Spotlight Delaware began to investigate the impact of the unprecedented settlement agreement reached in the wake of the Earl Bradley scandal after being contacted by Margaret Murphy.
Murphy, whose daughters have struggled in the years since the pedophile’s crimes were brought to light more than 15 years ago, has been raising awareness around the lack of support services for the survivors in the case.
She has unsuccessfully sought assistance from the multi-million-dollar settlement trust fund created to compensate and support hundreds of Bradley’s young victims.
Editor-In-Chief Jacob Owens talked with Murphy about all of this and more.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Well, thank you Margaret for welcoming Spotlight Delaware into your home for a tough discussion I think in some ways, but hopefully one that I think is rewarding in the long run. And I thought maybe we’d just start for listeners, if you could share a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, what do you do, and who your family is.
Well, you are welcome and thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. My name is Margaret Murphy. I am a native Delawarean. I have three daughters and am married to Larry Murphy, who brought me two bonus daughters and a son. In this time, I consider myself to be an advocate for sexual abuse survivors, as well as trying to bring an awareness to trauma in our community.
My advocacy work has led me to begin a journey with alternative trauma healing, which includes reiki and somatic healing.
We’re talking today because you reached out and started talking with myself and with Spotlight Delaware nearly two years ago about your family’s journey. You briefly worked for Earl Bradley and he even became friendly to your family. He hid his crimes from most of the community for more than a decade, including you and your family. How do you think he was able to do that?
I think that he was able to do that because he practiced in two states prior to practicing in Delaware, and I think during that time he became a master manipulator and a pedophile. His tools of deception were honed during that time before he got to sleepy Sussex County.
I think he was able to hide it because he was grooming not only his patients, but his parents with gifts, time and attention that a lot of other practitioners did not give. He also used some pretty high-tech devices, like cameras on the end of pen lights, and I think he was able to perpetrate his crimes underneath the nose of parents that thought they were protecting their children
In my opinion, it was kept hidden as well because of our local hospital and other physicians who waited too long to allow the public to know what was going on.
You were shocked when the charges against Earl were brought to light like many were, especially here in the Lewes community. And then you learned that your own daughters were among those victims. Can you tell me a little bit about what that experience was like as a parent?
When we first found out the initial 24 hours, we were in complete denial and disbelief. And then the evidence, the undeniable evidence, came to light. And I think to say that I was devastated falls drastically short. I was gutted. I felt an incredible amount of shame.
That’s when my nervous system kind of locked into some dissociation. We had a conversation as a family and none of us had present-time, independent memories that any violation had happened.
We had no memories of it. My daughters had no memories of it. I had no incidents where I felt like that anything could have happened.
Can you explain dissociation and what that experience was like.
To me, how I explain it is my nervous system’s way of protecting me from something that is utterly overwhelming.
There’s blank spots of memory when I try to recall things, but it is definitely a coping mechanism for protection of the nervous system.
How did it hit you that your family was actually among the thousands of potential victims?
I think that I was just in denial for a long time over it, and it wasn’t until the trauma of my sister passing in 2018 that led my daughters to be more open about their experience; how some of their maladaptive behavior and substance use disorder was directly and causally related to being a patient of Earl.
How did the family cope with these newly understood traumas?
They were adults at that time. They were my adult daughters. They were no longer my minor children.
But you probably don’t look at them that way.
Actually, in my journey, I have really grown to be able to. I don’t use the term child because I have to give myself space for one to allow them to figure out what their process of healing looks like.
And I have to accept that I no longer can scoop them up and protect them. As much as there’s moments that I really would love to just be the captain of the ship, I know that I’m not because they are adults now.
But I know some of the missteps that I took when they were children. I am able to accept responsibility for that and do my best to make amends for the choices that I made with what I knew at that time.
So when they did come to me and my husband as adults, I hope they felt a sense of relief that they could say something out loud. As a parent, I felt good that they were expressing what their needs were and that they were able to make connections. A great spot to start healing is by the acknowledgment that something happened.
And I think for my daughters, especially early on, they lovingly protected me. I think that, for them, keeping it to themselves was their own way of protecting me because they knew how devastating this would be for me. So when they told us, I just kind of put on the advocacy hat and I have kept moving and trying to make amends for some missteps that we may have taken.
Do you remember that first conversation where they confided in you?
Yeah, I do. And I will say that as a mother it hurt because it was real matter of fact.
It was kind of like, ‘I don’t really get how you didn’t know.’
So I had to know that those feelings were my feelings and it was really important for my shame and guilt not to be something that my daughters needed to carry.
And I’m grateful at that time that I had the wherewithal to kind of just stand up and do what I needed to do to advocate for my family. But it definitely, it was layered with lots of guilt and shame, but it was very matter of fact. Like they both were like, ‘Whoa, what about this time?’ And in reflection I was like, ‘Wow, yeah, I missed that.’
When did you learn about the Latent Injury Trust and why did you choose to ultimately pursue it for your family?
As soon as we knew of some of the maladaptive behavior, self harm and substance use disorder that was going on with my daughters, I just started making phone calls.
I called my public officials. I contacted the Department of Justice. I contacted the Beau Biden family, and right along with that dissociative thread that goes through it all, I don’t quite remember who it was that told me about a latent trust. But at that time I was told it was put into a trust for all of Earl’s patients.
We needed the financial support because I knew that what was going on in my family was not gonna be served by any facility that was in the state of Delaware at the time. There were no dual diagnosis centers.
How much was your daughter’s 30-day stay at the Caron Treatment Center up in Pennsylvania that offers trauma-informed care?
I believe at that time, five years ago, that it was about $36,000. And in my experience, 30 days is just enough time to stabilize an individual.
It was expensive and we were really lucky that the Caron Foundation gave us a scholarship for some of the cost and then the Victims’ Compensation Assistance Program ultimately supported us with $25,000.
Tell me about that process with the Latent Injury Trust because you really served as a liaison for your daughters in many ways through that process.
Filling out the application for it was difficult. It means that my daughters are being completely honest and vulnerable in a state when they are absolutely in a fight-or-flight situation, and it’s very difficult to open yourself up. So I did an application for one of my daughters and was led to believe that this is a go; there’s millions of dollars in this. Fund.
I got excited. They got excited. We were going to be able to go to a facility that offered quality care.
And then our first denial came.
What was that like going from this moment of feeling like you’d found a financial support to receiving a fairly short response saying, ‘Sorry. No.’?
Devastated doesn’t even give it justice, but I was devastated and I was angry and I was confused. It caused a fracture between myself and my daughters because I also led them to believe that this was going to be the fix.
I allowed them to get excited. So there was a breakdown in communication and trust that I had between my daughters, and I absolutely lay that straight at the trustees’ door.
They allowed me to let my daughters be hopeful in a moment that they should not have been hopeful.
And then they continued to allow us to apply multiple times.
My daughter ended up being taken to Chancery Court for a definition of the rules because during the these years of applications, the trustees could not present me with criteria for the application.
It was not well-defined in a sense that they were able to give me, this is the definition of what it is. So one of my daughters then was taken to the Chancery court. Yeah.
This has been a long journey for you – some 20 some years between when you first worked for Earl all the way up to today. What finally convinced you to reach out to a journalist?
I actually had reached out to several journalists before I found Spotlight Delaware. But when I reached out to some of the other local news agencies, none of them really had any interest in picking up the story.
I can’t say why, but in my opinion, it was because I was one person. One family. And I think that our community is so quiet about it that it may have appeared that it was one family, and I also believe a lot of the other, news agencies are driven by advertising. And our local hospital is a big advertiser for some other news agencies.
I reached out because I just kept hitting roadblocks and I needed the support. I needed someone to be standing in front of me.
I don’t even remember how I got Spotlight Delaware’s name or number. I know it was early on.
We were in fact just a few months old when you reached out.
It’s all in God’s time, and it felt like I was even gifted with the name Spotlight Delaware, because it’s always been my belief that darkness will not survive in light. And so even the name for me resonated a bit.
When you came down to meet me and allowed me a really safe space to share my story and my family’s story, I knew that I was in the right spot.
It has taken us a couple years to get here, but I never lost faith that everything was unfolding as it should because by me developing this relationship with Spotlight Delaware, I was able to open up my daughters and feel comfortable and confident that they would be well cared for and respected.
Spotlight Delaware has just been a godsend to our family to not feel alone and to bring awareness to the community that there are survivors out there that are still seeking wellness.
What lessons and awareness do you feel like you’ve gained in this journey?
One of them is that if I’m not well, then I am of no good to anyone else. And so it’s allowed me to love myself more and heal myself. I think that there are secondary victims in this case that have never been addressed – not only as an employee, but as a parent.
I’ve also learned to accept that everybody deserves a safe space, and it’s not for me to define what their safe space looks like.
What do you hope people remember from your story? What action do you hope comes from it?
Everyone needs to understand latent memories are something that are very connected to sexual abuse in particular.
Because there are victims with latent memories, they deserve the same support and compensation that the class members got. To say that those victims don’t deserve adequate financial support for healing and compensation for what they went through is belittling.
I think there’s still a tremendous amount of shame and guilt that we feel, and I think that there’s also a lack of awareness.
There’s parents who believe that because they were in the room the entire time and their child or loved one was never alone with Earl they weren’t a victim, right? And unfortunately that’s often not true.
In our community, substance use disorder is also at an astronomical rate and I think there are people that are unaware that it can be connected to just being a Bradley patient. They’re not connecting some of the “failure to launch” syndrome or anxiety disorder to Earl when I think that there can be some direct and causally direct connections.
You’ve often talked to me about this feeling that the community wanted to rush to move past the case. They celebrated tearing down his office and once the settlement was done, it felt like the greater community was able to kind of wipe their hands.
In terms of the community and what it can do better support the survivors, what do you think about?
My hope is that there is some type of support group that is established, or that at the minimum, as a community, we start creating space for people to have honest discussion or acknowledgment about it.
I would like my community to embrace these survivors as they’re going through it. Through all of this, I would also hope for some grace for some of what their experiences have been.
I want dialogue in my community. I want a safe space to be able to do it.
I feel really proud of my family for being able to stand up. But there is also a big part of me that feels very sad for the other families that I have spoken with, and I know directly, that don’t feel like they can speak up.
And so I’m kind of balanced with pride and sadness in this situation.
Well, Margaret, I really appreciate you welcoming into your home and joining us on this journey to help tell the story of where Bradley survivors are today. I hope that they find the support they need.
You are more than welcome and I really have to say how much I appreciate Spotlight Delaware. They are a safe space.
I’m gonna reach out to my Sussex County community and just ask you to be kind.
