MONROE, Conn. — As a 13-year-old boy who lost his father at an early age, Stephen Mills’ trust in the director of Camp Ella Fohs in New Milford grew in the summer of 1968. The director had become like a father figure, lavishing him with attention, seeking him out for long walks, giving him small gifts, asking about his family and showing concern for his challenges at home.
“This was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me,” Mills told the dining room full of guests at The Waterview during The Center for Family Justice’s annual Speaking of Women luncheon Tuesday. This wasn’t a counselor or even an administrator. This was the director of the friggin camp. It felt like God coming down from Mount Sinai. He was grooming me. All I knew was I was making friends with the most powerful person in camp.”
When the director, who was also a social worker, asked Mills’ mother if he could take him camping for one weekend in November, her deep respect for his profession influenced her decision to say yes.
“A few days later there I was, a hundred miles from home. In the middle of the woods. In the middle of winter,” Mills recalled. “And that’s when the trap snapped shut.”
Mills tells the entire account of being a victim of child sex abuse, its impact on youth and how he recovered many years later in his award-winning book, “Chosen: A memoir of a stolen boyhood.” He was the keynote speaker at The Center for Family Justice’s 29th annual Speaking of Women event.
Anna Zap, co-host of the nationally syndicated “Anna & Raven Show” on Star 99.9, served as the master of ceremonies and interviewed Mills in a fireside chat. Mills also signed copies of his book after the luncheon.
Monroe First Selectman Terry Rooney praised CFJ’s staff for the free and confidential services and support the nonprofit provides for victims of domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking and child abuse, and welcomed the organization to town, before introducing CFJ’s president and CEO, Mark Antonini.
“I wanted to thank and congratulate Mark Antonini for his leadership as president and CEO,” Rooney said. “Mark, you’re a fantastic human being. I’ve known you for a while. We’ve done a lot of things together and my foundation has supported the center every single year.”
“Thank you First Selectman Terry Rooney for those kinds words and for Monroe’s continued partnership with The Center for Family Justice,” Antonini said. “Superintendent Joe Kobza is here as well. Joe, thank you for coming.”
Antonini thanked his staff, committee members, volunteers and all of the local leaders and law enforcement in the communities CFJ supports including Monroe, Easton, Trumbull, Stratford, Fairfield and Bridgeport, community partners, local sponsors and benefactors.
“Your collaboration and commitment helps ensure survivors and families receive the support they deserve,” Antonini said. “As we approach three decades, we are reminded of the commitment that makes this work possible. Last year alone, CFJ served over 5,400 survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, child abuse and human trafficking.”
“At a time when the need for services continues to grow, your support matters more than ever,” he added. “The funds raised today helps ensure that children, survivors and families continue to have access to these life-saving services.”
Kristin Okesson, chair of CFJ’s board of directors, said “for 29 years, which is incredible, this event was brought together around the simple, but powerful belief that everyone deserves a life free from violence and abuse.”
Gary MacNamara, vice chair of CFJ’s board of directors and a former chief of police in Fairfield, encouraged everyone to continue to be curious and question why domestic and sexual violence, child abuse and human trafficking continues to be a problem.
“We have to stop accepting the fact that violence against women and children is inevitable,” MacNamara said. “When will we say enough is enough?”
Donna Craft was recognized as the 2026 Speaking of Women Distinguished Honoree Recipient. She has been a dedicated supporter of CFJ and its signature events over the last three decades, serving on and chairing various event committees. Craft introduced CFJ to Mars Jennings, leading to his One-Man Show last May.
In addition to Mills, Veronica Castro spoke as a survivor. Castro found herself in an abusive marriage to a man who controlled her finances, time and body. She told the story of how CFJ empowered her to break free from her bad situation. She is now divorced and living her life independently and debt free.
“No one will tell me I cannot again,” Castro said. “Today, I smile and shine brighter than ever.”
The room erupted into loud applause.
‘A life and death struggle’
Andrea Kawakami, a board member, spoke as a representative of M&T Bank, the event’s title sponsor, when she introduced Mills to the podium.
Mills talked about the effect sexual abuse has on a child’s brain to make people understand why victims can go years or even decades before confronting it.
“The child is in a life and death struggle,” he said. “It’s so critical to intervene with child victims as soon as possible. For me, that first episode of abuse was a near death experience. It was a kind of break from reality. The world as I knew it was gone forever, because in my mind there was no world in which the camp director would do what he was doing to me. I had no language for it, no reference for it, no way to process it. So my brain did what brains do when they are overwhelmed. It went into shock.”
“I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak,” Mills said. “I was vaulted out of my body and I watched the whole scene from above, as if it was happening to someone else’s body. Decades later, I’d come to understand that my brain had decided I was about to be killed. And so it flooded my body with endorphins, which is basically morphine. Leaving the body is nature’s way of letting us die painlessly when we are attacked by a wild animal.”
At age 13, Mills was being sexually assaulted on a regular basis, but he could still get up in the morning, go to school and be an A+ student, because he said the brain has a superpower of sealing off terror and trauma from consciousness. But his trauma came out in other ways.
“I didn’t know why I was having night terrors,” he said. “I didn’t know why I lost my interest in baseball — and pretty much anything else. I didn’t know why I needed to kill myself. I was in a trance. I was like a zombie, neither dead nor alive. I could function for sure, but was no longer connecting. Trauma is the brain’s way of preparing us to die.”
He said therapy makes children realize the pain of their experience is not going to kill them, learn it was something that happened to them, that it was not their fault, it isn’t who they are, and they learn to trust and love again.
“We live in a culture of a clear code of masculinity,” Mills said, “act tough, never show weakness, fear or pain. We have contempt for weakness. Supermen or a super boy would never be sexually abused right?”
But then Mills recalled how the entire University of Michigan football and Ohio State wrestling teams’ players were sexually abused by their team doctors.
“One hundred of the biggest, baddest athletes on the planet. So how many did fight back?” he asked. “As far as we know, every single one of those supermen froze. Their brains shut down. They were helpless.”
The “tough guy mythology” is so ingrained that it was only until the last 20 years that anything was being done about the sexual abuse of boys, according to Mills, who said psychologists once claimed it just didn’t happen.
This leaves 20 or 30 million American men abused as boys walking around with that trauma, which could lead to violence, Mills said.
He said the “culture is reflected back at us” with the message Hollywood sends in the few movies about the sexual abuse of boys, such as “The Prince of Tides,” “Sleepers” and “Mystic River” to name a few.
“In all of these films, the men who are sexually abused are portrayed as humiliated, broken and doomed,” Mills said. “Movies offer only one way out for the male victim: to get bloody vengeance on the perpetrator. That’s the American way. None of these films end with the man reaching out for help, exposing his abuse, getting therapy and recovering.”
Mills said everyone has fantasies of killing the abuser, adding he knows men who carried it out and ended up in jail, their lives immeasurably worse.
Then there is the culture of homophobia. “Men are acutely aware that the culture wants to turn the sexual abuse of boys into a ‘gay problem,’ that gay men are preying on boys,” Mills said.
However, he said the majority of men who prey on boys sexually identify as straight. Mills said sexual abuse is not about adult sexual preference, it is about power and controlling children.
He also said there is a fallacy that the abused will go on to become abusers themselves. “Some do, but it is a tiny fraction,” Mills said. “I know men who are terrified of this.”
“The truth is, men who were sexually abused as boys are experts at harming ourselves,” he said, “years and decades trying anything to numb our pain with alcohol, drugs, sex, overwork. We commit suicide 10 times more often than the general population.”
‘Crazy luck’
When Mills was molested, there were no child advocacy centers and there was no awareness of the signs of abuse to help kids.
“By the time I was in my 20s, I was encased in stone, impenetrable,” he said. “I was terrified of everyone, especially men, and deeply ashamed of what happened to me. I was trapped. In my case, I had an amazing ability to compartmentalize trauma, until I couldn’t.”
Mills was a PhD candidate for economics when his life began to unravel. “I dropped out and I spent the next four years trying to erase myself,” he said. “I shot drugs. I committed crimes. I was arrested twice. I tried to kill myself. Then I fled the country.”
“Your trauma will take you down one way or another, unless somebody reaches you first,” Mills said. “I got crazy luck. My best friend’s father was a neurosurgeon. He took one look at my physical and mental state and he sent me to a psychiatrist.”
The psychiatrist assured Mills he could recover.
“It’s all about connection,” Mills said. “We’re not meant to recover alone. We can’t. I started going to therapy. After a year of talking, cracks started forming and the truth of my childhood came bubbling up.”
After gaining a better understanding of what happened to him, Mills went to the FBI and Pittsburgh D.A. to stop his serial perpetrator, who he learned went to other summer camps and continued to abuse children.
“It takes a village to abuse a child,” Mills said. “Offenders don’t gain access to children and exploit them without the complicity of other adults. When I looked for witnesses in 1986, I found plenty: camp counselors, administrators, senior staff who knew or suspected that children were being victimized. But not a single one of them ever reported the offender or even confronted him.”
Mills said everybody hates child abuse, until the offender is a family member, a fellow employee or a boss. Then there is often a collective denial and self-silencing takes over, he said.
“In most cases, people would rather go on believing a fairytale about a predator, than believe their own eyes,” Mills said. “In my case, the perpetrator was caught abusing children four different times in three different camps and no one stopped him.”
Education is key
Mills said the most significant positive change since his childhood was the creation of children’s advocacy centers like The Center for Family Justice that investigate, treat and prosecute child sexual abuse. However, human nature did not change, and there is still a tendency of adults to look the other way.
“They see it as a problem in ‘those other communities, not ours. We’re good people,’” Mills said. “They’re scared that the stigma of the victim will be the stigma of their family or community. They sometimes even blame the victim.”
According to a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health report, one-in-five girls and one-in-seven boys will be sexually abused before age 18. Mills said pedophiles will always be the constant in the equation, but “the variable is how will we respond?”
Mills said it is exceedingly rare for a child to be sexually abused without warning signs. For example, he said his mother noticed how drastically his personality changed when he was 13, but she did not have the education on the topic to connect the dots.
“Most abuse can be prevented,” Mills said. “It makes prevention education so crucially important. Once we understand it takes a village to abuse a child, we can empower adults in that same village to safeguard kids by speaking out, intervening and supporting each other. Training millions of adults in this way should be job one.”
“Children do not need perfect adults,” Mills said. “What they need is a village of informed, engaged adults who are willing to act.”
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