Mary Byler.Photo: Peacock
“My first perpetrator was my biological father,” Mary Byler, 39, recounts. “I was five.”
Mary is the lead subject of Peacock’s new true crime seriesSins of the Amish, where she opens up about the trauma she endured in the insular community. (The documentary begins streaming today.)
“I remember not being safe in my room from my own f—— brother,” Mary says.
Speaking exclusively to PEOPLE, Mary — now an advocate for Amish and ex-Amish abuse victims through her organization Misfit Amish — says it’s her mission to eliminate the “romanticized view” of the Amish culture, as well as provide support and resources for survivors of cults and conservative sectarian religious groups. She believes that in the Amish community, women are largely silenced, and it’s too dangerous to speak out.
“If somebody is an abuser, you’re supposed to forgive him,” Mary explains to PEOPLE of her strict, religious upbringing. “There’s no space for you to even process what happened to you.”
But, it wasn’t until she learned her brother David had reportedly chosen his next victim — their younger sister, and that their mother would do nothing to put a stop to it, that Mary decided that was the last straw.
“It literally f—— killed me,” she says of the moment she learned of the sexual abuse in 2004.
“She [her mother] told her [little sister], ‘You have to forgive;’ and that means you don’t talk about it, and you can’t tell anybody about it. And it clicked, that if I don’t do anything, my sister is gonna grow up and have the exact same hell as her childhood, as I did,” Mary says inSins of the Amish.
Mary did what she says most Amish abuse survivors are too scared to do: She alerted authorities at the Vernon County Sheriff’s Office, where they outfitted her with a wire in hopes of capturing an audio confession from the Byler brothers.
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While visiting Johnny at his farm, Mary got what she needed for deputies to make an arrest: his confession that he sexually abused her.
Since Johnny, Ely and David all pleaded guilty to sex crimes, the case against the brothers never went to trial, according to investigator Don Henry. Their mother, Sally Kempf, pleaded no contest to failure to report a crime in connection with the sex abuse,theLacrosse Tribunereported.
“That’s 11 years of hell,” Henry said of the abuse Mary suffered from the age of six through 17.
As Mary pulled back the curtain to unveil the culture of sexual abuse, her former community — and family members — rallied behind her abusers and shunned her, she says.
Because of this, she says she now keeps in touch with very “few extended family members.”
The two-part documentarySins of the Amishbegins streaming today on Peacock.
source: people.com
