MISTY GRIFFIN: The Bishop told me to be quiet and to behave myself.
MISTY GRIFFIN: And I just took my head covering off, I threw it on the ground and I stomped on it and
I told them I am leaving.
MISTY GRIFFIN: The Amish believe that the outside world is evil.
MISTY GRIFFIN: So I fully believed that I had to be Amish. I 100% believed that.
MISTY GRIFFIN: If I wasn’t Amish, I would go to hell. That’s what I have been told basically my whole life.
MISTY GRIFFIN: When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my stepfather got the idea that we should start dressing
Amish and by the time I was 10 years old, we were dressing in full Amish attire.
MISTY GRIFFIN: My sister and I were isolated. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other or to anyone else.
And when I was 11 years old, we moved to a mountain ranch and my sister and I were basically held prisoners
there. When I was 19 years old, I tried to escape the ranch and that’s when my stepfather got the idea to send
us to an Amish community. I went to live with the Amish and three and a half years later, I left the Amish after
I was sexually abused by the Bishop.
MISTY GRIFFIN: I knew of several sexual abuse cases that were going on in the Amish and they were not
reported to the police. The perpetrators were allowed to just live among the church like regular people and they
had full access to their victims over and over again.
MISTY GRIFFIN: I knew I couldn’t tell anybody in the Church because the victims are usually blamed.
So I ended up going to the police because I was afraid he was molesting his children also. The Amish do not
even consider themselves citizens of the United States. When you are Amish, basically your, your Church, your
government, your whole world is Amish.
MISTY GRIFFIN: Not very many Amish leave. Leaving the Amish is extremely hard like, extremely hard. When I left
the Amish, I felt I was being teleported from 1600s into the 21st century.
MISTY GRIFFIN: I had grown up on a farm, getting up every morning at 5 o'clock. I really only knew gardening,
taking care of animals, sowing, canning. Nothing that I knew or nothing that I had learnt seemed helpful in the
outside world. How many nights I cried, I felt like nobody understood me and I didn’t really understand anybody
else. I had no identification, I didn’t know how to get a job, I had about a second or third-grade education.
I had no idea where to start. But thankfully my stepdad’s aunt, she took me under her wing and she went to the
congressman to get something signed so I could get a passport. That was my first form of identification.
MISTY GRIFFIN: Transitioning into the modern world was extremely overwhelming. I still have nightmares that
I am still Amish, that I never left or that somebody is telling me I am going to hell.
MISTY GRIFFIN: Because I left the Amish, I was automatically shunned. Shunning means that, that you
are basically set-aside until you repent.
MISTY GRIFFIN: My sister is in an Amish community in the midwest and it’s been 12 years since I have seen her.
MISTY GRIFFIN: 3 years ago, I wrote my memoir ‘Tears Of The Silence’ to raise awareness about child abuse and
the importance of reporting suspected child abuse and I also wrote about sexual abuse among the Amish.
I think the best way to raise awareness is to educate the public.
MISTY GRIFFIN: She told me that her and her sisters have reported their father to the police and that he was
being investigated. The Bishop was sentenced to 10 years in prison for child molestation.
MISTY GRIFFIN: Adapting to the modern world took a long time. It didn’t happen in 1 week or 2 weeks.
I have the chance to help a lot of people and that makes me very happy. I almost have a nursing degree.
That is a dream come true for me. So life today is very good.
It's better than I expected it to be when I left the Amish.