ginger Bronson soft grunge aesthetics.

There is a version of Soren’s story that is cynical: a calculated performance by someone who understood the platform’s reward structure and exploited it deliberately. There is another version that is more complicated: a genuinely unwell person whose delusions were fed rather than challenged by every system they encountered, from the Tumblr ecosystem that rewarded escalation to the parents and therapists who appear to have reinforced rather than questioned the narrative. The truth is probably somewhere neither version fully captures.

So, who really was Soren Daniel Hayes?

Across four lolcow threads spanning 2015 to 2021, a more mundane picture of Soren’s actual life assembled itself in the background of the narrative – visible in room photos packed with children’s toys, Depop listings for secondhand Hot Topic clothing, Instagram stories featuring drug paraphernalia, and the occasional slip of verifiable detail.

Soren Danial Hayes was a tans-identified female, born with the birth name, Priya (last name uncertain- Sweeny and then later changed to Hayes). S/he was adopted from India alongside a sister named Anjali, by older white parents living in the Seattle suburbs. Soren’s family was upper-middle class and his father worked as a scientist. Soren’s mother was a physician’s assistant, which reportedly enabled Soren’s early access to testosterone. Soren began transitioning around age thirteen with top surgery occurring in early adolescence. The family eventually settled in San Diego.

The bedroom tells its own story. Photos that surfaced over the years show a room that looks less like a living space and more like a shrine. Floor to ceiling Kingdom Hearts merchandise, plush toys, figurines, Disney collectibles, Mark Ryden prints, Pullip dolls, cosplay materials. Observers on Lolcow.farm noted the sheer volume of it, the way it consumed every available surface. One described it as looking like “a serial killer’s den.” Another noted it looked like “an edgy Pee Wee Herman.” It was the room of someone who had retreated very far inside a private world.

The drug use Soren claimed both in the narrative and on social media — heroin, meth, ketamine — was largely unverifiable and in several cases demonstrably staged. Photos of paraphernalia showed unused needles, clean spoons, and suspiciously fine powder in Mickey Mouse branded baggies that appeared to have been purchased online as props. The aesthetic of drug use was the point, not the drugs themselves. The ketamine treatments, by contrast, appear to have been real and medically supervised. Expensive but consistent with the family’s financial resources and the mother’s medical background but notably less glamorous than the street drug narrative Soren preferred to project.

Soren’s older adoptive sister Marley was notified about the online activity on multiple occasions. Community members reached out directly, and the lolcow threads document at least one instance of her being contacted about the trauma narrative and the fake profiles. She acknowledged awareness of the situation and indicated that their parents had been informed as well. What the family actually knew, and to what degree they believed or dismissed it, remains genuinely unclear. Soren’s father reportedly reacted with anger when he discovered the Instagram activity. The mother appears to have been more accommodating, though whether she accepted the narrative at face value or simply chose not to challenge it is unknown. What is documented is that awareness of the situation reached the family repeatedly over the years, and the behavior continued regardless.

Suicide attempts were a recurring feature of Soren’s online presence for years, so frequent, and so frequently survived, that when the real thing came, many observers initially assumed it was another performance. A fake death notice posted by a “brother” in December 2015 had already established the template. The Amazon account showing activity days after the alleged death muddied the waters further.

But on January 13, 2021, an obituary appeared on the Dignity Memorial funeral home website. Soren Daniel Hayes, born September 23, 1997. Died January 13, 2021. Age twenty-three. Under the care of El Camino Memorial Park, Sorrento Valley, San Diego. A sister posted a brief tribute on her private Instagram. The wording was careful and not quite warm with references to mental illness, to patience, to no longer suffering. The tone of someone who had been bracing for this for a long time.

Soren received a phalloplasty five months earlier, in August 2020. The surgery had not gone well. The graft failed, and photos posted publicly showed severe necrotic tissue. There were multiple returns to hospital, fabricated texts blaming a transphobic nurse, graphic wound documentation shared on Instagram with the same matter-of-fact exhibitionism that had characterized the trauma narrative for years. And then, eventually, silence.

It is worth noting that phalloplasty carries one of the highest post-operative suicide rates of any gender affirming procedure. The gap between what the surgery is imagined to resolve and what it actually can resolve is, for some people, insurmountable. Whether this was a factor in Soren’s death is unknown. What is known is that the person who had spent a decade writing about wanting to die eventually did.

What Soren actually experienced in childhood remains genuinely unknown. People who knew them in person described a happy-looking kid who became, somewhere in the transition to adolescence, something else entirely. There was almost certainly real pain underneath the fabrication – the compulsiveness of the behavior, the decades of investment in a single narrative, the inability to stop even when lawyers and callouts and public humiliation made stopping the obvious choice, all of this points toward something more than simple cynicism. Whether that something was untreated, psychosis, a personality disorder, genuine trauma elaborated beyond recognition, or some combination of all three, no one outside the family will ever know for certain.

Kingdom Hearts, the game that runs through the trauma narrative like a spine, is about children who lose their worlds and spend years searching for a way back to something that may no longer exist. It is about memory, and constructed realities, and the question of whether a self-built out of borrowed pieces is still a self. Soren named themselves after its protagonist. Used its mythology as the emotional architecture of a document meant to explain, or justify, or simply make bearable, whatever it was they were actually carrying. We don’t get to know what that was. The narrative, in all three versions, was too loud for the truth to be audible.

Source List

Trauma Narrative, Version 1 – Published April 19, 2015 Archived – Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/MD6YTgQa
Trauma Narrative, Version 2 – Published October 28, 2015 Archived – Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/KY3ZiaxE
Trauma Narrative, Version 3 – Published October 22, 2018 Imgur Screenshot Archive
Exposing Soren Tumblr post
Exposing Soren blog
Lolcow Thread 1: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/101679.html
Lolcow Thread 2: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/112039.html
Lolcow Thread 3: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/723714.html
Lolcow Thread 4: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/920764.html
Lolcow Thread 5: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/1685917.html
Archived Tumblr Blog – hurtc0re: https://archive.is/hurtc0re.tumblr.com
Archived Tumblr Blog – faggotuglyhfukcingdickballs
Archived Tumblr Blog – necrochotic
Archived Tumblr Blog – necromutilomania
MCR forum blog
Ashton Drew posts on fawnsyndrome
Fake Sam Facebook
Fake RIP Danny Facebook
Dignity Memorial – Soren Daniel Hayes
FBI Missing Persons page
Remains identified May 2018 (True Case Files)
KOMO News – cold case arrest with similarities to Baum case
NIH/PMC – Risk of Suicide and Self-Harm Following Gender-Affirmation Surgery
Journal of Urology – Rates of Psychiatric Emergencies Before and After Gender Affirming Surgery

Bury Wingless Crows: The life and death of Ashley Anne Isaacs

Posted on April 24, 2026September 21, 2026 by Alice Fawcett

Ashley Isaacs, also known as “Hamtaro-chan”, is a case study in early influence culture that I encountered on Tumblr as a teenager myself in 2014. All of the information included within this article comes from various image boards, forums, social media archives, and first-hand accounts from people who knew Ashley personally.

All primary sources are archived forum posts, social media screenshots, and firsthand accounts from people who interacted with Ashley online and in person. No single account should be taken as definitive truth; Ashley herself was an unreliable narrator, as were many who commented on her life. This piece does not intend to sensationalize her death or her illness, but to document the life of a real person who existed on the internet for nearly two decades.

Ashley Anne Isaacs was born to Rebecca Sue Isaacs and Michael Weist in Florida, USA. In 1999, Michael was arrested for battery and given 6 months’ probation with alcohol restrictions. In Ashley’s own blog posts from 2015, she recounts the physical abuse of her pregnant mother, inappropriate corporal punishment, emotional neglect and being compared to her peers by her father. Eventually, her father disappeared from he life sometime during either grade 5 or 6. Ashley later reflects on her father, asking “Where is he now? Fuck if I know. What has happened to ME now? Fuck if he cares.”

Rebecca was a single mother and worked as a waitress at Chili’s during the peak of Ashley’s online presence. There is a lot of online speculation, with some evidence that Rebecca herself had a disordered relationship with food, including alleged competitive weight loss behavior with Ashley.

Ashley, by her own account, claims to have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa as early as age 11–12 years old.

Hamtaro-chan (2006-2009)

In the early days of 4chan and /b/, there were a handful of girls who would post selfies and links to their Stickam profiles in order to get attention from the men on the forum. Ashley began posting on /b/ around the age of 12 or 13, and was given the nickname “Hamtaro-chan” after recording herself nude with a Hamtaro plushie on Stickam. This name stuck, and she joined the ranks of girls such as Boxxy and Cracky-chan.

Ashley did not choose the nickname Hamtaro-chan for herself. Instead, she used various handles referencing To Kill a Mockingbird in most of her online profiles — “Atticus_finch” on Snapchat, and variations of “Atticus” and “finch” on MySpace and DeviantArt.

At some point in 2007, she aroused the ire of /b/. This is evidenced by her DeviantArt profile, in which comments document mass trolling by anonymous users. It is unknown what Ashley did to invoke their wrath, but seeing how young girls like Jessie Slaughter were targeted en masse, it likely wasn’t any behavior out of the ordinary for a profoundly damaged preteen being taken advantage of by online strangers. Around the time the trolling begins, Ashley disappears from the internet — believed to have been removed from online access by her mother and/or authorities after they found out she was camming nude as a minor. Supposedly, Rebecca discovered Ashley’s activity and forced her into inpatient treatment. There is also some speculation that Ashley attempted suicide after being caught.

Over a decade later, when Hamtaro-chan photos began resurfacing, Ashley reflected warmly on 4chan: “Thank you, 4chan. You were my home… I still actually talk to a few of you from many years ago.” She also clarified that her selfies from this timeframe are post-refeeding, noting that she had “developed Bulimia after the discharge, and when those photos were taken. The year was [the end of] 2006 to 2007.”

In May of 2016, a former friend of Ashley’s, going by the tripcode “Twatwaffle” on Lolcow.farm, stated that Ashley “considers [her eating disorder] ‘revenge’ for Rebecca cutting off her whole ‘show my tits and bits on Stickam for presents,’ as was her suicide attempt after she was caught.”

Ashley vehemently denied this. But the fact remains that Ashley’s time on /b/ as Hamtaro-chan drove her toward an addiction to the attention of online strangers, and to the gifts they might provide. This pattern repeated itself throughout Ashley’s online footprint until her quiet death.

Ghost in My Pocket (2012–2016)

The year is 2012. Ashley is currently living in a one-bedroom apartment with Rebecca in Orlando, Florida, while Rebecca works as a waitress at Chili’s. Ashley returned to the internet on Tumblr as “ghostxperfume” and on Instagram as “ghost.in.my.pocket,” where she cultivated a following among pro-ana and eating disorder communities. Her body had deteriorated to a shocking state, quickly garnering a dedicated online following, the sympathy she craved, and the gifts that followed.

Ashley continued to openly document her deterioration on her blog. One post from 2013 documents a near-death cardiac event; she describes the experience of dying and being resuscitated. Around December of 2014, she confirmed on Instagram that she was wheelchair bound: “Yes, I am in a wheelchair, and yes, I am not ashamed to show I need one.” She also confirmed multiple times that she wore a wig to conceal hair loss from malnutrition. In 2015 it became evident that her bulimia had caused significant dental deterioration, after Ashley alluded to oral surgery. Online speculation was that severely eroded teeth were being extracted.

Realizing that her appearance could garner both sympathy and shock, Ashley began manipulating followers into buying gifts, eventually developing a system of receiving binge/purge food from followers via Amazon wishlist and gift cards. Some users speculated that Ashley did this because her mother, on a waitress’s salary, was unable to provide enough food to binge and purge on. Other communities — Stamina Rose (now Lolcow.farm), Pretty Ugly Little Liar, and Kiwi Farms — began to take notice and Ashley was treated simultaneously as a figure of morbid fascination and genuine concern.

Some of the items Ashley received during her Amazon wishlist era included Whole Foods gift cards totaling well over $100, Panera, Starbucks, Domino’s, Cheesecake Factory, Amazon gift cards, imported candy, and specialty nut butters. She claimed these foods and gift cards were for “challenging” her disordered eating habits.

Ashley was forced to delete her original “ghostxperfume” Tumblr after an anonymous user reported her to Orlando Adult Protective Services, leading to a real-life intervention. Immediately afterward, she returned under the URL “Sealed Up Tight.” These anonymous attempts to get her sectioned continued throughout 2013–2015 but ultimately failed due to Florida’s Baker Act, which does not cover treatment-resistant eating disorders in adults who do not present an imminent threat to others.

Former acquaintances surfaced on Lolcow.farm and Kiwi Farms, describing her tendency to speak poorly about people she befriended. Her pattern of manipulation was identified collectively by forum users. Ashley and her defenders attempted to use her severe illness as a shield for her behavior.

Ashley befriended Erika, an anorexic mother of two, through Tumblr, and they met in person. Their friendship quickly became co-dependent and dysfunctional. When Erika decided she wanted to recover in 2014, Ashley — who was anti-recovery — began sending hostile anonymous messages to Erika’s Tumblr in an apparent attempt to demoralize her. In April 2015, Erika was accepted into a specialized treatment center in Denver after raising over $1,000 for her care. Ashley’s resentment toward Erika’s recovery was palpable in her blog posts. In spite of Ashley’s toxicity, Erika recovered and left social media.

In early 2015, during the Erika saga, Ashley began sending “recovery” care packages to followers containing foods that forum users with their own histories of disordered eating quickly identified as known binge foods within online eating disorder communities, calling into question the sincerity of the giveaways.

In May of 2015, a Lolcow.farm poster who had contacted Dr. Phil’s producers about another friend revealed that producers had already received multiple write-ins about Ashley and had reached out to her directly. Ashley declined the offer — passing up free access to top-tier treatment and significant national attention, which she otherwise seemed to crave.

Ashley left Orlando for Mississippi in late spring of 2016, posting about a final visit to Disney World and telling her followers she would “never go back,” prompting speculation about a terminal diagnosis. After generating considerable sympathy and speculation, she officially announced the move.

Throughout this period, Ashley’s selfies documented continued deterioration, with a “mystery bandage” constantly present on her cheek — a small wound that appeared unable to heal. Some speculated it was a pressure ulcer from her glasses grinding against her exposed cheekbone. Her skin had taken on a yellow pallor. New sores appeared. Despite this, she proceeded have her paper-thin skin tattooed.

Bury Wingless Crows (2017-2025)

Ashley and Rebecca relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2017. Ashley found herself increasingly alone. She briefly entered what appeared to be a relationship with a Walmart employee, though its nature remains unclear. When a Tumblr user asked if she would recover to spend more time with him, she said no. The relationship ended quietly, with nothing more than a disappearing Facebook status to mark it.

Eventually, Rebecca either kicked Ashley out or placed her into some sort of medical living arrangement. “I won’t be able to see my mom for a very long time,” Ashley remarked as she publicly announced she had “one month” and asked followers for advice on living alone — and, of course, solicited donations. Ashley officially moved into her new place at the end of May 2018. She never confirmed whether this was a residential facility, but alluded to caretakers and social workers in subsequent blog posts.

Around this time, Ashley began to reckon publicly with the state of her body. In a Facebook post from October 2018, she wrote: “I fell backwards straight onto the wooden floor. Fell alone. Fell into darkness as my eyes shut for a while… Laying there like an elderly woman. Laying there with nothing but my shame.”

Her front teeth rotted away, visible in her Instagram stories. In August 2021, she broke her ankle, and her body could not heal it properly. Her posts had become increasingly sparse, mostly documenting physical discomfort. She continued posting on Instagram under @bury.wingless.crows, with friends confirming she was alive in comments for curious onlookers.

By 2023, her internet activity had slowed to a handful of notable posts per year. The community surrounding her had largely moved on; threads went months without updates. Tumblr itself was a shell of its former self. Her Tumblr was noted to have been reblogging content ritualistically, every week, up until October 2025.

On October 7th, 2025, Ashley reblogged her last post. Then she went permanently quiet.

Users on Kiwi Farms took notice in early November. After some digging, a comment from someone claiming to be a friend confirmed what everyone had suspected, after they contacted her landlord: “Her landlord at the time let me know that she had passed away. I knew where she lived, and after not hearing from her for a few days… so I reached out to her landlord and was given the sad news.”

Ashley Anne Isaacs allegedly passed away on October 13th, 2025. Her cause of death remains unconfirmed publicly, but one must assume it to be consistent with long-term complications of severe anorexia nervosa. Rebecca did not publicly acknowledge the death. The poster noted: “I don’t think her mom will mention anything about it. They didn’t have the best relationship.” Ashley had no known family nearby to mourn her. Her online community served as her primary mourners.

Goodbye Atticus (2025)

Ashley Isaacs was just one of many vulnerable young women who found themselves living online after multiple failures by her family, medical professionals, and the systems meant to save her. The rights of adults with treatment-resistant eating disorders should not be ignored, but one must ask where personal liberty ends and where life-saving intervention begins.

In the early days of the threads documenting Ashley’s life, a mortician posted what became an unintentional epitaph — a clinical description of what prolonged starvation does to a human body. The poster described performing an autopsy on someone even thinner than Ashley: organs displaced, blackened, and shrunken; visible arteries running along the outside of bone with no muscle or fat to protect them; a brain that had lost its volume and simply slid from the skull. The body, they wrote, was “just a shriveled sack with barely functioning organs.” They noted that eating would have reversed much of the damage — and prevented the death entirely.

Ashley knew this, on some level. She had been told. She had been offered treatment, hospitalization, national television, and intervention after intervention. She refused them all. Whether that refusal was the expression of a self that had been so thoroughly damaged it could no longer imagine survival, or whether it was the only form of agency she had ever truly owned, is not a question this piece can answer.

What she left behind — in forum posts, Instagram stories, Tumblr reblogs, Amazon wishlists, and the memories of people who knew her online and off — is the record of a real person who existed, who suffered, and who was never successfully reached.

“Failure is my only option here. I’ve dismissed too many opportunities… Who am I even trying to please anymore, I don’t even know.”

A word on the piece itself

Table of Contents

Original Trauma Narrative (Version 1)

Revised Trauma Narrative (Version 2)

Final Trauma Narrative (Version 3, Instagram Screenshot Transcript)

Trauma Narrative Download – PDF, eBook Format

Additional Reading

Video Archive

Tiktok Sources

Before the Diagnosis

Born-Again Autistic

Cat-Facilitated Communication

The Munchausen Question

The Final Blog Entry

Sources

Baggs’ Own Writing

Media Coverage

Witness Testimony and Controversy

Interviews

Medical and Scientific Sources

The Tumblr Trauma Ecosystem

Soren’s Trauma Narrative

Revisions to the Trauma Narrative

The Cast

Who was Soren Daniel Hayes Really?

Source List

Hamtaro-chan (2006-2009)

Ghost in My Pocket (2012–2016)

Bury Wingless Crows (2017-2025)

Goodbye Atticus (2025)

Sources

Lolcow.farm — Ashley Isaacs /pt/ Threads

Lolcow.farm — Ashley Isaacs /snow/ Threads

Kiwi Farms

Ashley’s Social Media Accounts

Other Forums