“You Belong to Me Now, Legally.”

I grew up in a broken home. My parents divorced when I was four. I am one of ten children from two marriages—the eldest daughter of five girls and the fourth child born to my mother. Divorce, family court, custody agreements, my father’s military service, and religion all made childhood chaotic.

When my mother finally left my abusive father after ten years and five children, she had no education, money, or help. My father accused her of neglect. She eventually lost custody. Three times a year, four of us flew across the country as unaccompanied minors between wherever my father was stationed and Salt Lake City, where my mother lived.

On one of those visits, I met my eldest brother’s teenage friend. I’ll call him John. He is the man I would later be forced to marry.

I was ten when we met. John already had a baby son and a marriage behind him. During his second marriage, when I was thirteen, he began paying me attention I did not understand. He told me I was growing up fast. That I was more beautiful than he remembered. No one had said things like that to me before.

John was twenty when he groped me during video-game night. He showed me how to install Kik on my iPod, then messaged constantly: you’re so amazing, I wish I could be with you. He manipulated a little girl who wanted, more than anything, to be wanted. It went on for years, escalating into what is now recognized as the internet luring and exploitation of a child.

After he left his second wife and the military, the abuse intensified. I slept fifteen to eighteen hours a day. I stopped going to school. My father pulled me out to “homeschool” me.

John texted in the middle of the night to say he was coming to tell my father everything and take me away. I was terrified of what my father would do if he learned what had happened. The next morning, I let John take me away in his white Chevy Cobalt.

He drove me to his parents’ house in Utah, where I was hidden under a bed, in a closet, and in his car—sometimes going a full day without food or water. He made me provide childcare and insisted I “pitch in” for room and board. When I took a movie-theater job, police found me hiding beneath the popcorn counter, repeating, please don’t let him take me.

They asked whether I had slept with the man I left with. I said nothing. “It’s not illegal here in Utah,” they told me, “as long as he isn’t ten years older than you.” They returned me to the adults who came to collect me. Back in Colorado, I was cut off from school, work, the phone, and the internet. That was when I made my first suicide attempt.

Weeks later, a lifeguard course gave me access to email. John’s messages filled my inbox. I sent one reply with the time and place of my final class. He was waiting when I walked out. He drove me home, saying he would speak to my father “man to man.”

That night, my father told me John would sleep at my aunt’s house. “In the morning, you and John will be right with God.” John explained by text: We came to an agreement. Tomorrow, we’ll be married.

I cried through the night, trying to understand what it meant to be married at seventeen with no diploma, no job, and no money. At 9 a.m., we drove to the El Paso County DMV. A clerk asked for my ID and issued my father the marriage license.

In our living room, my father slid a crude ring onto my finger—a crystal pendant from a necklace I had given my stepmother, dismantled and repurposed. He pronounced us husband and wife under the authority of the church and “Patriarch of this home.” I signed. I got into the white Chevy Cobalt and waved goodbye.

Ten minutes later, John stopped in an empty church parking lot. “You belong to me now. Legally,” he said. He raped me. Then I sat with what he had done for the ten-hour drive to Salt Lake City, where I would be his wife for the next year and a half.

In January 2023, I saw Christian Griffith on The Selection: Special Operations Experiment. Under interrogation, he said he was a survivor of child sexual abuse and would never stop raising awareness. He cried. I cried with him from my couch.

I found the campaign he had started and something shifted. The next day I ran around my neighborhood. I told my spouse about an idea: swim, bike, and run 3,000 miles to raise awareness of child marriage in the United States. In February, I made the campaign public and began fighting for my sobriety. I have been speaking ever since.

Before leaving TikTok, I received messages from survivors, families, and children born to survivors. Speaking out has carried me into newsrooms and committee hearings. It has exhausted and encouraged me in equal measure. Telling my story without shame cracked my self-esteem open and filled it with something new: self-love, forgiveness, and a strength I did not know I had.

After I escaped, I returned to Colorado, tested for my GED, joined the Army Reserve Military Police Corps at Fort Carson, remarried, and had a daughter. Raising the marriage age to eighteen, without exceptions, felt like the place to start.

At the Senate hearing on February 17, 2026, opponents argued that anyone married under Colorado’s current 2019 law would only be about twenty-three. I thought about myself at twenty-three: recovering from my third suicide attempt, newly diagnosed with PTSD, in military training, still fighting for an education. I did not understand until I was twenty-seven that what happened to me had a name and was happening across the country.

What shocked me was who I understood to be opposing the bill, including organizations I expected to stand against child marriage. We are not only fighting a law. We are fighting the willingness to look away from the evidence.