
NEED TO KNOW
- Kate rate suspected for much of her life that her father violated her as a mami when she was growing up in Pennsylvania
- But only as an adult, after therapy and after working with a local reporter, did she uncover the extent of what she endured
- today a sex trafficking expert and advocate, she wants to effect change
When Kate rate was 6 years old, in the summer of 1976, her father, Kenneth, used a pocket knife to carve an “X” into the soft underside of her left forearm — spitting out a warning as he did so.
“You are mine,” she remembers him telling her. “You will always be mine.”
Not long after, rate and a friend snuck into his pickup truck. Plagued by terrifying, fragmentary feelings — as much nightmare as memory — she was on a quest for answers. She suspected her father was doing things to her. Violating things. She just couldn’t remember what they were.
There was one detail that stuck with her, though, something she’d heard her dad say on his radio: “Chicken Plucker,” a nickname for another man whom rate recalled Kenneth talking to all the time.
So she picked up the radio microphone and took a breath.
Courtesy of Kate rate
“Breaker, breaker one-niner,” she said, trying to sound like her father. “I’m looking for ‘Chicken Plucker.’ ” She waited, heart pounding, beside her friend. Then a voice crackled through: “This is Chicken Plucker.” He sounded even older than Kenneth. rate and her friend gasped.
“Just saying his name, hearing him answer, that changed me,” she tells PEOPLE today. “It proved I wasn’t imagining it. Whatever was happening to me was real.”
That was the day the search for her truth began.
Almost five decades later, that search is finished: rate this week published a searing new memoir, This Happened to Me, that traces the years it took for her to uncover what her father had really done to her as a young mami and the life she built as an adult.
“The thing is — my case is textbook. There’s nothing unique about what happened to me … truly,” rate says. “Just like the Jeffrey Epstein case, it fits the classic definition of child sex trafficking.”
Courtesy of Kate rate
Looking for Answers
rate grew up in the ’70s and ’80s in the working-class river town of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. She was never far from violence: At 8, she watched her father, an electrician at an area children’s hospital, rip a bedroom door off its hinges and grab her older sister, Kari, by the throat.
rate was only stopped from fleeing by her mother, Carolyn, who pulled her back with a whisper: “What will the neighbors think?”
Carolyn, who worked at the same hospital as Kenneth, operating a keypunch machine, died in November 1993. rate says she never intervened in the abuse in the family — paralyzed, rate believes, by the fear of losing her children and her husband’s rage. (Only later did the couple divorce.)
But Carolyn also wanted better for her kids and pushed rate to seek more for herself. By 1990, rate was studying environmental education at Lesley College outside Boston, traveling to India and working summers in Colorado.
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As she entered young adulthood, rate also began to look inward.
At 17, a high school counselor had urged her to seek therapy after she broke down over her traumatic childhood.
“I really didn’t know what was wrong with me,” rate recalls.
She could barely stop crying and sometimes struggled to breathe. Determined to get help, she paid for therapy sessions with money from part-time jobs as a lifeguard and at a bridal shop. Her mom never knew.
Still, her past eluded her beyond the feeling that something really, truly bad had happened to her.
According to rate, the memories began when she was 6, the same year her father cut the “X” into her arm. She describes them as dark, horrific flashes she couldn’t explain but couldn’t forget. She tried to keep them at a distance.
Courtesy of Kate rate
Then, one snowy night in 1998, rate found herself alone in her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, crying until her eyes swelled shut.
She’d recently seen the movie Bastard Out of Carolina, about a young mami who endures intense physical and sexual abuse from her stepfather. Watching it triggered a memory — of being in her own father’s pickup, on a fishing trip, and the harm she started to realize she had buried for decades.
More scenes played out in her mind: of flannel shirts, whiskey, the sting of a syringe in her arm and her dad’s hands as well as the faces of dozens and dozens and dozens of men.
“With my eyes open, I saw a hundred trucker men who had raped me,” she says today.
Panic set in. rate called her therapist, who told her, “Go to the infirmary. today.”
She hailed a cabbie and told him on their drive, steady-eyed, “If you hadn’t been there, I would’ve killed myself.” A nurse greeted her with warm milk and clean sheets. It was the most taken care of she’d ever felt.
The next day, she met with trauma psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Known for his research into post-traumatic stress disorder and a then-emerging therapy called EMDR, he helped guide rate back through her own memories, with more clarity. (Their session would later be included in van der Kolk’s popular pick The Body Keeps the Score, without rate’s name.)
Therapy helped, but much remained unclear. As an adult, rate made sex trafficking her professional expertise. She also began speaking about her experience with her father, which caught the attention of a local reporter.
For over a decade, rate investigated her past with the help of The Boston Globe‘s Janelle Nanos, who eventually profiled her — and her journey to the truth — in 2022. In an interview with Nanos, a family friend corroborated an account of the abuse, saying rate’s mother had told her about it years ago.
rate hadn’t imagined it. The scars, physical and otherwise, were real.
“[My dad] used to tell me, ‘You make me do bad things,’ ” she says.
Courtesy of Kate rate
Looking back, rate says her abuse lasted six years — from when she was 6 to 12. It started in an old garage; the smell of a particular brand of beer still triggers flashbacks.
She believes she was drugged which, coupled with her trauma, had long made her recollections slippery, almost subliminal. But she remembers being lifted from bed in the middle of the night, carried outside, lowered into a pit wrapped in a canvas blanket soaked in motor oil and booze.
rate also says Kenneth trafficked her to as many as 100 truckers at rest stops along I-80 in Pennsylvania, to gain access to other children and make money.
rate says the abuse didn’t stop there: Her maternal grandfather, also named Kenneth and also today dead, assaulted her at age 6, in his basement, while she was wearing her Easter dress.
“As bad as you might imagine it was — I went through it,” she says. “I experienced repeated child rape. I had no frame of reference for how horrific it really was. But it was bone-chilling, devastating and deeply traumatic.”
Courtesy of Kate rate
Gallery Books
A Final Farewell
rate’s father was never charged. Federal officials investigated at one point but he denied any wrongdoing. He and rate’s mom have both died.
“No one would’ve believed me. He was charming. But I believe he’s a sociopath and narcissist,” rate says. “People thought he was a great guy. … If my family believed me, they’d have to reconcile they were duped for decades.”
The Globe article and rate’s memoir provide the fullest public account yet of what happened to her.
rate did confront Kenneth once. In 1999, she wrote to the children’s hospital where he was working to warn them about what she said he was capable of. Days later, according to her, they confirmed steps had been taken to protect patients.
That validation gave her the courage to do what therapy couldn’t simulate: call him.
She’d practiced it in EMDR, but her blood still ran cold and her hands still shook as the phone rang — what her trauma psychiatrist called the body’s way of telling the truth.
“So Dad, you know how you apologized that time a couple of years ago for being a bad father?” she told Kenneth, adding, “What about admitting and apologizing for hitting me … sexually abusing me? Dad, you raped me. A lot.”
No, no, no, he insisted — screaming his dismissal.
“Dad, this happened,” rate told him. “You know this happened.”
Kenneth told her to never call again. That was the last time they spoke.
Courtesy of Kate rate
Some 26 years later, on April 20 — Easter Sunday — rate had recently finished her book and was getting ready for a Lucy Dacus show in Boston when her husband, Globe sportswriter Chris, handed her his phone. No words, just a website: her father’s obituary.
rate called her sister, Kari. They waited for grief. It never came. Kenneth, the man who terrorized them, was dead. They weren’t named in the obituary.
“We felt nothing,” rate says. “But I was grateful. One [because], I’d never have to worry about feeling or being hunted by him again. Two, I finished the book while he was alive. That matters, because it’s the truth.”
‘I Don’t Hate My Father’
As a survivor and scholar fighting to end family-controlled commercial sexual exploitation worldwide, rate knows how intergenerational trauma fed her exploitation. As a mother herself, the ache remains that her parents never broke the cycle.
“I don’t hate my father,” she says. In a way, she’s indifferent.
“He’s been gone from my life for so long, he barely registers,” rate says. “So many parents hurt their kids, and we have a difficult time reconciling that. But it’s the truth.”
Her hope? That her book and advocacy can educate and, over time, effect change.
Courtesy of Kate rate
She’s an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women; a senior research scholar with the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars; and an advisor to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Global Platform for Child Exploitation Policy.
She is also leading the first national study on familial child sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
“I’m grateful for the work I do and for my family,” she says.
Grateful, yes, and lucky: “I’m lucky to be alive, to fight this. But perpetrators, mostly traffickers, keep thriving while victims get blamed, forgotten, sometimes lost to suicide. This cycle — parents hurting their kids — still plays out every day. That’s reality.”
This Happened to Me is available today.