Watch Former Amish Member Reveal Why She Ran Away From Her Community!
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A former Amish member has opened up about her childhood and revealed what caused her to run away from her community despite never knowing what’s waiting for her out there.
Misty Griffin had been living with an Amish family ever since she can remember and it wasn’t until recently that she managed to break free of abuse and isolation.
“When I was 4 years old, my mother met a coal miner in Arizona. He was also a wanted child molester, and we started living with him. He was very strict. He and my mother were extremely abusive,” Mrs. Griffin, who is now happily married, recalled in an interview with Barcroft TV.
“When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my stepfather got the idea that we should start dressing Amish and we started dressing in Amish clothes. Gradually by the time I was 10 years old we were dressing in full Amish attire.
“My sister and I were isolated. We were kept away from the rest of the world. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other or to anyone else. We were beaten several times a day and when I was 11 years old, we moved to a mountain ranch in the northwest.
“The ranch was six and a half miles out of town and my sister and I have basically held prisoners there until I was 19 years old. When I was almost 19 years old I tried to escape the ranch and that’s when my stepfather got the idea to send us to an Amish community.”
After making it to the Amish community, the girl soon realized that she wanted to break free from the strict lifestyle full of rules.
“When I went to the community, I learned that there’s basically a rule for every single aspect of your life. Like the width of the hem on your dress, to the length of the dress, to your underwear,” she added.
“When you are in the Amish, you are told that you go to hell for leaving the Amish. So, it takes a lot for an Amish person to finally get in their head that they should leave the Amish.
“In my case, I left them because I knew of several sexual abuse cases that were going on in the Amish and they were not reported to the police. And the perpetrators were allowed to just live among the church like regular people, they had full access to their victims over and over again.
“After I went to the police, the bishop tried to silence me and told me to retract my story from the police. And that is when I just realized there’s something very, very wrong with this church and what they are telling me, I longer believed in it at that point.
“I kind of made the decision in a swift second. I remember the bishop told me to be quite and to behave myself. And I just like reached up. I took my head covering off. I threw it on the ground and I stomped on it. And I told them I am leaving.”
Speaking of how she was cut off from the rest of the world while living with the Amish, Misty said:
“You are basically almost going to a different planet, nothing that I knew or nothing that I had learned seemed helpful in the outside world. The very first day I was in the outside world everything was so foreign and so different from what I knew.
“I remember that the television hurt my eyes, the lights hurt my eyes. When somebody left the room I turned the lights off and I was sitting on the couch in the dark.
“The Amish believed that the outside world is evil. Basically everybody in it is going to help. You are taught if you are not Amish or if you ever left the Amish you would go to hell. Once you are a baptized member and then leave the Amish there is no absolutely no hope for you.”
Fortunately, Misty had a friend outside of the Amish community who helped her assimilate to the real world. Soon enough, she also found and married a man who accepted her troubled past and helped her enjoy her new life. Misty is now a nursing student and an author of the memoir called ‘Tears of the Silenced.’
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