Unspeakable Terror, Extraordinary Strength

After surviving 10 years of abuse by her stepfather,michelle stevens shares her brave journey of healing and hope.

- Elaine Aradillas

It’s lunchtime on a recent Monday, and Michelle Stevens is finally eating breakfast.Inside her spacious Pasadena home, the 48-year-old mom to son Mikey, 11, sits at the kitchen table with her wife, Chris, coordinating work schedules, arranging school pickups, planning an upcoming business trip. Quick to laugh, Stevens is comfortable in the center of normal family chaos—a concept completely foreign to her as a child, when she lived a daily, horrific nightmare filled with rape, torture and sexual abuse. “No one knew my history,” she says. “I was very afraid.”

After nearly 40 years, she’s finally not afraid anymore. In her new book Scared Selfless: My Journey from Abuse and Madness to Surviving and Thriving, out March 21 and excerpted exclusively here, Stevens recounts the explicit details of how her stepfather, Gary Lundquist, a fifth-grade teacher, locked her in a cage in the family basement, “training” her to be submissive so he could usher her through a world of sex rings and child pornography. Though Lundquist was sentenced to three years’ probation in 1985 for engaging in sexual conduct with two girls at the school where he taught, he died in 1997 without ever answering for the years he assaulted her. “On a subconscious level, I knew he wasn’t innocent,” she says. “But I thought I was complicit, that I was a criminal.”

For most of her childhood, Stevens says, she lived a double life. At school she was a regular girl. But at home she was a sex slave to Lundquist, a master manipulator who went to great lengths to hide the abuse from her mother. (Today she and her mother have a “superficial” relationship, Stevens says.) “I was badly tortured,” she says. “I still have flashbacks.”