Pride, Trauma, and the Complexity of Same-Sex Abuse by a Woman

A Reflection on Grooming, Faith, Identity, and Healing

Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈

Pride is a time to celebrate authenticity, love, and the courage to live one’s truth. It is also a time to confront truths that are uncomfortable—including the reality that LGBTQIA+ people can be survivors of same-sex abuse by same-sex perpetrators.

As a lesbian woman who was groomed and sexually abused by a female teacher during high school, I know firsthand how traumatic and complicated that reality can be.

I first sought mentorship from Ann Marie Paul because I was a deeply religious teenager. I attended Mass in our school chapel every day because I wanted to, not because anyone made me. I loved my faith and felt called to serve the Catholic Church in some way. I eventually studied religion academically, but even as a teenager I was trying to imagine what a future of ministry and service might look like. As the first lay female theology teacher—she was not yet a sister—to teach at my high school, Ann Marie represented something I had rarely seen: a model of faithful lay leadership. She seemed to embody a balance of deep religiosity and sarcasm and represented a vision of faithful adulthood that I admired and hoped to emulate.

She nurtured those aspirations in ways that made me feel uniquely seen and understood. She attended daily Mass in the school chapel with me, gave me religious magazines and books, and brought me to theological lectures at her alma mater. She also took me alone on an overnight trip to visit a Catholic college I was interested in attending. Later, when she became athletic director, she paid me to sell tickets at sporting events, giving us yet another reason to spend time together outside the normal boundaries of a student-teacher relationship. Before long, I was also spending time at her house several days a week.

At the time, these opportunities felt like signs of trust, confidence, and investment in me. Looking back, I see how they also created additional avenues for contact, dependence, and exclusivity.

What I did not understand at the time was that the person I viewed as a mentor and role model was a master manipulator who centered her own needs under the guise of care and love.

The extensive grooming I endured created powerful bonds of trust, admiration, and emotional dependence. I was a religious teenager struggling to understand my sexuality within a conservative Catholic culture, where we were repeatedly taught that being gay was “intrinsically disordered.” I was shown affection and made to feel special, taken on trips and showered with gifts and mixtapes, and increasingly isolated from friends and family. She dominated my time with late-night calls and AOL Instant Messenger conversations and sought to spend as much time with me as possible both in and outside of school.

I naively mistook these intentional grooming behaviors for authentic expressions of same-sex love. They were not.

The extent to which my identity became entangled with hers was apparent even to others. In my junior yearbook, a fellow student and friend wrote, “Dear Paige (Companion to Ann Marie) … please know that I am always here for you to listen to anything you may want to say or talk about and you can trust me with anything.”

At the time, I interpreted this entry as evidence of a special bond. Looking back, it is painful because it reveals how completely the grooming and abuse had consumed my world. I was no longer seen simply as Paige, but as a teacher’s “companion.” That yearbook entry now serves as a reminder of the emotional dependence and enmeshment she intentionally cultivated. No teenager should have their sense of self become so deeply attached to and dictated by an adult in a position of authority.

She also told me never to tell anyone.

Years later, after I began to question the relationship and reached out to her, she referred to what had happened as an “experiment.” That characterization felt like yet another attempt to minimize the harm she had caused.

As a teenager wrestling with faith, sexuality, and uncertainty—someone who simply wanted to feel loved, listened to, and understood—it has been difficult to reconcile the reality of being exploited by a trusted teacher in a position of power. I still mourn the loss of my last two years of high school, which were dominated by her selfish desires, and the fact that I never had the opportunity to experience an authentic first same-sex love that was free from exploitation and power imbalance. I grieve that what I once believed was love was, in fact, a carefully orchestrated process of manipulation, grooming, and repeated sexual abuse that occurred over an extended period of time.

I also grieve the loss of a perceived spiritual mentor and role model. The person I believed was encouraging my vocation and helping me discern my future in the Church was simultaneously exploiting my vulnerability for her own purposes. In doing so, she corrupted something sacred to me—my sense of calling and my belief that faithful adult leadership within the Church could be safe and trustworthy.

Same-sex abuse by women remains deeply misunderstood. Society often struggles to believe that women can sexually abuse girls and young women. Survivors like me are frequently met with minimization. People rightly express outrage when they hear about a teacher sexually abusing a student or a priest abusing a child. Yet when the abuse involves a woman and a teenage girl, people often rationalize it as “just a close friendship” or a crush that went too far. Some cannot even imagine that a woman could sexually abuse or rape a teenage girl.

Those responses—and the messages I internalized for so long—made me feel invisible and question my own reality.

I experienced this a few years ago when I finally stopped blaming myself and reached out to a former teacher to ask whether she had ever noticed the power imbalance. Her initial response was, “It was so long ago,” a comment that seemed to minimize my experience. She later called me back, and I think she realized that if I was reaching out nearly thirty years later, it clearly was not ancient history to me. But the exchange illustrated just how easily even well-meaning people can misunderstand or minimize same-sex abuse.

For LGBTQIA+ survivors, abuse can create profound confusion about identity and attraction. I felt deeply ashamed and somehow responsible for what happened to me. For years, I struggled to disentangle my emerging understanding of myself as a lesbian from the abuse itself.

The person who first made me feel seen and understood as I came to understand myself as a lesbian was also the person who exploited the power she held over me. The relationship that helped awaken my sense of identity was simultaneously the source of profound harm.

Reconciling those contradictory truths has been one of the most difficult aspects of healing.

It is important to say this clearly:

Abuse does not define sexual orientation.

No minor is responsible for an adult’s exploitation.

Predators abuse children and adolescents. LGBTQIA+ people do not.

My story carries another painful layer. Less than six months after she last touched me, she told me she was joining the Sisters of Christian Charity, the religious community that taught at my diocesan high school.

Watching someone who harmed you so deeply enter “consecrated life”—professing a vow of chastity and assuming a role associated with holiness and moral authority—created profound feelings of betrayal, grief, and moral injury.

The betrayal runs even deeper because she was not simply a teacher I trusted. She represented a vision of who I hoped to become.

As a teenager who loved the Church, attended Mass every day, and felt called to serve it—a commitment that eventually led me to study religion academically—I looked to her as an example of faithful adult lay leadership. The person who seemed to embody my aspirations instead exploited my trust and vulnerability. In many ways, she did not merely betray me; she betrayed my sense of vocation, my understanding of mentorship, and my belief that the Church was a place where my gifts and faith could flourish.

That moral injury stems from the profound dissonance between who she presented herself to be and the reality of her predatory actions. The same person who repeatedly sexually abused me over an extended period of time engaged in conduct that law enforcement determined could not be prosecuted only because the statute of limitations had expired. Yet she soon embraced a public identity as a chaste, consecrated woman of God.

That self-presentation felt like a profound betrayal.

It also raises difficult questions about personal and institutional accountability and how far institutions will go to protect their own reputations rather than care for those who have been harmed. I can tell you that I have encountered silence and dismissiveness from both the Diocese and her religious order. Their response—or lack thereof—has left me wondering whether institutional reputation matters more than care for those harmed.

It has taken me years to reconcile being a proud, married lesbian with a wonderful son while also being a survivor of same-sex grooming and sexual abuse by a woman who exploited a scared and uncertain teenager struggling to understand her identity and vocation.

This Pride Month, I hope we expand our understanding of survivor experiences:

LGBTQIA+ survivors exist.

Female perpetrators exist.

Same-sex abuse perpetrated by women exists.

And survivors like me deserve to have the full complexity of our experiences acknowledged.

Pride is not only about celebration. It is also about truth-telling and creating space for stories that have been ignored, minimized, or misunderstood.

By speaking openly about these experiences, I honor both the teenage Paige—the girl who dreamed of serving the Church and sought guidance from someone she believed embodied faithful lay leadership, only to be betrayed—and the person I am today. I also honor survivors like me who have endured, healed, and found pride despite profound harm.

Every person’s story deserves to be seen, heard, and believed.