‘Where’s Daddy?’

This was, according to family lore, Kate Price’s first complete sentence.

It would take decades, and a mental health crisis in adult life, before she understood the full, harrowing meaning behind those words.

Overcome with inexplicable grief and feelings of acute isolation, Price sought out a therapist at the age of 17.

But beneath the sadness lay something older, fuzzier, and harder to name: the constant sense that something truly awful had happened to her.

In a quiet consulting room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she began exploring her past with psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose pioneering trauma work would later include Price’s case in his bestselling book “The Body Keeps the Score.”

At first, she talked about her crippling anxiety, her grief over her mother’s death, and her difficult relationship with her father. 

During those initial sessions, van der Kolk inquired where emotions resided in her body and introduced Price to EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – a method that helps patients process traumatic memories by involving both the body and the mind.

It took time but, as the therapy deepened, fragments of horrifying memories began to coalesce.

Growing up in a mill town in Appalachia, Price developed a sharp survival instinct – a community where everyone knows each other, questions are seldom asked, and secrets remain hidden for generations.

Her earliest memories, she recounted, involved hiding from her father in closets, surrounded by winter coats, crouching behind rows of snow boots, longing to escape into Narnia to avoid his violent outbursts.

It was not until her late twenties that she began to realize the full truth.

Price claimed that he not only violated her himself but also trafficked her to as many as 100 men, strangers who abused his little girl repeatedly from the ages of six to twelve, until her parents eventually divorced.

She now tells the Daily Mail that the revelations were ‘devastating to me but also simultaneously freeing. It was like this puzzle that I had been trying to figure out and that my body had been holding.’

Price confronted her father in 1999 with her accusations that he emphatically denied. He was never charged with any crime, and many in Appalachia still believe that Price is making it all up. Her father died earlier this year.

However, in her new book, This Happened To Me: A Reckoning, Price lays out her claims in searing, heart-breaking detail.

As her account goes, she was subjected to furious, drunken beatings at the hands of her father. By the time she started school, the abuse by day was joined by strange, blurry visions of something altogether more sinister at night.

‘My father often woke me hours after I had gone to sleep and loaded me into his pickup or took me to our garage behind the house,’ Price writes.

‘On those nights, I often woke to the smell of rubbing alcohol and the feeling of a cold cotton ball wiping my bicep before I felt my father’s rough hands prick my arm with a needle.

‘Or he’d wake me up with instructions. “Here, drink this,” he’d whisper in the dark, handing me a plastic bottle filled with a gooey liquid that tasted kind of like the cough syrup my mother gave me when I was sick, only stronger.’

He would tell her they were going to a party, that she was a very special girl to be allowed to join all the grown-up men. When she woke the next morning, she would no longer be wearing any underwear.

‘My hands would cup the soreness between my legs,’ she says. ‘I’d have no idea what had happened.’

The only safe space in her childhood was the local library, where Price found refuge in books.

Later, at her mother’s insistence, she applied for and was accepted into college in Cambridge and it was there, hundreds of miles away from Appalachia, that her mind started to yield its horrifying secrets.

One of the hardest elements to reconcile was not just the abuse – as horrendous as it was – but how organized and cynical her father had been in his alleged crimes.

‘My father had been telling me, growing up, that I was special, that I’m better than my sister… the harm was so purposeful and deliberate,’ she says.

His tactics worked, driving a wedge between Price and her sister Sissy that only began to heal when, as an adult, Sissy confided that her body, too, had been sold to passing truckers.

‘No wonder our father isolated us,’ Price writes in her book. ‘Our separation was the key to not only preventing us from gaining collective power but protecting his ongoing trafficking of both daughters.’

It took a further 10 years of delving, with the Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist Janelle Nanos, to deliver what Price calls ’empirical evidence’ that the memories of men clad in sweat-stained plaid shirts and the stink of beer, diesel and rubbing alcohol were not simply the product of a fevered imagination.

Together, she and Nanos traced old neighbors, former colleagues and police who remembered the CB radio chatter used by abusers.

Then came the news that Price had long feared. In an on-the-record interview with Nanos, a friend of the family confirmed that the girls’ mother knew about the trafficking all along.

‘She had overheard your father selling you and Sissy on the CB radio in your garage,’ Nanos told Price. ‘You were six or seven.’

In the beginning, the friend said, Price’s mother had kept quiet but confronted her father after overhearing a second conversation.

He batted her away, telling his wife he knew what he was doing. Unconvinced, she took the two girls and left him for a week – but returned after he promised never to do it again.

The news was heart-breaking. How could her mother have stood by and let this happen?

Looking back, Price, now 55, has been able to forgive her mother.

‘She left us to the wolf. That’s horrible,’ she tells the Daily Mail. ‘[But] my mother was very much trapped there. She had been sexually abused by her father, and it’s statistically more likely that she would have married someone who was abusive. So she went right from the frying pan into the fire and married an even more heinous person.

‘She really did the absolute best she could. Our mother could not give us a childhood but she could give us a future.

‘She insisted that we both leave our hometown, and she did everything that she could to support that, including taking me to the library. That was literally an act of incredible rebellion on my mother’s side. I cannot emphasize that enough.

‘The other piece is that she was terrified of losing us girls. We were literally all she had.

‘She died at 48. She had no life. She raised us and she saw that I was so close to the finish line of graduating – I graduated six months after she died. 

‘She was just like: “Alright, I raised my girls. I’m confident they’re going to be okay. I’m out. This life completely sucked. I’m done.” And I don’t blame her at all. She had a really horrible life.’

Conversely, as an internationally acknowledged authority and survivor of child sex trafficking, Price knows all too well that the blame is often cast onto the victims.

‘We see this within trafficking and child sexual abuse as girls get older – 16 or 17. [It’s a case of]: “She knew what she was doing.”

‘No,’ Price insists ‘she was a child. She was not capable of making a choice. 

‘Perpetrators depend on that – the reality that victims are going to be blamed and dehumanized by the public, and that gives them even more power to keep doing what they’re doing. The adultification of victims is utterly horrendous to me.’

Price never spoke to her father again after she confronted him about his abuse but Nanos did, in 2022, and he repeated his angry denials.

Is Price frustrated that she didn’t see justice served?

‘I never intended to press charges against my father,’ she says, ‘even though the statute of limitations had just changed and I would have been able to. No, I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance. I have seen what prosecutors and defense attorneys do to victims.

‘My father was very much this beloved man. He started a nonprofit for cancer victims. And yet it was all a ruse. I’ve been humiliated enough in my hometown and denigrated enough by my family – everyone except for my sister and one other extended family member who went on the record and said he believed me.

‘I’ve been denigrated enough. I don’t need it. To me, the justice comes from a life well lived.’

Now married with a son, Price is based in New England and returns often to Appalachia. On the surface, she is the picture of success: a poster child for the resilience of the human spirit.

But scratch a little and the scars reveal themselves.

‘I will be managing PTSD for the rest of my life,’ she says. ‘My entire life is set up to manage my trauma. Loud noises make me jump. I can’t watch scary movies. I need to work in a quiet space. I even need to have a car that has sensors in terms of who’s passing me, who’s behind me. All of those things just to help me navigate the world.’

‘I mostly need to travel by train whenever I can,’ she adds. ‘That sense of being trapped and being confined in an airplane is really difficult for me. So that stuff never, ever, ever goes away.’

This Happened to Me: A Reckoning by Kate Price is published by Gallery Books