Esther’s Testimony (names changed for privacy) Interviewed by Joseph & Sonia Miller

J: You said he's been sexually abusing for 40 years. How old is he now?

E: He’s 59 or 60 now. I’m the youngest of 13children and I'm 46. Of my siblings all but two are older than me.

J: Did you grow up in Berne?

E: We moved out of Adams County and came to Jay County when was 6. I’ve lived in Jay County my whole life.

J: Was that because of abuse or not necessarily?

E: No, it was because my dad and grandpa, wanted to get out of that church because my younger brother was born and he had very severe asthma. He was in the hospital 7 times, with pneumonia. before he was a year old. When the doctor said that he needed a breathing machine, that church would not allow dad to get a generator to get a breathing machine, so my dad just switched to a different church where he was allowed to have a generator for health of his child. — Back to my older brother, I have talked to him since he moved back home. He was at some Amish facility in Michigan or in Ohio. The reason I say he hasn't changed is because he's so manipulative and religious. He is still the same. I've noticed the more people are trying to hide it, it comes out in a better than thou” religious spirit. They look down on you for what you're doing instead of handling what's going on with what they're doing.

J: Yeah, it's the grip of control because there's no hope without Jesus. So if they don't have Jesus, all they have is to cover up their sin and go by what they're allowed to do. The Ordnung is at the root of it and if the Ordnung says you can be slapped on the wrist and then you're okay then they'll take a wrist slap and go back and just keep living life but there's no freedom. I mean the only freedom is deliverance and repentance.

E: My first memory of me being touched inappropriately, I was probably 3 or 4 and I'm not gonna go into detail. That's something I haven't been able to do much is go into detail. I had an older brother that started penetration when I was 10. When I was 12, my mom put me on birth control because I think she suspected what was going on. Looking back, my dad would have been my biggest protector because I heard an argument when I was about 15 years old between my mom and my dad and my dad was asking her “why is Esther on birth control”? I was 15 at the time, or 16 because I no longer got my period. I was so severely anorexic I stopped getting my period. She told my dad it's because her periods are so heavy. My dad asked her, “Are you sure it's because of what __A___ did to __B__?” __A__ was my oldest brother that abused my sister ( B ) that’s 5 years older than me and my mom reassured him that there's nothing like that going on.

J: Did she know about your other brother.

E: Yeah, my Dad knew about my other brother, too. They tried to get him help. It wasn't until he was married and my older sister was 15 that they found out the abuse she went through. My Mom and my Dad tried so hard to get him help. The brother (that abused me) is one of my Dad's favorite sons and I did not want my Dad to find out what he was doing. I knew my Dad would be devastated because of how hard he took it when it was my oldest brother. I never spoke about it, not to anybody. The first time I tried to commit suicide I was 12 years old. I slashed my wrists at school. The 2nd time my mom caught me with a shotgun in my mouth. I was 14.

J: You would say this was mainly due to the sexual abuse; that was the root of it?

E: I couldn't live the way I was living. When I was 17 I wanted to do whatever I could to get out of the house and I met my oldest 2 children’s biological father at an Amish party. He was a driver and he promised me the world. He didn't know what was going on at home. He wanted me to run away with him so I left with him and he was 14 years older than me. I didn't know him. I had met him 3 times before I ran away with him. My dad and mom got the cops involved and they brought me back home. Since he was 32 and I was 17 he would have went to jail. As soon as I turned 18 I left with him again. He realized right away I was not a virgin and he was very abusive. He tried to kill me on multiple occasions so I went basically from one hell to another. I didn't know this guy.

J: Was he former Amish?

E: No he was never Amish. He was a drunk. I had my oldest 2 children and I moved back home when I was pregnant with my son. He took a baseball bat over my head, and when I woke up from the coma, the cops told me I cannot go back there. It wasn't just for my safety, it was for the baby's safety, so I moved back home.

[ Back to the brother] The abuse stopped though, the abuse stopped when I was 17. The last time he tried to abuse me was, when I was a “mahwt” (maid) at his house, his wife had a baby. I was 17.

J: So he had children already, and he was still doing it?

E: This would have been his 2nd child. He came upstairs during the night, and I told him I'm going to scream. The next day, my mom came, and she was very, very upset, and she said that my brother had called her and told her that all I do is sleep. I'm not doing anything. I'm lazy and that he wants me to go home. Because I said no to him, he said things about me that weren’t true and of course, my mom believed him (he was one of Mom and Dad's favorite kids). I ended up marrying my husband. [ Not the guy i had my first two children with] We weren't married very long. I couldn't deal with the intimacy of marriage. I was so ashamed. I was afraid. I just knew my husband would never love me if he would know that part of me. I was angry, I blamed God for everything. My husband was raised totally different. His dad became a Christian when he was 10 years old. My father-in-law got kicked out of the Amish church.

I overdosed with pills and from 2005 to 2010, I basically lived in the hospital. It was I really don't have any memory of those years. My goal was to die; that's all I wanted. I knew I could not ever be healed. If life hurts that bad, I wanted no part of it. April 10th, 2010 my daughter made me a a dandelion necklace. She brought it in, put it on my head, and said, "Mom, you're Jesus's princess." I started crying, and I called my mom, because I was so happy, and my mom said, "You don't deserve those kids. They need a different mom. All you do is cry in front of them." I don't know what else she said. I knew that my mom was right. My kids do need someone else. That night I took 86 pills and 30 of those pills was a muscle relaxant. I wanted it to stop my heart and it did. April 10th of 2010….stopped my heart and I was in a coma for five days. The doctors kept telling my husband to take the machine off me because I'm just gonna be a vegetable with the pills that I mixed. My husband knew that if God wanted him to turn off the ventilator, God would tell him. I woke up April 15th in ICU, I had tubes down my throat. My first thought was “God, why am I still here?” That is the first time that I ever remember Him talking to me. I heard his voice just like he was standing beside me. He told me he has plans and a purpose for me. It's been a long road up but it's been up. After my Dad passed away in 2020, I finally told my husband everything that I went through. That's when a lot of my healing started. I was on 13 different psych meds. I was on 20 milligrams of Valium just to be able to stay out of the hospital. I lived like a zombie. I was so drugged up. I'm off of my medicine since October of 2022, I was completely (after 17 years) taken off of all anxiety medicine. Satan loves secrets. He loves to keep people in the dark. As soon as I was able to talk about what I went through; it felt like I had my voice back. God gave me the power that I needed to have. With me healing, my family has healed. I am so happy to see my kids happy.

E: Do you guys know what “brucha” is? [Brucha is Reiki, which is witchcraft]

J: Yes

E: Do you guys believe in that?

J: I believe it's from hell, yeah.

E: Thank you because I was a single mom, I lived with my parents with my 2 oldest and my dad would “brucha" on them all the time. I met my husband, I married him, and he told me, Esther, I'm not comfortable with this. They cannot do that anymore." I believe wherever there is brucha, (witchcraft) there's going to be sexual abuse. My oldest never went through the sexual abuse, but the anger and the depression…. They had spirits in them that our youngest never had to deal with. As a teenager my oldest daughter would cut, and she had bloody prints on her walls in her bedroom. It was so dark. And she would cry for Jesus, she wanted the pain to go away. I didn't understand what was going on with her until I understood what “brucha” was. I knew I had protected my children. I knew they weren't sexually being abused, but I did not realize how demonic some of the darkness was that we were under. My husband never stopped praying over me. In the Amish church I was raised (they said) you do not read Revelations. You do not study it because it will lead you astray. I married someone who has Bible handbooks laying out the scriptures and he had this book on revelations. I knew he was going to go to hell, I knew he was on the wrong track and my husband would ask, why is it in the Bible, if I can't read it and study it?" He was still Amish at that time. His dad got kicked out of the Amish church when my husband was in 6th grade. When he got kicked out of the Old-Order Amish church, they started going to a New-Order Amish church. My husband was Amish, but he was the only one of the children that was still Amish. The reason they kicked my mother and father-in-law out of the Amish church was because they had a son leave the Amish at 16, and they refused to shun him. They said (to the church) it’s not right. It was in 1988. My husband was 10 years older than me. He read the book of John through 3 times from 3 different translations to see if he can go along to communion services. The preachers had told him the only way he could go along to communion service is if it changes his mind.

E. My Dad was on his deathbed 6 months before he died and could barely breathe. He couldn't talk that afternoon. My friend asked him on his deathbed “If you would die today do you know where you would go?” My Dad shook his head no. He said, “Do you want to know where you can go?” My Dad got tears down his face he nodded his head yes and my friend said “Can I pray for you." He prayed. He said he prayed just whatever the Holy Spirit gave him, but he prayed for life for Dad; not to extend his life here on earth, but for eternal life. When my friend was done, my Dad was sobbing. He said he feels better and he accepted Christ right there. That evening, my Mom called my older brother from Southern Ohio and said, "Dad would like to talk to you." (because he had mistreated my older brother so harshly for leaving the Amish) My Dad made it right to him. My brothers went up and visited him. He was 78 years old by the time.

J: Even though you said he was your biggest protector at that time, he still opened the door to the witchcraft and believed in all that.

E: Yeah, I don't think he knew, that “brucha” is handed down generation to generation. I don't think my Dad knew. My older sister actually has her own massage business. She went to college and there's even non-Amish people that refuse to go to her. I had one of my good friends go to her house to pick up some clothes that she gave for some young girls in church and she was telling me. “Did you know that __anonymous__ is in all that reiki and I didn't know what reiki meant. I googled it and it means white witchcraft. The last time my sister gave me a massage, I was not comfortable with it because she put one hand on one part of my body, the other hand on another part, and she would just lightly touch and then she'd do motions in the air and I asked her, "What are you doing?" She goes, “Oh this is the energy in your body. It has to be shifted." And I asked a chiropractor here in town that went to the same school if that is normal. And this is when I was still Amish. He looked at me and he goes, "Mrs. Troyer, your body does have energy but you have to be very careful what you start dabbling in because you can open doors that you do not want to go through. (everybody goes to my sister for brucha, because my dad handed it down to her). I asked her, what are you praying? (This is when she was doing it to my daughter) She said, “I can't tell you what I'm praying.” I thought it was odd, you know, and then I met my husband and I was telling him what they're praying and he goes, “No, if she would be praying over our daughter, we would be allowed to know what she's saying. I'm not going to let her silently speak something over my daughter. It's curses.” My brother had left the Amish like I said 25 years before, and he had broken his back. My sister stepped up and just put her hands on my brother's feet. All of a sudden she pulled back and she goes, “I don't know why, but I usually can pull the pain, but I can’t.” As soon as she placed her hands, he couldn't move. As soon as she put her hands on his feet, he knew what she was doing so he started praying in his mind that whatever she's doing, she cannot do in Jesus Name! He just shared that story with me two weeks ago, and it (what she tried) didn’t work

E: Back in the Old Testament in the Bible. T

here was a place where they would sacrifice children. They would throw in a goat and if the gods did not accept it they would throw in their children.

J: It was Caesarea Phillipi. The temple of pan was to the sun God. It was actually the darkest place in the land.

E: Back in the old days they would sacrifice children. In all reality, they’ve not stopped sacrificing children. Wherever there's witchcraft and they're honoring other gods. They will sacrifice children in another way. The way that they do it in the Amish, is through child molesting, raping, the sexual abuse that they put the children through. They take their voice away, they take their power away, they take everything that that child has. They take it away from them.

J: Yeah, it's an emotional death.

E: It is! It literally kills part of you. So if that's not child sacrificing, I don't know what it is.

J: And it's not only child sacrifice, it’s human trafficking. I used to think they have to take kids to another state, across the state border or international border to Mexico or Canada in order to traffic them. The Amish are trafficking their children for sex and for work. They do it for control instead of money.

E: To me religion is very, very demonic. I am a Christian, I love Jesus more than anything and I live my life for Jesus but i hate religion. I absolutely find it very demonic and anywhere where you have religion and you have that as your god , you will have sexual abuse. You will have human trafficking, you're gonna have all that. We started going to the new order church because my brother was the bishop of the old order church and we didn't want to shun my husband's family anymore so we just decided instead of being put in the ban. We’re just gonna go to a church where we don't have to shun them anymore. We were in that church probably about 6 months (maybe a year) they decided they're gonna split over some Ordnung. We didn't know which side to go to so we stayed home that Sunday. My husband said, “we're just gonna pray about it.” That Sunday afternoon the preacher's wife texted me and said they missed me. At that time they had everything except a driver's license; electricity and everything. The preacher’s wife wondered if someone was sick and I said, “no, my sister was visiting” which was true. She named 3 families and then under that text she said “just like we want it.” I showed my husband that text and he goes “Esther we can't go to a church where they want to pick and choose who comes to church." That's what made us go to the other side. I wear pants, you know, because for me, once Jesus started stripping away that religion, he showed me that it is absolutely not anything that I can wear on the outside to make me be good or bad. But if I have Jesus in my heart, works will automatically follow. You cannot work your way into heaven. I don't care how long my dress is, how big my covering is or how plain I am. If I have a bad heart….. I've seen this so much in my family. They cover up the horrible sins that they're doing, with their long hair and their long dresses and Jesus freed me from all that.

J: Do you know how many of these children, like, what percentage of them do you believe in these Amish communities are being sexually abused?

E: My younger sister, she still goes to the Amish church. She just recently stood up to my two older sisters 'cause they were warning her, “don't be around Esther! She is very dangerous. You have to shun her, you can't sit with her” She basically told them I don't know if I'll ever drive or not. Just because Esther has that driver's license, that's not going to get her into heaven or gonna keep her out, but the brother that you hang around with, that you condone, that is child molesting; that will keep him out of heaven if he doesn't change. You guys sit and eat with him. As long as you can think it's okay to go back and forth with him, there is nobody telling me that I can't be around Esther.” I was at her house yesterday, and we were just talking about the abuse we went through. She went through horrible abuse, too. We were talking about how intuitive we are. If there is a child male or female going through any type of abuse, you recognize the signs. I remember immediately the stuff I did as a 5-year-old to try to cover it. And I notice things like that, but most other people don't even notice. And it's very scary. I have a niece that never got abused by her dad, but she laid awake and heard her sisters go through it and that was as traumatizing to her as going through the abuse herself. Her dad never did like her. My brother never liked that one girl. But there was absolutely nothing she could do to protect her sister. She was too young.

J: So your parents knew this abuse was going on?

E: I don't think my Dad knew until my older sister was 15 and then he thought it stopped with that one boy. He didn't realize the rest of us were going through it. The 3 older ones didn't (get abused) because they were all older than that that brother that started it all. There were 7 of us girls, 4 of us younger ones and we all got abused. The boys did too.

J: So was it everyone younger than this brother who started it?

E: Yes and then the abused also became perpetrators ( some of them ). 2 brothers did so in total it would have been 3 of my brothers (who were perpetrators).

J: So what I believe to be true, Esther, is that the light itself will not set people free. Jesus is the light. I'm not talking about the light of Jesus. Just simple knowledge of it will not set people free. The Truth is what sets us free, when we know the truth. The devil wants to hide it but if you can get a culture into the sin and then people go to work with him enough and condone it. He wants it to become normal, so everybody knows about it, but they won't stop. They won't-- so the next step for the enemy is to make it public, but acceptable. Just like in the culture today, people are trying to make the LGBTQ completely normal. People shed light on it. It's extremely hard. I believe light itself does not set people free, but the Truth does, which is Jesus. He's the true light. It's what set me free from pornography. I was never abused sexually. I had a great parents, but I had an affirmation void. I was raised Amish. I didn't hear affirmation as a child, and I was very strongly disciplined. There was a spirit of lust that came over me as nobody talked to me about puberty until it was too late. The Lord set me free by one word of His grace. I was depressed for seasons of my life as a teenager into my 20s. Just before I got married, I was set free completely. It was a statement that I heard the Holy Spirit basically whisper to me and it was Truth. He said "you're being bad so you can get attention (because you have an attention craving)”. As soon as he said that, it just it clicked. I don't know. It wasn't my power. It was His power and I was willing to embrace the Truth and go through the gut wrenching, full exposure (of what I was still giving in to) to my fiance at the time and my wife now. We are married for 7 years. I love to hear that about your testimony. When you began speaking about it, shame was gone because it's not who you are. It is the Truth and coming out with it that it sets us free, and it's sometimes it's a process. But I want to thank you for being brave enough to come out with it. Don't ever stop sharing your testimony.

E: Once I knew that my husband loved me no matter what, and he loved even the damaged parts of me, I will tell you….. we’ve been married , next Saturday, it'll be 24 years, and it feels like we are on our honeymoon because there's so much of our marriage that wasn't good because I couldn’t enjoy what God wanted, I couldn't be who God wanted me to be. But he was willing to stick it through with you. It's amazing. I asked him already, what made him stay with me? There's so many people would have walked away. And he told me that God told him to get married to me, even though I broke our engagement twice. I got pregnant twice (by another man) after I met my husband. When I was 14 he was 15 we were dating before I ever ran away from home but he waited for me and he told me that the woman that God wanted him to marry he knew it was in here somewhere. He never stopped praying life over me. He didn't know why I was trying to commit suicide, why I wanted to die so bad. He thought it was him for a long time, he blamed himself. Now I know why God saved my life. When it talks about living life abundantly, that doesn't mean the afterlife, that means here. We enjoy life. I am having grandkids, I am having my kids home for Christmas and I get to see them. So long in my life I just survived, one step in front of the other. Now I can see my kids thrive. They see Mom getting free.

Sonia: I wanted to ask you, what gave you the courage or the breakthrough to speak to your husband and to tell him what you have gone through?

E: My dad had passed away and we were driving, it was a Saturday and we were driving over to my in-laws, which is like 23 miles from our house. I started talking and once I started talking, I couldn't shut up. It's like everything just came out. It got so bad that my husband pulled the car over and he just sat there. He had tears going down his face. He had no idea. Once I started talking, I couldn't stop. My dad passed in January and this was the beginning of April. I don't know what made me even talk about it. I’d never seen my husband cry and then he got out of the car and was physically sick, he threw up. But after I told him and I knew that he still loved me, I started seeing a therapist. She was a Christian. I don't see her anymore because I don't feel that I need to, but she helped me a lot after that. She would pray with me. One of my biggest biggest problems was looking in the mirror. I hated pictures of myself and I always thought it was because I was overweight but in all reality it's because of the shame and the condemnation and the guilt I felt. I don't feel the shame and condemnation and I don't hate myself the way I used to. I used to hate myself.

S: When you had mentioned that when you see children, you have this intuition and you recognize things that you yourself were doing when you had been abused as a child. Would you mind expanding on what signs you noticed?

E: Yeah, it's kind of a little things, about a child that just isn't normal. Like there was a little boy here, he was 5 at the time, he's 6 now, that really made my eyes open up. Every time he would get around one of my poles, he would rub himself against it, kind of start humping it, and just little things like that . I remember as a child, even though you don't want things to happen, certain things feel good. There's certain things you know as an adult ., you stop those urges you know, you don't do certain things in public; a child doesn't know that. There was another little girl, this is why I called CPS on my older brother, the one that abused me, because their little girl, every time I seen her, she was picking her crotch, like something hurt. It's not normal for a child to do that. And my brother did get investigated. I don't know what became of it, but I do know, after you're the age of 35, you can no longer be a victim. I could not turn my brother in for what happened in the state of Indiana, but he still had little kids at home when I called CPS on him a couple of years ago. I don't know what became of it, I just know that it was thrown on my face that CPS was called, but I wasn't the only one that called, my other brother did too, the one that left the Amish. So I don't know what ever happened, I don't know if his kids were looked at, I don't know. But there's little things that a child will do that is just out of the ordinary. Another thing; if a man is around and reaches down to touch that child, they turn stiff or just immediately stop moving. It’s not normal for a child to show fear like that unless something happened. Normally they have no reason to fear a man….. if a man has never given them a reason to fear, they're not gonna fear a hand that comes towards them.

J: I’ve always identified with Amish. I'm still former Amish you know, I don't have a problem with calling myself Amish, but the Lord recently told me. “Why do you identify with something that I don't identify with? I’m not in that system.” I don't care about their clothes, you wear what you want. My grandma dressed like an Amish woman all her life. She just passed away this spring. She went through sexual abuse in her own story. I know she knew the Lord but for the Amish, the outward is the biggest issue.

E: My Mom turned to the Lord too, before she passed away. The last year that she lived, I had more of a Mom than I ever had in my whole entire life before. After she got sick and after we knew it was cancer, she called me and I was allowed to call her. Just little things that moms should do. I asked my older brother, I cried, “why didn't I have more time with Mom, why did she die so fast? My brother just explained to me that my Mom might have not been strong enough to withstand the traditions (of man) in the family if she would have lasted years after becoming a Christian. Family was everything to her. And if her Amish children, the ones that were preachers, would’ve said “Mama, what you're saying and doing is wrong!” They could have gotten her to change her mind. She could have been swayed. I'm just thankful that she passed when she did. My other brother called me a couple weeks ago. He needed surgery. He then had surgery this past week and asked me to pray for him. He’s never called and asked that. He tore his rotary cuff. He said, “when it happened I was angry and I snapped, I was so mad. He said that was on a Saturday, and then Sunday he stayed home from church and the others went to church and he walked around the house And he was walking around the house talking out loud to Jesus. He said Jesus took him to Romans 8. The next day he had to go for an MRI and he was stuck in an MRI tube his arms by his side; … couldn't move for 22 minutes. He said, "If you open your ears, God will come to you." He said God came to him in that MRI tube! My brother sees a difference in me. Him and his wife have both asked me what changed. They see I'm not a zombie anymore. I'm not walking around on meds. I have a full-time job. I was working two jobs a couple months ago. They see this difference and the only thing that I can tell them is that it’s Jesus.

S: I just want to read Isaiah 61:1-3 because it's so what God has done in your life and what he's doing now through your life. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the broken hauling, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s favor. The day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn and to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord that He may be glorified.