Truth is Stronger than a Sword
What the Canadian Fencing Federation Doesn’t Want You to Know will Shock You
It’s not just Hockey Canada. It’s not just gymnastics. It’s everywhere, and we need to talk about it.
What you’re about to read is an account that spans over 25 years and will blow the lid off an obscure, little-known sport where misconduct keeps getting covered up, largely the result of an incestuous subculture where almost everyone seems to know each other and psychological harm is overlooked at the expense of athletes’ well-being.
Ultimately, what started out as me tweeting about my experiences as a student athlete at the University of Ottawa in the 1990s, led me down a rabbit hole of coach abuse, power imbalance and athlete mistreatment spanning over two decades and culminating in an ongoing crisis in Canadian fencing that impacted Canada’s Olympic fencing team as recently as the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, but has been kept under wraps with the knowledge and complicity of the Canadian Fencing Federation (CFF).
Make sure you scroll all the way down to see the shocking revelations in the second half of this post.
On the heels of Safe Sport/Sports Canada’s June 2022 announcement that the federal government is dedicating $10 million to reform sport and create a Sports Canada Athletes Commission, social media was rife with athletes across sports disciplines expressing skepticism over Safe Sport’s ability to make a difference in uncovering systemic abuse on the part of coaches who get away with harmful behaviour because they “produce medals” for their sport.
While corresponding with Canadian Press reporter Lori Ewing in the summer of 2022, I learned that “there is a three-year backlog of cases with the US Safe Sport office” and things were looking similarly overwhelming on this side of the border. At the time of our conversation, Ewing confessed that her hands were full of stories involving “the ongoing Hockey Canada stuff, numerous MPs have talked about investigating sports across the board, and I’m currently working with another sport who wants to tell their story as well.”
Important Note – before I decided to go public with my story, I took every proper step to make an official report. Throughout June 2022, I engaged in correspondence with David Howes, Executive Director of the Canadian Fencing Federation. On June 7, 2022 he wrote to inform me that he would bring up my complaint at their next Board of Directors meeting, the following Sunday. He also forwarded my information to Independent Third-Party Safe Sport Officer Brian Ward.
On the afternoon of June 22, 2022, I spoke for over an hour with Mr. Ward and itemized my experiences, then submitted them in writing as a formal complaint. For his part, Ward told me that he would look into pricing out an investigator and access university records and 1990s codes of conduct. On June 30th, I received one last email from David Howes confirming that he had passed on my complaint to the University of Ottawa. That was the last time I heard from anyone.
Since June 2022, not one person has gotten back to me. Not the university. Not the Canadian Fencing Federation. Not SafeSport, either. Why would they? My complaint names Paul Apsimon, an Olympic coach to whom the CFF awarded the highly-coveted “Coach of the Year” prize as recently as 2017. But this is not the first time I discussed my varsity fencing experiences - I wrote about it in 2008 and mentioned briefly the sexual misconduct in a 2012 article, but I hadn’t named him. Until now.
I didn’t get as much as a follow-up email to inform me whether a formal investigation would ever take place. This is despite the fact that the events I describe below are all against the rules as set out in the current CANADIAN FENCING FEDERATION (“CFF”) SAFE SPORT POLICY MANUAL. Sure, rules evolve over time – but I am certain that most, if not all, of the conduct I describe below is so egregious that I have a hard time believing it wouldn’t have been against the rules in the mid-late 1990s.
To be honest, it didn’t surprise me. As a Romanian immigrant from a broken home, growing up in foster care and low-income housing projects, I became all too accustomed to being treated like dirt. People think they can steamroll over the disadvantaged and get away with it because they have more money, more prestige and more connections. Why would the overseers of an elitist sport bother to indulge the complaints of a woman who can’t let go of something that took place two decades ago, and risk diminishing the luster of a Bela Karolyi of Canadian fencing?
In the process of my own investigation, I found other victims and uncovered what may be the Canadian Fencing Federation’s best-kept secret – a damning report written by an independent investigator only a year ago in response to complaints filed last year by the women’s Olympic foil fencing team, which determined the existence of a “culture of systemic bullying” in the sport (see page 16). The report was kept Confidential and never released to the public – which defeats the whole purpose of transparency and accountability in sport, and blocks avenues to progress.
You can find it at the bottom of this article.
The secrets end today – so brace yourselves, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
This is my official complaint to Safe Sport Canada and the Canadian Fencing Federation (submitted June 22, 2022) – names of all female athletes involved have been changed/redacted.
Everything I write here is the truth to the best of my recollection, and supported by descriptions noted in fencing journal entries from 1995-1998. I am willing to swear an affidavit, if required, and submit photos of my journal entries as evidence. I stand by everything I wrote and have no problem with my identity being disclosed for the purposes of an investigation.
I started fencing in my 1st year of undergrad at the University of Ottawa. Our head coach was Paul Apsimon, who has been national team coach for over two decades. To date, he has coached Women’s Foil through the last 4 Olympic games, most notably Rio and Tokyo.
When I joined the fencing team (1995-1998), Paul was already dating a senior girl we nicknamed Maddy, who was about 20 yrs old. Within months, Paul started cheating on Maddy with another freshman in my cohort, Deanna, and eventually went on to marry Deanna soon after graduation (they divorced him a couple of years later, but marriage records can prove the timeline of their involvement).
The student athletes who Paul was sleeping with always got chosen for the University of Ottawa varsity team, even ahead of better, more experienced fencers. Deanna, for example, got on the varsity team despite being a beginner, but no other beginners were added to the varsity team. (Deanna had been Paul’s student when he was her high school gym teacher, but according to her, their affair started after she began fencing in her first year of undergrad).
When I was living in Residence at the Marchand apartments, Deanna used to come hang out in my room between classes. She lived far from campus so she came down in the morning for her first class, and then killed time hanging out with me between classes and before practice. That’s when she’d tell me all her stories about Paul – how they snuck around having sex on campus, her accidental pregnancy, and how they did it in the stairwell of the Sports Centre/Athletic Dept building.
While Paul didn’t come on to me sexually, his mistreatment, retaliations and emotional abuse impacted me negatively in other ways throughout my fencing years. The following is a short summary of this mistreatment:
Open favouritism – the girls Paul liked better got free coaching and were invited to his house for private lessons. Both Paul and Manu (our nickname for Manuel Guittet) demonstrated open favouritism of certain athletes and ignored others like me, even when they were mandated by the University of Ottawa to teach all of us.
At competitions Paul paid attention to his favourite athletes and ignored me – specifically the Queen’s Open invitational in 1996 and other competitions (I have to locate my old fencing passport, which has a record of the competitions I attended back then).
Cottage parties at Paul’s cottage in the Gatineaus – everyone was encouraged to drink heavily. In winter, they got naked to do snow angels (Gabby – who got the third spot for the Ottawa U varsity team, after Paul’s lovers Maddy and Deanna). When we went up to the cottage during the summer, I saw several athletes skinny-dipping at his cottage. At the cottage they played sexual drinking games like Truth or Dare, which sometimes involved stripping, “Never did I ever”, and Spin-the-Bottle. There was no professionalism or inquiring if there were any underage people there, despite the fact that many of us were 1st year students.
One specific party I wrote about in my journal happened the weekend of December 3-4, 1995:
“Gabby was the first to take her clothes off, and do a nude angel in the snow. They (or most of them) drank, but surprisingly no one smoked. Incredible – I still can’t get over it. Being among up to 30 people, with no one smoking! […] Anyway, everyone played games – the usual paper bag one, as well as a whole new bunch: the animal noises charades, and the drinking game “I never did etc.”, and then Truth or Dare. I think anyone paying attention to the games will have realized my sexual preference by now. After questions like “I never performed oral sex on a woman” and “I’ve never turned down a woman”, what could one say?!”
During sleepovers at the cottage, some people were having sex. I saw a fellow athlete named Leah give a topless massage to another athlete in a bedroom.
Paul created an uncomfortable environment where this activity was part of our “team building” training. I felt that I had to appear “cool” with this behaviour and couldn’t speak up or risk being viewed as not a “team player”, particularly since the “easy-going” girls who slept or got naked in front of him seemed to be rewarded with more lessons and personalized coaching.
Paul appeared to use the fencing club as his personal social network – to date, drink with, etc. There was no delineation between him as a coach, vs him as a drinking buddy or a teammate’s boyfriend. Everybody at the Excalibur (EXO) fencing club knew that Paul had dated Maddy, and then that Paul was dating Deanna. In fact, most of the team attended their wedding.
The “easy-going” girls who skinny-dipped and got naked at the cottage were chosen for varsity team, along with his lovers (Maddy and Deanna).
Following an incident at a competition where I snapped at Deanna in the locker room and told her “I hope you lose!” because she kept getting extra lessons from the coaches, Paul became angry with me. He told me that my “bad attitude” and “negativity” affected Deanna and other teammates, and if I continued my bad sportsmanship I would be thrown out of the fencing club. I felt suicidal, because he clearly appeared to prioritize Deanna’s emotional well-being over my own, and I was directly affected by his treatment of me (not giving me lessons while giving her so much attention, private lessons both in class and at his house, as well as not coaching or ever cheering for me when I was in a fencing bout – while he seldom left her side during competition).
September 1996 – Paul Apsimon creates unfair classification of EXO fencers into A, B and C levels, following the fencing team’s move from the regular Athletic Centre building to a private building on campus. Although I met all the criteria of an “A” fencer – must own equipment, work out and attend regular practice – and I fenced for the same amount of time as his lover Deanna and at least one other beginner, Natalie, he classified me as a “C” and her as an “A”. A fencers got double the private lessons (30 mins twice/3x per week), more coach attention and a different practice time slot / days of week for lessons, sometimes with different coaches. To me, it was an overt way to cut me out of their circle.
- All of this is documented in my fencing journal entry of Sept 1996:
“The only difference between me and an advanced fencer like Ingrid is the length of time we’ve fenced, and the amount of competitive experience. I have all my own equipment, I help out, I work out, I’m always one of the first to arrive at the gym and one of the last to leave – and I never miss practice. I’ve done everything humanly possible – and I simply couldn’t have done more in the past year. I fit all the criteria set out in the club’s outline for an “A” fencer (it doesn’t have any stipulations requiring a certain length of fencing experience), so why should I be relegated to a “C” or “intermediate” level? (when Deanna is not).” […]
Though I continued to attend practice, they created an environment that made it impossible for me to stay. Even when I trained with the A-list and Intermediate fencers, neither Paul or Manuel gave me the private coaching everyone else in the group was getting.
For much of my two years of training under Apsimon and Guittet, I felt hopeless and self-destructive.
Paul overlooked situations where I was being overtly bullied by another athlete named Karen. There were several occasions where her bullying went from being rude to me, to actually shoving me during practice. In one specific event in April 1997, Paul took the fencing club to a park in Sandy Hill to play Ultimate Frisbee. Karen was on Paul’s team and I was on the other team. When I was catching the frisbee, she elbowed me, stepped on my left foot and shoved me with her shoulder and hip, nearly causing me to fall, while she literally tore the frisbee from my hands. I stopped playing and yelled at her to stop, while Paul did absolutely nothing. I walked off the field and the game resumed a moment later, with no disciplinary measures taken against Karen.
Deanna told me that after she’d asked Paul why he was ignoring Karen’s overt bullying, he’d said, “They should work it out between themselves” and that he didn’t want to get involved, even though it happened under his watch.
I felt that another reason why Paul disliked me and didn’t want to give me lessons was because he was uncomfortable with me being gay. This is based on his comments in a hotel room where we had all gone for a Queens University tournament. Paul joked with a fencer named Corrine N that she’d better have watched out when having accepted an invitation from Marie-France (a fencing judge) to stay overnight at her place. “She didn’t do anything, though,” Corrine said, but Paul made another derogatory joke (about Marie-France trying to get in bed with Corrine), and everyone in the room was laughing.
Paul and Manuel created a self-fulfilling prophecy where they chose the girls they believed had the most aptitude (coincidentally, the ones who slept with Paul always seemed to be included) and gave them more training and free lessons, and then ignored and under-coached the ones they didn’t like or who they didn’t feel were as talented. The logical effect was that the ones they liked got better, and the ones they dismissed never caught up.
In sum, Paul Apsimon retaliated against me speaking out about his and Manu’s favouritism and his own sexual relationships with female athletes. He created an environment where I felt intimidated and bullied, to the point I had no choice but to practice at Carleton and eventually quit fencing, because:
He didn’t give me lessons, while focusing his attention on giving extra lessons to his favourite athletes, two of whom he was sleeping with – they made varsity, I didn’t
He threatened me with kicking me out of the club because I wasn’t a “team player” and I had a “bad attitude” toward his lover
He refused to coach me during tournaments, focusing his attention on others
He ignored another athlete openly bullying me / shoving me at practice
He exhibited hot / cold behaviour – leaving me on pins and needles because I never knew what I did wrong. I’d hear from other athletes like Deanna and Gabby that Paul said I was too competitive and negative, so he was talking about me to others but seldom talked to me at all, except for his angry outburst following my exchange with Deanna (when I’d told her that I hoped she’d lose the competition).
I felt that I didn’t have a choice but to quit, because it seemed to me that those 2 coaches ran the Ottawa scene, and by default CFF itself. Even the RA Centre fencing program was ran by Paul Apsimon’s father. If you didn’t toe the line and do what they wanted you to do, there was little hope to become an elite fencer.
I should have gone to the university and said something. But I was a kid back then, I had no support system and was suffering through PTSD – at age 19 I had literally just gotten away from testifying against a bunch of neo-Nazi criminals who had threatened me with death. I’d just arrived in a new city, new school, got my life together, found a new “family” and friends among the athletes on our team….and I was terrified of throwing it all away by whistleblowing against a National Team coach, risking bullying and harassment from my friends - my then-best friend Deanna ended up marrying Apsimon shortly after graduation. I didn’t have any other friends, family or therapy to help me through the process.
It felt like the entire world was on his side because he trained champions - and in this world, the weight of truth depends on the perceived worth of those who speak it.
At this point I have no illusions of any kind of vindication or apology, simply because so much time has passed. Lost opportunities can't be quantified or restored, so it all feels pointless. All I know is he had a lifelong career, but I will never have the opportunities that might have been.
Imagine yourself as a coach, and 2 out of the 3 girls you're coaching for varsity (one being 18 yrs old, the other one about 20) are vying jealously among themselves for your attention. You have to juggle sexual commitments, while ensuring nobody complains to university administration and nobody catches you while you have a quickie with one of them in the stairwell of the Athletic Centre before practice. You do all this while continuing to invite dozens of people to your cottage for "team spirit" weekend getaways like heavy drinking and skinny-dipping, AND you're simultaneously trying to intimidate people like me from telling anyone by threatening to kick me out because I'm not a "team player" and I have a “bad attitude”. You ignore the talented in favour of the obedient and play one girl against the other, to the point where everybody pretends to be friendly with one another but we hate each other's guts because only the "special" girls get invited to the Coach's house for free private lessons.
On June 7, 2022 I posted the following tweet from my Twitter account:
On June 12, 2022 I received a Direct Message on Twitter from [REDACTED], one of the four members of Canada’s Olympic Fencing Team (Women’s Foil) at Tokyo 2021.
We DM’d back and forth, and then she told me the following:
On the evening of June 13, 2022 I telephoned [REDACTED] and we had a lengthy conversation. I encouraged her to come forward with her story because this is the right time, there are many other athletes voicing their traumas, and Sport Canada issues are in the news. I told her that my story is likely to be considered “historical” and may be dismissed due to time - but the more of us who speak out, the more we can repair the serious issues and culture of cover-ups in our sport.
The fact that my story is 25 years old and the things that happened to her took place over the last decade, suggest a historical pattern of abuse.
The following are my notes taken from my phone call with [REDACTED]
- She moved to Ottawa for training camps with Paul Apsimon when she was 13. There were times when she stayed at his house where heavy drinking was involved, and he kept encouraging her and other underage athletes to get drunk, having drinking games, etc and she “felt uncomfortable”
- She “called him on his BS and we started butting heads”, “he called me difficult all the time”
- “He tried to get rid of me, but unfortunately my results were too good and he couldn’t”
- When she was ranked at the top in Canada, he told her that she wasn’t good and the juniors were going to beat her: “When I was ranked top in Canada, he sat me down and told me how I was worse than all the juniors”, that “I would never succeed” and that “I was overweight, need to lose weight”
- They had a “toxic relationship”: “I saw him quickly remove other members of the team who were talking up against him” – she names another female athlete whose name I couldn’t hear legibly – “she spoke up about how Paul was maltreating her, and he quickly had her removed from the team without even blinking an eye”
- “I kind of figured that he had the kind of power that if we did say something that was fired up, that he would kick us off the team.”
- “Then in 2018 he hired a coach from France named Yoann Lebrun, and he used all of his power to get him to move to Canada, and within a year of him moving here he became extremely, extremely toxic to our team."
- “He [Lebrun] was undermining all of us, he was calling us names, he would pick us out and publicly shame us in front of other people, he’d comment on how we looked, pretty much everything. He was racist, sexist, the whole trifecta there.”
- “And so we kind of put up with it for a long time, and I didn’t want to speak up because I didn’t want to hurt my teammates either, because we had never talked about the issue. Like, we all kinda had a beef with Paul, but we didn’t talk to each other about it.
- And so the stuff with Yoann started happening, and I knew that something was weird but again I didn’t want to say anything, because my teammates, I didn’t want to hurt them, and the Olympics were coming up. And then we qualified for the Olympics, and then Covid hit.”
- “I was at my lowest point, I hated fencing, and my plan was to compete in the Olympics and never look at fencing again in my life. I was so miserable, I hated myself, every time I looked in the mirror I didn’t know who I was looking at. Really toxic stuff.”
- “I talked with my family about it, and I knew that my chance of fencing at the Olympics was pretty slim if I still got to get Paul, so I was like, my plan is, after the Olympics was to do everything to get rid of Yoann.”
- So Covid ends and we start training again, and a young athlete ends up coming to me and saying, “I need to get out of Toronto, I’m miserable, I can’t do this anymore, I can’t work with Yoann” and she’s telling me the exact same things that I had gone through and I thought I was alone, and so as soon as she told me, I thought, Ok I have to do something”
- “So I went to Paul, and I made sure it was a very public scene, with other coaches and my teammates, and I told him all the things that had been going on with Yoann, and he kind of had no choice but to report it, for the stake of his job, because if he didn’t report it, with all the Safe Sport going around, that he would probably also be in question.”
- “So a third-party investigation happened – the CFF hired the investigator, and the second that they hired the investigator, Paul started threatening me, saying that I was going to be ruining Yoann’s life, that I’m ruining my fencing career, I’m hurting him, all this kind of stuff.”
- “It turns out there were already complaints from the Toronto Fencing Club against Yoann, before I even launched my complaint and my teammates launched their complaints”
- “The Safe Sport investigator, third-party investigator, found that there was systemic bullying within our program, and it directly named both Paul and our high-performance director.”
- The report is hidden, all confidential, the CFF has it and the people involved have it
- “After that happened, things got way worse. Paul had a hate-on for me. He hated me and I had a new coach [….]
- Paul saw this new coach as a threat to his job. He started targeting me and my new teammate and this new coach, and was trying to find any way to get us out. […]
- "Finally we’re at the training camp before the Olympics and he’s [Paul] picking fights with all of us […] it was the worst environment possible. And then, after the Olympics, me and my teammates decided that we’ve had enough, we’re going to send a full report to CFF of everything that’s been going on – everything he said to us, things that are verifiable by other parties, that are facts, nothing that’s hearsay, and we send these reports to CFF and they say they want to have a chat with the whole team.”
- “So we get on this call and the president of the CFF [Yann Bernard] pretty much says to us, “We’ve read your letters, we understand you’re upset, but we’ve hired Paul for another four years.”
- “Instantly, all of us start crying. We’re bawling, we’re saying ‘We can’t do it.’ I said that this was a setback for female sport, that they’re making a huge mistake, and the president pretty much said that he didn’t care
- He [Yann Bernard] swayed the Board, saying ‘Well, Women’s Foil results are so good, and they’re our shining stars, and if we get rid of this coach, then their results are gonna plummet.” And we were saying to them that our results are being held BACK because of this coach, that we are succeeding DESPITE this coach, but the CFF refused to listen to us.”
- “So we all start crying, we say that we can’t believe this is happening, and they’re like ‘Well, how can we make this work – you guys pretty much have no choice, you have to work with him.”
- And so we say, Fine, we will work with him if we can get a mediator and we can have everything laid out on the table, we can tell them our concerns and maybe then he’ll change – at this point we still had hope."
[Paul Apsimon then takes a leave of absence.]
“During this leave of absence, one of the Board members shared a letter that he probably shouldn’t have shared with us, but it was a letter that Paul had sent to the CFF after the Olympics and it essentially is a bunch of lies, slander, all of it essentially against ALL the members of the team, including myself, saying that I was grooming a young athlete to become a coach […] outlandish lies. He went after my coach, saying he was attacking all of us, enabling eating disorders, like crazy, outlandish slander, lies. […] It was absurd, it was almost comical how much bullshit it was.
- “After we find out about that letter, we were like, ‘That’s it, we cannot work with this person.’ So Paul’s ready to come back after his leave of absence, and we say No. We’re not doing it. I’d rather quit fencing than work with this person. And all of us kinda said that. And the CFF pretty much had to clear face with either him, or the whole entire Women’s Foil team.”
- “So they looked at it and said, Fine, Paul’s no longer part of the program. But now he’s suing the CFF for wrongful termination. [...] [CFF Board President Yann Bernard] still wants to keep Paul around. He’s still running training camps, he’s still part of Ontario Fencing, he’s still at National championships. […] CFF refuses to listen to people.”
I hope these details are enough to paint a picture of not only what I experienced 25 years ago, but what Olympic athletes experienced up to one year ago. Paul Apsimon is still a CFF coach who runs a fencing salle and teaches all age groups, both as a gym teacher as well as a respected fencing coach. I don't know what, if any, changes were made following the 2020-2021 complaints and subsequent investigator's report for the CFF.
I cannot fathom the level of entitlement it takes to listen to young women pleading tearfully for change, file their complaints away in a drawer, mark the investigation report 'Confidential', and carry on with business as usual. Coaches and athletes in fencing salles across Canada, left completely unaware of the serious findings involving those at the top of their sport's hierarchy. No opportunity for discussion, for new lessons to be learned or new proposed ways to dismantle the culture of systemic bullying that warps and corrodes this sport from the inside out.
That a national sports organization would protect coaches who mistreat athletes, simply because they produce medals, is disturbing and makes me worry about the next cohort of young girls who might be similarly treated.
After what I lived through, and after hearing [REDACTED]'s story, I believe that fencing as a sport needs to be transformed to prioritize health and well-being, rather than self-destruction and potential lifelong psychological trauma for the sake of a piece of metal.
As of the date of publishing, I received no reply or answer from either the University of Ottawa, the CFF or Safe Sport. My last emails to [REDACTED] have gone unanswered, which is worrisome because in our phone call she seemed keen for the truth to come out. I believe this is a matter of public interest.
Although I have no way of knowing what is going on behind the scenes, I am afraid that the CFF read my complaint, figured out who she was (there are only four women on the national foil team), and may have pressured her into silence.
At this point, I have lost all hope that anybody in any position of authority will take any further steps and investigate. Deciding to make my complaint public is the only way I can draw attention to this situation and prevent others from being browbeaten or gaslighted into silence by thinking they are all alone.
As [REDACTED] told me, it didn't matter that the entire Olympic women's fencing team was crying and begging the CFF’s Board of Directors to get rid of a coach they felt was causing harm, the Board of Directors president still decided that he was too valuable to be fired.
The priority does not appear to be the athletes - they're viewed as interchangeable and replaceable, from the amateur varsity team member to the highest-ranked elite athletes in the country, women who have dedicated their bodies, minds and lives to the pursuit of mastering a beautiful, archaic combat sport.
Until there's a revolutionary turnover where the talent controls the industry, this sort of abuse will continue unhindered, because it's propped up by the corrupt multigenerational culture that propagated and allowed it to fester in the first place.
You don’t need a sword to be a warrior, because truth is stronger than a sword.
To change the world, you must find the strength to speak out. If this happened to you, file a complaint. Tell somebody. Shout it from the rooftops. Whether it happened last year or thirty years ago. Speak the truth even if your voice shakes. Even if you lose everything.
Because it happened.
You owe it to your younger self, to stand up for her and give her justice - or someday you may regret it. If you won't fight this battle for yourself, today, who else will do it for you?
You are NOT alone, and TRUTH IS STRONGER THAN A SWORD.
PERMANENT LINK TO FENCING INVESTIGATION REPORT AT ARCHIVE.ORG
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Greatly appreciate you taking the time to write this. Thank you for sharing your story, as well as part of the redacted athlete's story. I've looked up to the women's foil team for more than the past decade and it is heartbreaking to hear how they've been treated.
You are NOT alone, and TRUTH IS STRONGER THAN A SWORD.
❤️🩹🤺thank you