TRANSCRIPT
A little bit more than nine months ago, I was mugged on the street in New York City. I was robbed by two men, and I made two videos about it shortly after I was robbed—one the next day, one I think five days later. I promised that I would make a follow-up video about what happened, about how it all turned out, and here I am, gonna give it a shot nine months later.
I wanted to do it much sooner, but for a few different reasons, I couldn’t. The first was that the district attorney in the case against these two guys, the prosecuting attorney who works for the state of New York, he told me not to say any more about it publicly. He said it would hurt the case, and I actually really wanted the case to go forward. I wanted to see these guys get some sort of “quote justice,” and so I went silent.
Then I ended up traveling for several months. I was away from New York and didn’t do anything in terms of making videos. I had a lot of videos come out, but all those videos I had shot before I was mugged. In a way, it’s good that I did all those videos and edited all those videos before I was mugged because after the robbery, I was a mess. I couldn’t sit in front of a camera and talk comfortably. I actually tried. I tried talking about different topics and ideas in my regular way—take on a topic, analyze it, break it down, see what it means—but I couldn’t keep my concentration, and all I kept doing was coming back to the mugging in my mind.
So finally, I just said stop, take a break, work with the videos you’ve already edited. Well, here’s what happened because now my case is all done. It’s all over. It’s complete, and there’s no more really to be said about it. I think, uh, it ended up that the guys got away with it. They were released with no charges, no, no anything, no punishment, no jail. I think they were basically locked up for a total of like an hour before they were released with no bail because of bail reform in New York, and that was it.
And I’m gonna tell what happened and why. Well, I was robbed in early March, and you know, I went and I talked about a lot of this. I believe—I haven’t seen those videos since I made them—but I went to the police station, I went through photo lineups, I picked one of the guys out. The police told me that the other guy I didn’t get him because he looked, well, very different from all the people in the pictures.
But afterward, they assigned me a district attorney, and I talked on the phone. Well, over the next, what was it, four months after the mugging, I talked with that district attorney many times on the phone, and I didn’t really like him, to be honest. Even though he was technically on my side and fighting for me, I didn’t really feel like he was fighting for me at all. I didn’t actually feel like he was doing anything most of the time. Most of the time, he was just telling me, “Okay, I’ll get back to you in a week,” and then I wouldn’t hear from him for a month. I’d leave multiple messages and email him a lot and not hear anything, and basically, my life was on hold waiting for him to do something.
And then, oh, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. He was always sort of trying to appease me. “COVID is holding things up. He had a family emergency this time and that,” and he would say things like, “Don’t worry, we’re going to get those guys there,” blah blah blah. He said a lot of things—tough talking—but you know, it just kept dragging on and dragging on.
I wanted to go traveling, actually. I wanted to get out of New York because I was shaken up. I really, in a way, just didn’t like being here. Even though I kind of wasn’t so overtly traumatized as I was in the first few weeks, because I was shaken up the first few weeks, it was like it wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t like going outside very much. I certainly didn’t like going outside after dark. I felt uncomfortable when there were other people behind me on the street—anybody behind me on the street. It just made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like people jogging up behind me. I was looking over my shoulder constantly, but at the same time, I didn’t want to look over my shoulder because I was afraid it would give away how anxious I was, and I was anxious.
And yes, that did go down. My bad dreams did go down, but I just felt kind of like I wanted to get away and do something else. So I really was excited about planning to go away. I was going to go to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and all I was waiting for was the district attorney to give me a date when I would go in front of the grand jury, and they would decide—they would listen to what I had to say, listen to my story about what happened in my robbery, and they would decide if they were going to charge these guys.
Well, what happened is finally he did set a date, and it came when I did the ultimate. And listen, I am going to leave the country. I’m buying a ticket, and finally, actually, I bought a ticket to go to Bulgaria. And he said, “Okay, okay, I’ll meet with you, and we’re going to have the grand jury.” They were going to have the grand jury, I believe, is the day before I left in early July.
Well, I met with him, and I went down to the courthouse in lower Manhattan, and we had a conversation. Okay, and he’s going to tell me we’re going to get these guys, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in the course of the conversation, he was asking me again about what had happened when I was robbed. He wanted to hear the story from me face to face, and I told him the story. I said, “But when I go and tell the grand jury tomorrow or the next day or whenever it was, I said I want to just review my journal because I wrote about what happened in my journal so I can be very clear about what happened.” And then he suddenly changed. He looked at me, he said, “You wrote about this in your journal?”
I said, “Yeah, I wrote about it in my journal. I wrote down a lot about what happened just to help me heal from it and to help me clear my head and to help me remember what happened.” He said, “Oh, I need to get your journal. You have to send me your journal. Email it to me.” And I said, “I don’t want to email you my journal. That’s extremely personal. I said I have all sorts of things in that journal that I don’t want anybody to see. This is for me, written for me.” He said, “No, you have to give it to me.” He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll black out anything that we don’t want other people to see, but I have to share this with the defense attorney because legally the defense attorney has a right to read anything that you have written down. This is considered testimony.”
I said, “Wait a second, so these two guys who robbed me—presumably they caught the right guys—I said their defense attorney is going to get to read my journal?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “What about these guys? Can they read it too?” He said, “Yeah, they can read it.” I said, “No way! I said I’m not giving my journal to two guys who robbed me. They already robbed me. They mugged me. They invaded my body. They touched me. They took my stuff, and now I’m going to give them my journal? They are absolutely the last people I’m going to give my journal to. I don’t even want to give it to you. I said I don’t want to give it to anyone. I wouldn’t even let my best friend read my journal. It’s like this is totally personal private stuff.” He said, “Listen, I understand how you feel, but you have to give it to me. Just give me just like two weeks or get whatever it is when you really wrote.”
Most about whatever happened, give me what you wrote about. And I said, okay, but you will black out a lot, right? And I’ll have some say. He goes, yes, we can decide together what we black out.
So I went home and I sent him my journal. I emailed him a couple of weeks of my journal where I wrote about what happened and my reactions to it, my bad dreams about it. And I put highlights over the parts, like, you know, certain things, people’s names, my history, things that I don’t want this to be public testimony with anybody, people who are fighting for me or against me.
Well, the district attorney said, well, you actually blacked out too much for starters. He says we have to release some of it. He said we don’t want to be blacking out that much. I said, wait a second, I sent it to you with the agreement that would be blacking out a lot. He said, well, you blacked out too much. I have to release some of this. He said also some of the things you wrote about don’t put you in the best light from the perspective of the defense, especially some of the dreams that you had.
And then he proceeded to analyze my dreams. And I was having post-traumatic dreams, straight up. And I wrote my feelings down around those dreams, and I was angry and I was hurt. And in some of my dreams, I even fought back. In some of my dreams, it was like I was in terror. But he analyzed my dreams in a way that was like, he said, yeah, this is what the defense is going to do. They’re going to paint you to be this type of person.
I said, but those are post-traumatic dreams. That has nothing to do with me in the bigger picture. He says, well, and I don’t want to get into exactly what I wrote down, but suffice to say, I felt horrible that my dreams were being analyzed by a prosecuting attorney and that a defense attorney could get up on the stand and rip into me about dreams that I had.
So the prosecutor said, well, don’t worry, we’ll be able to defend. But what you have to do is now you have to send me your journal from before you were mugged, from a period of time before you were mugged, so we can look at your dreams before you were mugged and see that, you know, you weren’t saying some of the things that you said in your dreams afterwards, so we can have a sort of a comparison study.
I said, now I have to send you my journal from before the mugging? He says, yeah. And I said, wait, wait, wait, I don’t know if I want to do this. He said, you have to. Come on, this is what we need. This is what’s required.
Well, I went home, I thought about it some more, and I realized I felt out of control. And I realized I was out of control. I flashed back then on my time as a therapist. And also since I’ve been a therapist, I’ve heard this story, and it’s an analogous comparison. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s kind of similar to women who have been raped. And I heard this from a few women that I worked with and women that I know who have been raped, that there was the rape, there was that violation, which is kind of analogous to me being mugged. And I would say what they went through was a lot worse, but analogous.
And then there was how the legal system treated them. And I heard this from women who said it was like being raped again, maybe even worse in some way, publicly, in front of lots of people, tearing into my credibility, questioning my thought process, making it out like I was crazy, making it out like I asked for it, things like that. And that’s how I felt. I felt like I had already been violated.
And when I went home that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up half the night. And then it hit me like a lightning bolt in the middle of the night. What is this? Two, three nights before I’m supposed to be flying to Bulgaria and living a completely different life? I’m supposed to be going off and hitchhiking into the world unknown. And what I realized in the middle of the night is I am not going to do it. Absolutely, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to give him any more of my journal. I’m not going to give him my past journal. I’m not going to give him the journal I wrote after two weeks. I’m not going to do it.
And he also started hinting, by the way, in the conversation that he could get access to my emails. He had the right to get everything. And I was just like, you know, I’m not doing it. I don’t want to go in front of the grand jury. And that started me on a course of thinking that, first of all, I realized the guys were going to get away with it because if I’m not going to testify, there really is no case. I’d heard that the whole way.
But then I thought, you know what? I’m going to cut my losses. I don’t want to be part of this anymore. This is making my life worse. This is going to make my life horrible. And also, it’s like when does it end? If they get all my personal information, what will they know about my life? Where is my privacy? Where is my sense of being free and independent? This was too awful.
And I thought, you know, I felt like these two guys should get punished somehow. They should get caught. They should get told at least by the legal system, no, it’s wrong what you did. But not at the cost of myself. This was too much. It already had been stressful, but I was willing to go through a lot, but not for the sake of giving up my journal, potentially emails being analyzed like that. No thanks, I don’t want this. This will hurt me worse than I think it will help them or the world.
So then I thought, wait a second, what if the district attorney doesn’t agree? What if he doesn’t let me go? Because I’d talked to some people, I’d done a little research, and I realized that he might not so quickly let me go. So I started thinking about it, and I realized, and this is horrible, but I realized I had to come up with a strategy to get out of it because I realized he might not just let me go. He might say we can do stuff.
So I thought about it, and I actually wrote in the middle of the night a lot more in my journal about everything that I was going through. And I wrote a lot about the district attorney. I wrote about a lot of our conversations we’d had over the months. I’d written, I wrote down a lot of what the police told me behind the scenes and a lot of stuff that wasn’t so kosher, wasn’t so pleasant, wasn’t so respectful.
And then I called him up in the morning, and whoa, surprisingly, one of the first times he’d ever done it, he took my call because now I was important to him. And I told him on the telephone, I said, I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided that I don’t want to testify in front of the grand jury, and I’m not giving any more journals or anything.
And that is when he showed his true colors to me because he dropped any facade of being pleasant and polite, and he got tough, cold, and nasty to me on the phone. And then he said to me, probably much in the way he said to people he was cross-examining, people who are being accused of crimes, he talked to me that way, like I was a criminal. And I realized the guy had no empathy.
What he said to me was, no, you are going to give your journals. And if you don’t give them, we can subpoena them, and I will subpoena them. And I have a legal right to get them. I have a legal right to get your computer. I have a legal right to get your hard drives. I can access your email. I can get everything, he said. And if you don’t come, he said, I have a legal right to come and have your passport confiscated. We can prevent you.
From leaving the country, and we can have the court officers take you down and compel you to testify in front of the grand jury about what happened. I had been anticipating this. I hadn’t realized it was going to be that extreme. I didn’t realize he was going to be that cold, but he was unwavering.
And I’m actually very grateful that I had a strategy planned because I told him, I said, “I understand. I understand what you’re saying, and I understand that you can compel me to come, and I will come if you compel me. You don’t need to bring court officers to drag me down there. I’ll come if you say I must.” But I need to let you know that I’ve been writing down, and I have written down everything you’ve told me in every conversation. And you’ve said quite a few things that, well, I don’t consider to be very respectful. You’ve lost my trust in a lot of different ways. You’ve made me lose trust in the legal system.
And I wrote down things the police officers said that I considered to be very disrespectful against people in general, about criminals in general, about these guys that they arrested. And frankly, if I get up to testify, I’m going to say all of this. And I’m going to say that please do not charge these guys because I don’t trust the police. I don’t trust the district attorney. I don’t trust the whole process. I feel you took advantage of me in a traumatized state. I feel the police took advantage of me in a traumatized state, and I don’t want to be part of this anymore. And please, please, please do not charge these guys. Let them go. Even though, yes, somebody mugged me, I no longer am confident even of who they are. And I told that to him.
So I said, I’m not gonna give testimony that’s gonna help you or the case or anything. And also, I really want to make it clear that you said things to me that I wrote in my journal, which should be testimony. And I actually would like to give that part of my journal that tells about who you really are behind the scenes. And I feel like this should be known, and I feel like any grand jury should know this. And I feel that the defense attorney should know this. And I feel it’s important to know that you’re not who you presented yourself to be.
Well, he suddenly was like, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, well, um, oh yes, okay, I see it.” He backed way off and he stopped being such a tough guy. And then he said, “Well, um, yes, I am okay. I understand your position. I think I’m going to need to talk to my supervisor. Blah blah blah, just hold for a moment. I, you know, if you wait, I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” Well, I’ve heard him say how many times he’s going to call me back, and I had to wait forever.
Well, suddenly it was on a different time schedule because I got off the phone, and he called me back, I think five to ten minutes later. He said, “Yes, I was able to talk about it with my supervisor, and we’ve decided it’s best that you not come and testify and that we dropped this case. And yes, you realize these guys are going to go free, but you know, considering the circumstances, blah blah blah blah blah.” He was like a dog with a tail between his legs, and that was it. He told me they’re gonna drop the case. I’ve still since checked the court records. They did drop the case against these two guys, and that’s it. Never heard from him again, and it’s all done.
And in a way, overall, I feel incredibly relieved because I thought I don’t have to get violated again, perhaps worse, by these strangers who are being paid to do it with their big fancy jobs in public testimony. And then there’s the whole side about the guys walking free now. I don’t feel good about that. At least, well, I would say probably about 80 percent of me doesn’t feel good about it. 20 percent of me is like, so be it, that’s life. Everything moves on. But then there’s the 80 percent of me that’s like, you know, those guys got off scot-free. They robbed all that money from me and my phone. They made hell out of my life. They stressed me out. They traumatized me. They made me scared, scared to live in my own neighborhood.
I will say this: my travels abroad for five months were wonderful. I felt safe. I was hitchhiking all over, all sorts of different environments. It was like part of it, I think, was where I was actually literally was safer. But then there’s another part of me, I think just the change of environment was great for me. I really needed that. It was like a holiday away from the stress of my neighborhood and the constant reminders and the places, well, that I could get robbed again.
I also noticed when I was traveling, a lot of times for sometimes days, weeks at a time, I wouldn’t even think about being robbed. I wasn’t talking about it all the time. Like at first, I was constantly talking about it with everyone. After a while, I just kind of stopped talking about it. Definitely stopped dreaming about it. I noticed it’s been a little weird since I got back. I started thinking about it again, but not so bad. That five-month gap in being away from my neighborhood, it definitely helped. I’ve healed. I feel healthier.
But then I think about those guys. What message did this whole experience send to them? I think at some level, maybe they learned that, wow, we can get away with it. We can do this again. And I don’t feel good about that. But then there’s another part of me that thinks at least at the end of them robbing me, I did tell them it’s not okay what you did. Don’t do this again. You scared me. And they did. They looked down. They were ashamed of themselves. At least one of the guys was ashamed of himself.
But then they also did live with several months, four months basically, of thinking that they’re gonna go to jail. This was hanging over their head. They never knew what was going on behind the scenes, that I’m a massive journal writer and that it actually came back in a way to screw me. I kind of screwed myself, my healing process, by being so open on the paper. Hurt me. I certainly have to think about that for journaling in the future. And I’ve been so public saying journaling is wonderful. Well, maybe if you’re going to journal on a computer, think twice because they have access to it. They can grab it. They can make it public testimony. It’s not a pleasant thought to think about that. It’s very disheartening to me.
However, when I think about these two guys and what’s going to happen to them, I think the consolation I feel, the consolation that I get, is that there is such a thing as karma. This I believe in. This I have observed. And that thing that they did to me, that robbery that they did against me, they did that to me, but they also poisoned their own souls by doing that. You can’t do something like that and feel good about yourself afterward. You can’t love yourself afterward. You hate yourself when you do stuff like that.
And I speak for myself, of my own life experience. When I was younger, mostly when I was a kid, a teenager, and I was so traumatized and so wounded in my family of origin, probably somewhat similar to these two guys who robbed me. I have a feeling they had it a lot, lot worse than I did, but somewhat similar. And that as a result of me being so traumatized, I acted out. I harmed others. I harmed myself. I harmed the world. I was someone who replicated what had been done to me in an attempt to make sense of it, unconsciously, as a way to act out my anger, as a way to act out my sadness and rage and powerlessness and frustration. And all of that acting out, I did the harm that I caused other people. Thankfully, nothing remotely as bad as robbing people and traumatizing someone like that, but I did things that were not good, and I know that, and I’ve faced it.
I did each bad thing. I did each replication of the trauma that had been done to me, mostly in my family of origin. Each of these replications poisoned me, made me like myself less, made me respect myself less, made it harder for me to hold my chin up high and feel good about myself. I wasn’t proud of myself. It lowered my self-esteem. It poisoned me. That was karma. That’s the law of karma. That’s how life works.
And until I faced it, until I started healing it, until I started grieving what had been done to me that caused me to do that, and still I analyzed it and made sense of this, until I did a massive amount of grieving, and as the result of that grieving, stopped acting out these traumas, stopped harming other people, stopped harming myself. I mean, I’m not 100% healed, but a big percentage of my harmed inner self has transformed into someone who’s not harmed anymore and, as a result, isn’t harming others.
Self-esteem came back. It took a long time to build it, to rebuild it, to grow, to become a person who loved myself. And increasingly, every day, every month, every year, every decade, I love myself more. But in a strange way, this is the consolation for me with these two guys. The legal system let them get away with it. The legal system failed me. These rules that the defense has a right to my journal, that’s a failure of me. But in a way, the legal system failed them too.
Now, had the legal system stuck them in jail to rot with a bunch of other traumatized, angry, violent people, would that have helped these guys? I’m not under any illusions that it would. In a way, I don’t have to even consider the idea that me testifying put these guys in a rotten hole of jail with a bunch of other miserable, angry people. But it probably wouldn’t have helped them. Maybe it could have, but it’s doubtful. Most of the people I’ve talked to back when I was a therapist and in my life in general, meeting people who have been in jail, who are in jail when I visited jail, this is not a healing environment.
So again, I think I talked about this in one of those earlier videos about my mugging. My big hope for these two guys is not that they get punished, especially now that I’m not angry and enraged and hurt and traumatized anymore. I mean, early on, yeah, I wanted to fight back. I wanted to spray him in the face with pepper spray and kick them and do all the things they threatened to do to me. I wanted to bring harm to those guys to get all my stuff back, to re-empower myself. But I don’t feel that now. I don’t feel angry and violent toward them in my fantasies, not at night, not during the day.
Instead, if I could have my wish, they could heal. They would have to face what they did and really look at it and sit with it, not just bury it and move on and pretend it never happened and glory in the riches they got by stealing from me. Will they heal? Maybe, maybe not. But in a way, that’s not on me. That’s on them. That’s on life. And I hope that they do. I really hope that they do. But that’s karma, and it’s going to be their karma. Are they going to have the strength to wake up and look at themselves?
I made a video on that once about karma being my religion, and it’s a religion that brings me comfort. It’s not a religion that wants vengeance on others. It’s not a religion that believes in vengeance and harm and vicious punishment. It’s a religion, if you want to call it, probably better said a philosophy, and I’ll share it in the link below. A philosophy about the fairness of life, even though life seems so unfair. I think in another way, there is a kind of inherent fairness.
If those two guys who robbed me, whoever they are, ever have any hope of having a good life, good relationships with others, self-esteem, all the things that actually I’ve worked really hard to get, and they didn’t actually really take away from me in the long run, if they want those things, they’re gonna have to own what they did, really, really own what they did. Own what set them up to do such a horrible thing to a person. Perhaps they’ve done it to many people. I really don’t know.
So that’s what I’m left with as this final, or probably final, video about this mugging, that robbery. This is where I am more than nine months later. Moved along with my life, still on my healing path. And I think the part of me that’s the most happy, if you want to use that word, happy, as the result of all this is that it didn’t stop me from being useful to others. It didn’t stop me from making these videos and writing. Yes, I took off for a while, but my life got back on track. I am doing well, and I’m able to share this hopefully in a way that will be useful to others.
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