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Intro/Outro: A Content warning for our listeners, general discussions of sexual violence, including impacts of trauma and healing modalities will be discussed. If you need support or resources, please visit survivors.org

Angela Rose: Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Survivors.org Podcast, helping survivors to thrive after trauma. I'm your host, Angela Rose, the founder of PAVE, Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment. And I am so grateful for our sponsor for this episode. Today is Color Street Nails. And Color Street is a creative beauty brand with limitless possibilities. I could not be more excited for our guests today. We have an advocate, an author, a former NFL player, just an all around awesome human being. We have Mr. John Vaughn joining us today, and we're gonna be talking about healing through writing through advocacy and through a number of different ways. So, John, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jon Vaughn: Thank you for having me.

Angela Rose: So John, for those folks that might not know about what happened at the University of Michigan, can you just give us a high level overview of what you have dealt with over the last couple of years and how you've used activism to help?

Jon Vaughn: Absolutely. I found out in March of 2020 that there was a team doctor who was giving unnecessary medical exams, all under the guise of medical treatment, prostate cancer screening and testicular cancer screening exams, which were not necessary and were for all on field and off the field injuries. Which essentially was rape. And that came out in 2020, and I really started speaking out around July of that year. And then about almost seven, eight months ago, seeing that we weren't getting anywhere in the negotiations, we weren't getting anywhere with speaking with the border regions or the president. I just began a protest, sleeping in a Pop tent. out in front of the president's house at the university, which morphed into what we call today, the Hail to the Victim's movement.

Angela Rose: And how has that impacted you? I know from knowing you over the last couple of months, hearing how many survivors that you have impacted by your activism, by you shattering the silence, was that healing for you to have so many survivors stop by your tenant to disclose to you?

Jon Vaughn: There was a duality in it. It was very healing and cathartic and empowering to meet so many survivors of Dr. Robert Anderson, who was the doctor at university. I probably heard upwards of 600 individual stories of their abuse or rape from students, male and female in those a hundred plus days that I was out there. But also there was the institution's Goliath personality and I was getting death threats. Even our security team was even here in details as granular as there they're looking to poison you. So it was a very empowering time, but it was also a time in which I knew my life was at risk.

And then I had some health issues come up. I had a, essentially what was a sweet potato growing in my thyroid. So I had to get my thyroid removed and then I had a hypertensive episode, which I had never had high blood pressure to where on the day of surgery, my blood pressure was like 250 over 150. I was definitely a stroke risk. I almost didn't make it out of the hospital. And so that kind of brought me back to how I was raised and some things that my mother had planted those seeds some 30 years ago that sometime in life you're gonna be faced with things that are bigger than you. And she had, raised me to stand. And so I stood.

Angela Rose: That's so powerful. For the listeners that don't know Dr. Anderson has been accused, I think a thousand victims plus, is that right, John?

Jon Vaughn: Yeah, over 2100 right now. And back of the envelope, just doing our research in the book that I'm writing, it could be upwards of 10,000 individuals over the course of a 50 plus year career.

Angela Rose: Wow. And one thing that you and I have talked about in the past, People knew about this. And I think having that complacency is that's just been such a, what a re-traumatization I feel like for so many of the survivors to find out that there were so many people that potentially could have stopped this. And I think as you were talking about some of the health issues, one thing that we're very passionate about at PAVE is talking about the physical impact of trauma on our health.

And one thing that really resonated with me, John was when you talked about how there was other survivors, because it was under the guise of medical treatment. So many other survivors have avoided doctors because of what happened. And so I just think that's so powerful. Did you wanna speak to that at all? Do you feel like that happened for you as well?

Jon Vaughn: Oh, absolutely. I stopped going to the doctors after my playing career in the NFL for the most part. Ironically, one of who is now one of my best friends Chuck Christian, who played about 10 years before I did for Bo Jim Beckler football at Michigan, who put off doctors to the point where he had stage four prostate cancer. And I remember it was early November. I thought it was just my lymph nodes. I thought I might be getting a sore throat and I remember having a conversation with him on a Saturday morning about John, don't be me.

Go to the doctor and I was terrified. Another one of the survivors TA de Luca he actually drove me to the doctor to get checked out. Literally I was having panic attacks. Once we got the appointment set up, because I hadn't been to the doctor and subconsciously I never even thought about my own health. I would always, try to figure things out myself. But I just realized I was staying away from doctors and we found what my endocrinologist oncologist thought was cancer.

They had never seen a tumor this large, that wasn't cancer. So we didn't do any biopsies. We set surgery schedule and I Think trauma, as well as the trauma, physically and mentally and emotionally in the protest, just all led up to, what he called. It was a massive, tumor, the size of a sweet potato just living inside my neck on one side. And then I had a golf ball on the other side of my thyroid. And as you talked about I started reading a book a couple years ago, when I learned about this is, The Body Keeps the Score.

Because I was having panic attacks trying to Separate my public and professional life and, keep my kids out of because I had listened to so many victims of other atrocities that their families were threatened and things like that. So I was carrying a weight of really the world on my shoulder, but I was denying myself, just my health and listening to my body. And I think it came to a point where I literally. Almost didn't make it out of the hospital. I mean, at any minute I could have been a stroke victim.

Blood pressure test every hour. It was. scary. But going into this protest if I can and I used to visit my mother in the off seasons while I was in NFL and in February of 1992 she was a teacher. And she'd be home by 3:50 by four o'clock. We would watch O Oprah. That's what we did. During the week when I would come home to visit her. And this show, there was something so, moving to her is the first time she really talked to me about the civil rights movement in her marching. And she talked about it wasn't just black people.

It was blacks and whites and Asians and Indians Indian Americans and male and female young and old. It was a human rights issue. And she told me about, seeing the skin taken off of people's back the hoses and the dogs, attacking people. And she had marched in two major marches and She said, but we knew we stood because it was bigger than us. We realized that the world that was left to us was not as safe as the world we wanted to leave others. At that point, I'm a month away from being year old. Ready to go out, hang out with my buddies.

She says to me, one day you're gonna be faced with something that's bigger than , and I know you'll stand because that's the way I raised you. And so me being, a girl dad seeing how the narrative was being controlled by Michigan. And I didn't want my daughters to find out that I was a rape victim on ESPN. So I wanted to have that conversation with them. And then from the second day that I was on campus, where a young female student told me I spend more time on this campus thinking about the next time I'm gonna be raped or sexually assaulted than I do thinking about my major.

I realized, this is that moment. This is so much bigger than me. We couldn't change anything that happened to us, but I've always thought that I have to leave the world a safer place than what was left to me. By the time I was 21 years of age, I had been raped over a hundred times, but 50 of those times were at the hands of Dr. Robert Anderson, who was a team doctor, who we were forbidden to see any other doctors until we saw him. So I never saw my childhood pediatrician once I stepped on campus at the university of Michigan.

I just wanted to hopefully be a part of change. And the thing about being an athlete in sports is you're always watching film. You're always trying to correct your mistakes. And this atrocity that became this syndicate of abuse at these universities had gone on for half a century. I'm 52 years old today. So, literally I found out two weeks after my 50th birthday. So it's been going on longer than, I've been alive and not only just the abuse, but the cover up, but then that abuse spread to this rape culture that was on campus that was.

I talked to a, therapist and she'd been a therapist professionally for 40 some years. And she said in my 40 years, I've never heard that many individual intimate stories about sexual abuse or rape than you have in less than a hundred days. I might have heard five or 10 in my entire career in the details that you have heard, so that could have only been a much larger issue than John Vaughn.

Angela Rose: Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that. I know that your mom is looking down just so proud of you paving the way for other survivors to speak out. And a couple things I wanna touch on, you mentioned about college campuses. I think so many parents are now sending their kids off to school. Here we are back to school time. And what a lot of parents don't realize is that the red zone is right. It's the most dangerous time for students.

And so, with PAVE, we're very passionate about making sure that we educate not just young women, but all gender identities, encouraging men to understand like, what is consent. And so this has to come from everyone, but I wanna turn to how you have found Survivor solidarity. You know, I know that you reached out to one of the Nassar victims, survivors, Thrivers, Trinity and would love to hear about how that helped you heal by working with other survivors and how that survivor solidarity piece was a part of your healing journey?

Jon Vaughn: Well, it is interesting. We spent a lot of time yesterday together just kind of talking about things and we were on the highway and we were like, we shouldn't have met, ever. Because I remember watching her impact statement in the Larry Nassar case. And there's two things that I remember very, vividly is it was one of the most courageous live events that I'd ever seen in my life. I watched the man stand in front of the tanks in tandem and swear. And so I was like, wow, that took an extremely ungodly amount of courage.

And then I thought, well, this has never happened at the University of Michigan. This is a Michigan State. And so when it came out about Michigan and the difference in their case in our cases, our perpetrators and most of the enablers had passed. So I really looked to Trinae to figure out how to gain my voice, to speak past the grave, but then also to speak in real time to the institution that enabled, empowered and covered up this atrocity. And a side note, from a spiritual standpoint, I've always felt like God never caused the equipped.

He equips the call. And as I was called to do this, he equipped me with a lifelong friend, almost my counterpart as a female survivor in Tranae. And it's been one of the biggest blessings. In this I wouldn't have survived because in the middle of the fire, she was the only one that could understand the public, looking at you as a rape victim first and not a human being. And the darkness that, brings, and the trauma that brings, but yet you must, stand strong. You must stand loud.

You must stand in solidarity in those times of darkness, because what I tell people is going from the dark to the light is not like just getting off an exit and you say, okay, I'm there, you know? I think Winston Churchill once said, if you make it through a minefield, don't ever go back through it, keep going forward. But to get out of the darkness, you have to go back through that minefield. You have to go back through the trauma to find the light and and this is on a whole, kind of metaphysical level and all that.

There is no light and darkness. So you have to find your way back through your trauma. And that's where I say victim to survivor is like caterpillar to butterfly. You go to a metamorphosis and I think we should embrace our victimhood so that you can understand the metamorphosis to become a survivor. Like it is a process. And I don't think I'm all the way there because there are days that, I just want to crawl up in a ball from playing professional football and being a dad and all these things and an entrepreneur and all that stuff.

But there are days where I just want to lay in a ball and cry because I feel the pain of the betrayal, the pain of understanding, the different levels of trauma and rape and culture and the taboo nature of, most African American communities of color, how we don't talk about it, men don't talk about it. But the one thing Trinae and I anchored on yesterday, was there 8 billion people in the world and a quarter of those people at least have suffered some sort of sexual trauma, so we are not alone. And that's the biggest thing that I think that solidarity has brought me is to know that I'm not alone in this.

Angela Rose: And I love that you talked about the light and I'd love to talk about your book and how that has helped you find the light and stay in the light. And I know it's not easy to go back into those places, but would love to hear some tips from you for other survivors that might be looking to pen their own journey, or maybe tips when it does feel dark. How do you find the light? What has helped you? So in the short time that we have together, John, can you give us some advice for other survivors and how that book has helped you heal?

Jon Vaughn: Yeah it really has helped me heal from the standpoint of, in most of these type cases or just in like, whether they're in institutions or individual cases, put this moniker on you of a Jane or a John DOE, which is a faceless, nameless, voiceless individual. So there's no human connection. And in October of 2020 I started to look at my notes and then a good friend of mine who now has become a really good friend. My co-author had written a book called Armies of Enablers, which talked about the bystander complicity in all these atrocities from the Catholic church to Ohio states and Nassar.

And I remember making the decision around two o'clock in the morning and, you know, excuse my French. But I said, I'm not a fucking John DOE. I'm John Vaughn. I had to gain back my individuality as a man, as a dad, as a son, as a brother, as a teammate, and say, I'm gonna control my narrative. And that will be the light. At that point, that's all I knew. And also writing this book, you're battling a Goliath that uses the tool of revisionist history to try to act like this atrocity never happened.

And that has become a synonymous problem in these atrocities that these institutions that are culpable. Because when you think about it, it's one that raped several thousand individuals that could only happen if he was empowered by an institution, which the University of Michigan had paid almost 11.9 million to prove that 24 plus individuals at the University in leadership and one being Bo SIM Beckler and Don cannon, who was the athletic director, knew about this doctor.

They're trying to erase the legacy of all of these victims and survivors to uphold, this God like aura of a statue of a man who was a coach, but still a human being that obviously was flawed that the university proved, knew about it. They're trying to erase our history, but you're never gonna have a great coach without great players. And so you can't have one without the other. And I think that's been the most healing is to really get deep. And I find that most survivors want to tell their story, whether it be publicly or not, but they want to get it out to someone else who understands.

So being able to interview and get to know so many survivors and different backgrounds and has also been empowering for me, but I also think it's been empowering for others. Because at the end of the day, I'm only one man, but I've always felt like one man can move a mountain. If he's standing next to another man or another woman, that's trying to move the same mountain. And so our collective voices and also what I've learned to do, not just in writing articles or speeches or this book is I take parts of other people's story.

And I make reference to them to show that this is a community of survivors that are standing. I might be the messenger, but don't ever forget the message. Is that we've decided to say no more. And to take back ownership of our individuality and our contributions to these different organizations.

Angela Rose: That is so beautiful. John, thank you so much for reminding us that we are so much more than our trauma, that the light is always there. If we seek it and there's so much healing in finding others in that survivor solidarity piece, I love that. So John, how can people find you and find out more about your book?

Jon Vaughn: So, right now you can find me on hailtothevictims.com in which we also have a 15 minute mini documentary that kind of talks through our a hundred days. And very soon I will be launching my non-profit. Tentatively, I'm thinking of calling it the Solidarity Metaverse Project working with some more intelligent people than I, but just trying to use technology to create a better world for survivors in how they handle their PTSD. Whether that be in sport or just any survivors. And I should be actively joining Trinae in the development office of Avalon Healing within the next 30 days. And I will also be creating my own website for the book. As well as the nonprofit and all the other things that not only I'm doing, but so many survivors are doing, in this fight.

Angela Rose: Beautiful. Thank you so much. And having you and Trinae come and speak at PAVEs, I am the Movement event was so incredible. Your voice is together individually, so powerful together unstoppable. So thank you for your voice and for all that you have done for our movement and continue to do. And we are so excited to continue to partner with you, John and see the amazing places that you go. So thank you for your time today, and thank you. All of you for tuning in. Thank you for joining. For another episode of the Survivors.org Podcast.

Again, this episode was sponsored by Color Street, a creative beauty brand with limitless possibilities. And until we meet again, remember to please love yourself, respect each other, and together we can change the world. See you next time. Thank you.

Jon Vaughn: Thank you.

Intro/Outro: For all survivors and their loved ones tuning in, please remember that you are not alone and it's not your fault. If you need support or resources, please visit us at survivors.org.