Trigger Warning: Read at your own risk. I’m gonna talk about sexual abuse. I’m gonna talk about physical violence. Do not read this if it will hurt you.
Two weeks ago, I appeared in a courtroom in Rock County, Wisconsin. There, I took the witness stand, pledged an oath to tell the truth, and spoke out briefly about my coparenting experience with my first fiancé, the biological father of my oldest two children. His name is Cason John Lee.
A lot of words that I wanted to say didn’t get said. My story didn’t get told. But my daughter’s story was told. A roomful of jurors listened to my daughter, her younger half-sister, and a friend from school as they recounted experiences from their childhood, reliving horrors put onto them by a father figure.
For my daughter and her half-sister, the man standing accused is their biological father. For their friend, the story comes from a girl whose home life was fractured, a girl who was seeking refuge in the home of her best friends. A refuge that turned into a nightmare.
On March 13, 2026, a jury of 12 strangers had spent an entire week listening to girl after girl tell their story. Each story different, but enough alike to leave no doubt about the truth behind it. For two of the girls, the abuses happened over ten years ago. After a week of testimony and hours of Cason’s family lying on the stand and getting caught over and over again, the jury returned guilty verdicts across the board in less than two hours.
You might wonder why the police didn’t do anything ten years ago. I’ll be honest, I’ve screamed that very question into the void through torrents of tears over the years as I watched my daughter’s mental health deteriorate to the point of her trying to end her life more times than I could count. Over the years, we lost track of the friends. The girls learned to bury the pain and move on with life. Life was not kind to the girls, but they have persevered as only survivors can.
As we sat in the courtroom, I saw young women who were terrified of what was happening but determined to be heard. Young women, the youngest of them still in high school, stood strong and proud while they stared their abuser in the face and shared their memories. While pieces of their biological family stood on the side of a child molester instead of with the victims. As strangers stood at their side, giving them courage and protection they didn’t know existed. As a little girl watched her mother and brother choose her father over her.
I may never tell my whole story. It’s too awful. And even as awful as the entire thing has been for me, it is still barely traumatic compared to what others have endured. But I feel like telling a little of it now. Even if nobody reads it.
I met Cason in 1999, when I was 16 years old. He was 19. I lost my virginity to him in his parents’ basement while I cried and begged him to stop. He consumed my life, and I didn’t have a choice. He would show up at my mother’s apartment and pick me up. If I refused to go, he would threaten to kill himself or me. He supplied me with unlimited amounts of alcohol, and if I didn’t drink, he would sneak it into other drinks.
Between him and watching my mother, I learned how to mix vodka with orange juice so nobody would notice at school. I went from the top of my class to hiding in the bathroom, skipping school, and dropping out within a roughly six-month period.
I remember the night he forced me to get pregnant. It was Valentine’s Day. I was 17. My mother let him stay the night at our apartment. I kept hoping she would tell him no when he asked, but she never did. She wasn’t even home. She was at the bar with her boyfriend.
I cried. I screamed. He held his hand over my mouth. He held my hands down so I wouldn’t fight him and push him away.
He was bigger than me. For scale, he was nearly twice my size at the time. I always felt like he was going to suffocate me.
Nobody came to save me. Nobody stopped it. When it was over, he laughed and said, “Oooops, it looks like the condom broke.” He smiled.
The next few weeks were unremarkable in that I kept going to school and partying with Cason. I found myself more tired, I couldn’t drink orange juice without throwing up, i couldn’t stand the way he smelled.
When I passed out in the hallway at school and fell down a flight of stairs, the nurse suggested a pregnancy test.
I’ll never forget that day. It was mid-afternoon. Cason bought the test. I locked myself in our tiny bathroom and took the test. Reading and re-reading the instructions. Watching the stick. Feeling my entire life shatter as I watched the stupid pink lines. I cried before the timer was even done.
When I came out of the bathroom, Cason was eagerly waiting. I punched him as hard as I could in the arm and ran to my room and locked him out. I could hear him celebrating from the other room. Our apartment only had one bedroom, and none of the walls were very thick. I could hear everything in the building all of the time.
I didn’t understand at the time what had really happened. It is only now, twenty-seven years later, that I fully grasp the extent of what happened. At the time, I thought it was an accident.
Years later, I started hearing rumors from friends of friends. A few years back, those rumors were confirmed when one of my daughters told me that Cason had been bragging about poking holes in the condoms so I would get pregnant.
Who does that? What kind of monster pokes holes in a condom? What kind of monster tells his daughter that it was how she was conceived?
The kind that was perfectly okay with sexually abusing his children. The kind that was perfectly okay with forcing me to have sex with him nearly every single day of our four-year “relationship.”
Again, for years, I cried and begged him to stop.
My mother told me it was my responsibility to sleep with my boyfriend.
My father told me that since I was pregnant, I was expected to marry Cason.
My family all shared those sympathies.
Only one person offered me an alternative, but I was afraid. My cousin, Brandy, saw through him. But I wouldn’t take her offer because I didn’t trust Cason to not follow through on his threats to kill me and our daughter if I ever tried leaving him.
One night, when I was barely 18, Cason caught me checking out a guy at work. He invited the guy over to one of his house parties. We lived a block from the high school, and Cason would host house parties for the high schoolers where everyone would get drunk. I usually hid in the bedroom with my daughter, reading books or crying.
That particular night, he got the poor kid from Wal-Mart so drunk that he couldn’t drive himself home. Cason and his buddies dropped the kid off on a random porch a few miles from his house and left him. I don’t know what ever happened to him. When Cason got home from doing that, he made me stand outside in the cold in shorts, a t-shirt, and no shoes, holding our daughter while he paced up and down the driveway with a giant knife in his hand. If I tried to go inside, he pointed the blade at me and stepped closer until I stopped moving.
When I could take no more, I screamed at him to stop it. He stormed over to me and put his fist through the garage wall that I was standing next to. He missed my head by inches. The baby screamed. I screamed. He put the tip of the knife to his forehead and told me that he couldn’t live without me. He said he would kill himself if I ever looked at another person. He said he would take our daughter and me with him.
I believed him.
From that day until I left him almost two years later, I was never alone. If Cason wasn’t with me, his sister, his brother, or one of his thugish friends was. I wasn’t allowed to see my family without his approval. I wasn’t allowed to pick dinner menus without his approval. I wasn’t allowed to do anything or say anything without his approval. I was forced to quit my job and was kept as a prisoner in a home where everyone thought I was happy.
I learned to pretend I was asleep. I stopped resisting. I stopped moving. I learned that if I didn’t fight back, he wouldn’t hurt me as much. He would do what he wanted and move on. I learned to numb it out, to go elsewhere while it was happening.
I learned to dissociate on command.
After the relationship ended, the abuse did not. Once I was out of his home, the abuse slowed, of course.
I learned quickly that the abuse was minimal when I was in a relationship with someone else and living with them. I moved from one shitty ass relationship to another, seeking protection from one demon and finding myself in bed with another.
For several years, the abuse was minimal. I had my own apartment. I would come home from work, and Cason would be sleeping in my bed. He never asked. He would just be there. I never gave him a key, and I always locked the door.
He would show up at my work unannounced to argue with me. Several times, he showed up at my work in women’s clothing in what he called “an attempt to embarrass me”.
In 2008, while I was trying to recover from Evil M, the monster I sought refuge from Cason with (I didn’t know he was a monster at the time, but the truth is undeniable now), I was forced to move in with Cason and his wife, Heather. I helped her through her distressing pregnancies. I cooked, cleaned, and cared for all of the children. I babysat while they went out. And when she was sleeping, he would sneak into my room and assault me. I tried hard to avoid being at home, but I needed to protect the children. I tried to block my door closed, but it was a sliding glass door, and he could unlock it without any difficulty.
I lived with the two of them for about six months. I was attacked multiple times a week throughout the entirety of it. I pretended to be asleep. I pretended to be dead. We both know I was awake and crying the entire time. He simply didn’t care. I actually think he gets off on the whimpering, the crying, the full-body shakes that come with being terrified and abused.
It took me six months to move out, and when I did, I convinced my boyfriend, who later became my husband, to let me keep his big ass dog at the house with me. Buttons did more for comforting me than anything else in the world at the time, and I miss that sweet puppers to this day.
Throughout the years, when the girls wanted or needed something, and it required both of our consent, the only way he would consent was if I let him have sex with me, whether I wanted it or not. (I never wanted it, let’s get that very clear).
I remember one year, just after I’d gotten married in 2011, my oldest wanted to play basketball. Cason wouldn’t say yes. I was several months pregnant with my youngest son. (Cason always had a hard-on for pregnant women, which always creeped me out.)
He showed up at my house one day after our daughter had thrown an epic fit about not getting to play basketball. I was the bad guy because he had told her she could play, but told me she wasn’t allowed. My boys were taking a nap when he came over. My husband was at work an hour away.
Cason picked a fight with me about basketball. He said he wouldn’t let her play unless I did the thing. I refused. I was married! I didn’t want him. I hated him. I told him all the things. He stood firm that our daughter would know it was my fault she couldn’t play because, as far as he could see, it was my fault. I was refusing to give him what he wanted.
I didn’t give him permission.
But
I didn’t stop him from taking what he demanded.
While my children slept, he raped me in my safe place.
I cried silent tears and never told anyone until very recently.
That was the last time he ever put his hands on me.
It became clear over the years that when he stopped putting his hands on me, he started putting them on our youngest daughter. And then her friends.
In 2016, my youngest daughter was cornered at school about some injuries she had. Over the next few days, I institutionalized my daughter for what I believed were suicidal actions.
It was brought to my attention at that time that her injuries were self-inflicted because of the things Cason was doing to her when she was at his house for visitations.
I cursed. I cried. I lost my fucking mind.
And then I started fighting.
I have never stopped fighting for her.
For all of the girls he did this to.
For myself.
The police failed to arrest or even pursue him in 2016. During the recent trial, it was made very evident that incompetence by the Beloit Police Department and meddling by Cason’s siblings were responsible for the failure.
Child protective services identified him as a viable threat multiple times, with NO action by the police department. We weren’t allowed to mention that in the courtroom. During the trial, our side was handicapped and prevented from telling the entire truth. It would have buried him more than he did himself. Even without that information, the jury could see the truth, and I will be forever grateful that those strangers looked evil in its eyes and put it behind bars where it can’t hurt another girl.
The jury was given a front-row seat as the police officers involved highlighted the failures of the department. And they listened as Cason’s sister testified that she works for the department and had intimate knowledge of the case. It’s important to note that Cason’s older brother also works for the department but was absent from the entire court trial. It is my belief that he has distanced himself from his brother and sister, at least publicly. I can’t say whether he was involved. I’ve always considered him a threat to myself and my children.
If the police had done their jobs in 2016, Cason wouldn’t have had a chance to turn his final daughter into another victim.
This is not a complete history. This is more like a highlights reel. I am positive there are more memories buried away in little boxes in the darkest corners of my mind, just waiting to pop open at the worst possible moment, like a deranged, haunted Jack-in-the-box.
This time, though, when the memories and demons come for me, I will be ready.
If society hadn’t told me to keep quiet and “respect my boyfriend”, I’d have done something about him much, much sooner.
Do not teach your daughters to be soft. Teach them to be fierce. Feral. Menaces. Because only the strong survive.
If society won’t teach the boys to respect the girls, we must teach the girls to protect themselves from the MEN that it creates.
Look around you. Unless you have carefully curated the people you surround yourself with, you are probably already standing in a room with a predator, and you are pretending everything is fine.
Until next time,
Cathy Marie Bown
Cathy Marie Bown 