How a Brave Young Woman Got Her Alleged Abuser To Confess To Molesting Her as a Child
Adolescence and those early awkward teen years are difficult to get through, even for well-adjusted individuals who have idyllic home lives. For victims of abuse, those years can be traumatic.
Marianna Mazzeo was just 14 years old when she decided that it wasn’t worth it to keep trying. She’d lost hope.
“I wanted to die. But I didn’t think it was normal for a person in middle school to want to die,” she said, according to People magazine.
She did attempt to take her own life as a teen and was admitted to a mental health facility. When she received the paperwork, she read something and made a decision that changed everything.
“Have you ever been touched in a way that you shouldn’t have?”
A simple question, but a crucial one. Mazzeo’s answer was just as important: She answered “yes.”
For five years, from ages 6 to 11, Mazzeo was sexually abused by her uncle, a person she should’ve been able to trust and who should have protected her from the evil in the world.
She hadn’t spoken out about it, but even as a teenager she knew that it was time. She needed to address her past and the monster who’d hurt her.
“It was split-second decision,” Mazzeo admitted, according to Tech News Base. “I said ‘yes’ because I wanted to be able to talk about it, to be able to finally heal from what was making me so upset all the time.”
Unfortunately, initial investigations reached a dead end when her uncle, Richard Rose, refused to take a lie detector test and denied any sort of misconduct with his niece. A disheartening turn of events for Mazzeo, but she wasn’t done yet.
She told People magazine that she promised herself that she would get him. “When I found out,” she said, “I wrote in my journal, ‘He stole five years of my childhood that I’ll never get back.'”
“It’s not over. I’ll get a confession.”
Now, at 20 years old, Mazzeo has gotten her confession. She did what the police weren’t able to do, and justice will finally be served.
After being reminded of her uncle by seeing a man who looked like him, she came up with a plan to get a confession out of him. It had been 8 years since she’d seen him, and seeing him again would no doubt stir up a maelstrom of emotions that would be difficult to deal with, but she was determined.
She contacted Rose and asked if he would video chat. She used one phone to communicate with him, and another to record their communication.
During the Facebook video chat, Rose apologized in general. Mazzeo cried, but framed her request carefully.
“I need to hear you say it,” she prompted.
“I’m sorry I molested you,” he said.
She had it: the confession. It wasn’t long before Rose was arrested.
Since then, her bravery and ingenuity have been recognized by many, including Mike Meisler, Chief of Police for the Danbury Township Police Department.
“We started the investigation a few years ago,” he told Daily Mail. “But there just wasn’t enough evidence at that time, until the victim got the confession, on her own.”
The Port Clinton News Herald reports that originally Rose was charged with 50 felony counts of rape of a victim under the age of 10, but 45 of those have been dismissed. Prosecutor James VanEerten explained why.
“To leave the victim on the stand to go through 50 specific instances of times where she was raped could not only lead to jury confusion as to the dates of the offenses but could also create some trauma for the victim,” VanEerten said.
“It wasn’t in any way a reduction to the case because each of the individual counts carries a life sentence,” he continued. “Even if (Rose) was convicted of all counts, his sentence would be the same as if he was convicted of a single count.”
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