I stopped digging into it or trying to resolve it and I tried to just leave it behind me. But it hurt to remember and so I would convince myself that I was not going to let it affect me. I felt accomplished that I had remembered parts of what happened to me and that I had done something positive for my mental health. I started to remember and talk about the sexual abuse from my childhood. This explanation made it easier for me to understand myself and a past that I clearly did not remember and I continued to tell my story in that way.Ī few years ago, I started working on my mental health. I did have numerous encounters with the law including having to spend time in juvenile detention at various periods in my teenage years. To explain to myself all of the pain and suffering I had been through, I convinced myself that I had been to prison. I still had to be an expert in forgetting where I had come from and what I had endured. As I eventually rehabilitated myself, I got clean, but I never got well. I do not remember much of my life from my teens through my 20s. And as many others who have gone through what I went through, I ended up getting into drugs and running with the wrong crowds. For years, I forgot about my childhood and all those instances of abuse. I know for us whose families have experienced this, we also experience shame, secret keeping, denial, and intentional forgetting. This intergenerational trauma experience is shared by many families in New Mexico and across the world. Unfortunately, this is not unique to my family alone. Others within both my immediate and distant family have gone through similar struggles. By my older brother of 10 years and my step uncle, I was a victim of sexual abuse. I was the last of 11 children born to my parents. The roots and explanations to address that article touch very deep into my trauma filled history and dark skeletons within my family. I have seen, as a small business owner and resident, day after day and year after year, how our community has deteriorated while very few in our government cared to address the root causes. I started this campaign focused on the goal of addressing our community’s problems with crime, addiction, and homelessness. I am sorry that one newspaper article has caused so much distraction and so many people to question my integrity and sincerity in this campaign.

Last Friday, October 20th, an article in the Albuquerque Journal was published questioning my history.

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