Episode 2: The Sister Detectives

Vienna and Shawnessy break off contact with their brother-in-law and something about becoming a mother makes Vienna ready to dig for the truth about what he did to her. Can’t wait for next week’s episode? Hear all episodes of Personally: Agent Layla now, ad-free, on CBC Stories Premium on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/channel/cbc-stories/id6443681642. https://agentlayla.ca/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Ryan's style is really gunning it in gold.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  I'm Michelle Shepherd, and from CBC Podcasts and The Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  This is a CBC Podcast.

• 0:35Speaker 04

  Just a warning before we begin. This episode contains a description of sexual assault. Please take care while listening.

• 0:47Speaker 04

  October 2014. Shaughnessy's phone rings. Her older sister, Sunny, is sobbing. Something is wrong.

• 0:58Speaker 05

  And she just said, I've, I, I kicked him out. I kicked him out. I need you, I need you, I kicked him out. And I was like, what?

• 1:06Speaker 04

  Sunny and her husband, Justin, have had a big fight. He's been cheating. Two affairs in the past year. So she's kicked him out of the house.

• 1:16Speaker 05

  And then I said, okay, I, I'll, I'll be there.

• 1:20Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy books a flight up north to Fort St. John. She walks into Sunny's house.

• 1:26Speaker 05

  And she was like absolutely beside herself, like non-functioning. Probably in shock. So couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. She was completely incapacitated.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  She jumps into caregiver mode.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  I was sleeping in bed with her, in, in the bed. And that's when she started to tell me everything. That's when she opened up. She was kind of ready to leave him.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  At this point, Shaughnessy doesn't trust Justin. It's because of what he did to Vienna seven years earlier. She doesn't know everything, but what she does know feels wrong. She knows there was a week where Justin was alone with Vienna. And Vienna told her that he had held her hand inappropriately, as though they were a romantic couple. And that when they were watching a lightning storm, he rubbed her back in a way that felt too intimate. Most troubling of all was the night he gave her drinks. Vienna had never even tasted alcohol before, but he gave her enough to blackout. Shaughnessy doesn't know what he might have done after that. So all that is going through her mind when Sunny starts to open up.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  She was telling me things that she hadn't said to anybody.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Sunny confides that the second affair had been pretty recent with a mutual friend. The first affair happened at work with another vet at the clinic.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Some of the stories Sunny shares are about Justin's behavior with Vienna from back when she lived with them. One time, Sunny caught him peeking through Vienna's bedroom window. She asked Vienna to stop wearing pajama shorts around the house.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  I started putting the pieces together. I thought, this guy's no good. Like, he's done something so egregious to betray her, right? And not just once.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  By this point, Sunny and Justin have four kids, all boys. Shaughnessy starts to run the household.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  I'm action oriented, so I was just like, okay, obviously the basics need to get done here, like kids have to be fed, people have to go to school, like go to soccer practice.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  One evening, she loads the boys up for soccer.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  I was driving their Lincoln Navigator. It's kind of like a red color. A very big vehicle to drive.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  She parks at the field, the boys run off, and then a woman who works with Justin at the clinic walks toward the car.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  It was cold, and I remember we were just talking outside, like I was in the car. I was like, just had the door propped open, we were talking.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  They gab about how disappointed they are in Justin's behavior, how Sunny is coping with the affairs. And then Shaughnessy acts on a hunch.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  I think I prompted her by saying, well, you know, he did something to Vienna. Like, what, did you ever know about anything? Did you ever hear anything?

• 4:24Speaker 05

  And then she's like, well, you know, there are pictures of her, right?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  And I'm like, what?

• 4:32Speaker 05

  And of course, I'm just like the kind of person like, well, tell me, what are the pictures? What did they look like?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  The woman hasn't seen the photos herself. She's only heard about them from colleagues who saw them left open on a computer in the clinic.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  She's like, well, I'm not really sure, like, it's like he cropped her body on different heads, or heads on different bodies.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  People at the clinic who saw the pictures say they're nude, pornographic, and that Justin's face is in them. The face of the woman is not. But Shaughnessy doesn't know this. Her source is only giving her a sketchy, secondhand idea of what those pictures even are.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  And I just had such a hard time visualizing. And I wasn't even thinking porn at this point.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  She doesn't have enough information to put the pieces together.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  I'm just like, oh, he has pictures of Vienna, and I'm not thinking of pictures of Vienna from that night.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  So when Shaughnessy gets the boys home from soccer and tells Sunny about the photos, she's thinking if they could find them, it would substantiate this creepy interest Justin has in Vienna. Maybe it would be enough to get Sunny to leave him for good. Maybe it would be the end of Justin Sewell in the Luke family.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  From CBC's Personally, I'm Jodi Martinson. This is Agent Layla, episode two, The Sister Detectives.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy and Sunny go hunting for the creepy photos of Vienna.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  We are looking everywhere in the house. They have T-bar ceiling in the basement of their house. It's all T-bar ceiling, and we're going up in every one of those pieces of whatever the square is, and we're pushing up, thinking they've got to be up here. We're going in the shop, we're going in the office, we're looking, and then I find a disc in the desk.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  It's a CD-ROM.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  I think it said, did it say ACDC or Aerosmith or something like, it was some, something like that. And I put it in the computer, and it's all porn.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy is pretty stunned.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  And I didn't look much, like I didn't, you know, I was, I mean, I was also very like naive. I'm sure lots of people are like, oh, porn, what a big, like, not a big deal. But if, for me, I was very like, whoa, what is this?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  She pockets the disc, gets herself a screwdriver.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  And I took their hard drive out of that computer at the time, and I brought it back with me to Vancouver.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Eventually, she pays a guy off Craigslist to go through the hard drive. Between all the places she looks, she does find photos of Vienna and some of Vienna's friends, and one of herself, where the photo has been cropped, so it's just a close-up of her chest. They're all photos Shaughnessy believes must have been downloaded off Facebook, but not the photos, the ones of Vienna's body described to her by Justin's colleague.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  I am completely, absolutely hell-bent on finding these images of Vienna. Because they prove there's something weird with this guy about my sister, but I'm still not connecting it to that night.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  So Shaughnessy pitches Sunny on a riskier plan. She knows it's a precious window, where not only is Justin out of the house, he'll be away from Fort St. John.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Justin's going down to a sex addiction clinic in LA, Beverly Hills, let's be clear, Beverly Hills. I said, you gotta look on the clinic computers.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  The computers at Justin's vet clinic.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  It's like she was keen on it at first, and then not keen. She's like, what if he finds out or other people, you know, find out? But that would have been our window of time.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  So instead, Shaughnessy starts a family campaign. She sends emails around with links to resources meant to help Sunny leave.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  I'm looking for someone to get on the team here, right? I'm looking for someone to be like, okay, yeah, I see what you see, and let's, let's do this. Let's, let's help her get out of here, you know?

• 8:55Speaker 04

  But she has no incriminating photos. There's Justin's stellar reputation in the community and at the church, and she has only vague details about what he really did to Vienna. She's convinced that something is not right, and Justin needs to go. But Shaughnessy feels alone in this, and like she's losing her grip on this precious moment. Even when she tells Vienna what the woman at the soccer practice said about these weird photos, Vienna doesn't have the reaction Shaughnessy wants.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  There was no dialogue with her about the pictures. She's not the same person she is today, where it's like, let's, yeah, let's find out, let's, whatever. She was like, not even, she was shut down. But she'll tell you she was pretty checked out at that point. She's, she's very disconnected emotionally.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  I was up there for a week with my sister.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Vienna does her sisterly duty, too. She helps Sunny out with the boys. And yeah, she was pretty checked out.

• 9:57Speaker 06

  I was just a robot, like I was just going through the motions of what I thought I was supposed to be doing.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  But robotic is not how it felt inside.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  October, no date.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Vienna reads me a journal entry from that week.

• 10:14Speaker 06

  Be here of my brother-in-law's multiple affairs. Sunny is frail and unable to function. Shaughnessy is unsurprised. Mom is in disbelief. Dad is shocked.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  I couldn't believe it. I'd spent years pretending everything was all right. Pretending that our family was cohesive and supportive. Numbing and hugging my perpetrator goodbye and hello for the sake of family. When everything came out, I thought, I'm not ready to deal with this. I didn't feel anything. I couldn't support my sister, couldn't be there with my family because I couldn't feel anything.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Wow, so you were being quite honest to yourself.

• 11:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I was. As much as I couldn't let myself necessarily feel it yet.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  So the actual emotion of it and the depths of it, I'm acknowledging that I've been numbing the pain.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  You call him a perpetrator.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  Wow, yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  You're so right, even the fact that I am calling him that. It's almost, I don't know, that I was speaking out of my subconscious.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Sometime while Vienna was up there, Justin writes her an email. It's the first of many.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  Vienna, thank you for coming up to be with Sunny. God has brought me to my knees through all of this, and I am realizing how powerful His Spirit can be. I would like to meet with you while you are up here. I know you are angry and justifiably so. But I feel like He is putting so many things on my heart and sense that of all the people that I need reconciliation with, you are one of the most likely to be willing to start talking. If you aren't ready, just say so. I won't take it as rejection, just that you aren't ready. I would say sorry here as well, but I can't do it properly and don't want it to seem insincere.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  What's he talking about? Is he talking about the night where he gave you the drinks?

• 12:30Speaker 06

  I don't know. They were all so ambiguous. That's how I read it.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Vienna doesn't respond. She starts to rethink Justin's actions. She writes about the ways he blurred the line of their relationship so he could cross it. She and Shaughnessy decide to break off all contact.

• 12:55Speaker 06

  So Shaughnessy and I, though not talking about it, are both team, you should not be getting back together, and team, we're having no contact with this guy.

• 13:12Speaker 05

  We both independently cut ties with Justin.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  But that's not how everyone in the family felt. After Sunny kicked Justin out of their home, Justin picked up a book that became important to him called Surfing for God. Here's a clip of the author, Michael John Cusick. It's from his podcast, Restoring the Soul.

• 13:31Speaker 07

  Most people who are listening to this know that I was a sex addict. And in 1994, I blew up my life and my marriage. And the sex addict, he's looking for something bigger than sex. He's looking for transcendence. He's looking for all of the good gifts that God gave him.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Michael John Cusick says men sneaking around sexually are actually looking for greater connection and meaning in their lives. That resonates with Justin. So he tries to address what he calls a porn addiction that started early in his life.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  He goes to see a therapist in LA, or, as Shaughnessy pointed out, Beverly Hills. He puts software on his phone. It sends a screenshot of any porn he looks at to his accountability partner, who ends up being Sunny herself. And he joins a local sexual purity group.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Sunny sees a change in him, the father of her four sons. And so they start to patch things up. They book a week of intensive couples counseling in Colorado.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  And I would say that the sex addiction clinic, her porn addiction clinic, shifted things.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy realizes she's lost the fight.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Because if he's got an addiction, can you really leave him? Like, this isn't about an affair. This is like, the guy's got a problem. So that was what was spun to her. And then, you know, she would make the statement, like, I don't want to give up on my marriage.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  That Christmas was the first one Shaughnessy and Vienna did not spend with their parents.

• 15:08Speaker 06

  Christmas Eve, we know that he is there at the house with my parents.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  He's there, she's brought him back in to wrap presents. And it's kind of like, okay, well, oh, is he going to be there Christmas morning? It's all under the guise of a united front for the kids for Christmas, being together as a family on Christmas.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Justin patches things up with not only Sunny, but her parents, too. For Shaughnessy, it feels like just another example of everything getting swept under the rug.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  The big issue was that we had talked about her staying separated a year. And that didn't happen.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  In the end, Sunny and Justin were only separated a few months.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  Subconsciously understood what happened in 2007 and then 2008 where nothing got addressed.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  2007, the night Justin made Vienna blackout. 2008, when they told their parents, but Justin controlled the story.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Same thing happened here. So I was like, okay, well, this is another episode of like, we're not actually going to deal with it. Whatever it is.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  In the new year, their parents suggest a plan to address the divide in the family. They enroll everyone in group therapy. But Vienna and Shaughnessy won't go with Justin. They only go to sessions with their parents and Sunny. The focus was reconciliation.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  That was the big word that was being used, which is such a loaded word. When really, I think what they were wanting was kind of like, how do we just put this all behind us and be a family again? I was not down. I was not down for any of that. And the idea of reconciliation was so

• 17:02Speaker 06

  far off or tone deaf to me.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Vienna remembers no discussion about what Justin did to her. The focus is on reconciling from the affairs. The sessions were framed that it was Sunny, not Vienna, who had experienced a horrible thing.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  And it just very much being, the theme was that we couldn't re-traumatize her. You know, only going as far as she could handle.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  There were no signals group therapy was going to be a welcoming place for Vienna to pour out her darkest secrets, especially to Sunny.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  And I just remember feeling like if I started to reveal anything, she wouldn't, she wouldn't hear it. She was so back in his corner. And I just remember feeling like she didn't have the capacity to be my sister and that it couldn't be honest and be vulnerable.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy started to feel like a pariah.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  I'm grieving, but what I'm also facing is my parents' anger towards me. Which they wouldn't say it's anger, but the way they treat me and the way they treat Vienna and I is like, you guys are the ones that are holding us back from being a family because you can't reconcile. The messaging is, we've moved on. He's said sorry. She's forgiven him. We're sorry that you are still there, but we've moved on.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Redemption is at the core of Christianity, but Vienna felt her faith was being used to manipulate her. Justin had admitted a porn addiction and sought help. His church was supporting him. Why couldn't she accept he was a changed man and forgive him? It's not Christian to hold a grudge.

• 19:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, forgiveness, people that have done things wrong, where the church, right, seeks to be that place of like, we welcome everyone. And really, that's a lovely thought, but what if there are vulnerable people there? And so then what? Then how does your mandate change? And it should change, and it should change to protect the vulnerable people.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  To Vienna, reconciliation would mean he gets to be around her again. It would be a dangerous place.

• 19:37Speaker 06

  The only way I could live back in that camp is if I pretended like nothing happened, right? Because that's what they're all doing. And yeah, the only way I go back in that camp is if I also pretend and say, which is how I lived for so many years, yeah, no big deal, it's okay, doesn't matter.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  That camp, the burying the truth camp, it's also an impossible option to Shaughnessy.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  My whole life has been like following my own, my internal voice, my internal knowing, and it's never led me astray, so I'm not going to start now. I would have been split, like internally. The pain that I experienced was better than being incongruent with my own sense of who I am and what is right.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  So consciously or not, or maybe just because of the phase of life Vienna and Shaughnessy were now entering, their search for family turned elsewhere.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  I was also in very early love and being completely focused on my relationship with her.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  It was a woman Shaughnessy had known since they were teenagers, another girl who'd been raised in the Christian church. Coming out was another big life moment where Shaughnessy had to buck family expectations and follow her internal compass. She told Vienna first.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  She understood the gravity of like this, this is big, but I felt supported by her and loved by her.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Vienna was looking for love too. Through a friend, she met a guy called Jordan.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  Jordan is just, ah, like unapologetically himself, which I guess I was attracted to that.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  She'd finished her last university course, moved out on her own to Vancouver, was hopping around house-sitting and taking care of people's pets. She landed her first grown-up job working for a development company.

• 21:45Speaker 06

  I was not serious about him, which is so, also seems really like not me, but I was like, this is just for fun. And also based on the fact that he wasn't like the traditional Christian type that I was supposed to be seeing.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Vienna takes Jordan to church. He tells her that he's not buying what they're selling, and they almost break up over it. But Jordan's affection is uncomplicated, and as they spend time together, things start to change.

• 22:23Speaker 06

  When I met him, like I didn't love, yeah, I didn't love myself. I don't even think I realized the whole scope of how much pain I was in. But yeah, no, I, if, if he didn't love me,

• 22:46Speaker 06

  yeah, Jordan like loved me back to life when I like was probably like my lowest low.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think people, sometimes you need people to like love you so much that you can like see that and it can remind you, like to love yourself again. Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 06

  I don't know where I'd be if he didn't love me so much.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  They're together for not quite a year. They're not married. Then there's a surprise.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  January 1st, 2016.

• 23:38Speaker 06

  I'm pregnant. What am I doing? What have I gotten myself into? I'm scared.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Her belly grew, and so did her worries. Here's what she wrote in a letter to her baby.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  August 4th, 2016. Four days until my due date. And I don't know what to tell you about life and love. It seems we have all the practical things ready for you, but my head and my heart aren't ready. At a time when I'm supposed to be feeling joy and excitement, I am desperate, sad, and heartbroken. I wonder if I have what it takes to love you, to champion you, and to encourage you, but I feel so unfit. What would make me ready for you?

• 24:30Speaker 04

  And do you remember at that time, why were you feeling that way?

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Thinking back, I can say I was very disconnected from my body. And it does relate back to everything I experienced. And even my whole labor and delivery, my body wasn't ready and I just kept being pushed along.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Vienna felt her body was locked off. She got induced. She labored all night. It was going very slowly. And the company in the delivery room could not have helped. Vienna agreed to let her mom and sisters come.

• 25:09Speaker 06

  I'm like laboring with like my mom and my two sisters, one of which is, right, I have nothing to do with her husband. No communicate, like that elephant is still in the room of kind of like this thing that we just don't speak of. You know, we're family, but it's not a trusting relationship anymore.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  It gets to pushing time. The doctor says there's no chance this baby is coming anyway except to C-section.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  I was just like, okay, if this is what you guys think is best, sure, let's go ahead.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Life with a newborn was busy. Reckoning with whatever had made her feel so locked down during delivery had to wait. But Vienna knew one day, when her daughter was older, she would have to tell her why Justin wasn't part of their lives, about what he had done to her.

• 26:06Speaker 06

  She turns one, she turns two, and I'm like, she's still young. I don't need to deal with this yet.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Why couldn't it stay kind of buried?

• 26:19Speaker 06

  I think I believed that it was something that was holding me back. There was still so much shame and yeah, self-loathing, like yeah, it destroyed who I was.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  There was another issue with eventually telling her daughter the truth about Justin. What would Vienna say? She didn't even know what really happened to her the night she blacked out. One evening, she and Jordan were cuddling in bed. Here's Jordan.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  And she said, you know what? I did get really drunk one time and passed out. And my legs went numb and I don't really remember anything.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  And I was like, well, that's not, how many drinks did you have?

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Vienna says she just sipped what Justin gave her, the equivalent of maybe one drink.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Just one drink. My brother-in-law thought we should get drunk for the first time together in a safe place. His words. And I couldn't handle my booze and I passed out. And I was like, after one drink. And then my wheel started turning like, what? First of all, why are you alone with this guy? And his wife's out of town? And the family's like orchestrated to be somewhere else?

• 27:51Speaker 06

  I would just remember him saying, you know, when you get drunk, that's not what it feels like. Are you sure?

• 28:02Speaker 03

  And then I just told her, you can tell me anything. I'm here for you and I'm going to take care of you and protect you. But also I was like, what a creep.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Who else knows about this?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast Cornerpiece comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Three years later, Vienna is pregnant again. This time, she's got a different goal for birth. She does not want to be induced. She goes to classes about embodiment and she writes in her journal about how in the lead up to the delivery, parts of her start to come back online.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  In those hours through the early morning of May 2nd, my body wasn't just laboring, but waking up. Little nudges over the years had brought me to this point.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  It was hard to explain, almost supernatural, but something about that birth changed Vienna.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  All I know is that everything shifted in me that morning. A perfect baby entered the world, which in and of itself is a miracle.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  But how lucky am I?

• 29:52Speaker 06

  That at the very same time, there was an invitation to come home, to my body, to myself. And I accepted it. I stopped avoiding what I didn't want to know and I decided to explore instead.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  My kids entered the world and brought forth different parts of me. Their timing was perfect. My first born, my call to be a mother, my constant reminder that I am lovable and loved. You were the gift I needed. I didn't need to do anything to earn your love. Isn't that love? Shouldn't it be not deserved or earned? My second child, you entered the world and you showed me a bravery I didn't know I had, that I could face everything head on and be okay.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  So baby boy nursing and toddler girl tearing apart the living room. Vienna decides it's time.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  She's ready.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  And I can imagine myself standing in my kitchen being like, hey, I'm ready to deal with this.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  She calls Shaughnessy.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  We wrote a list.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  The sisters make a plan.

• 31:11Speaker 05

  We talk about it. Hey, who could we reach out to? We wanted to find out more, but we didn't want to reach out to anyone who would tip him off. That was the key. So we kind of went through our list of like usual suspects, if you will, and we identified some key people.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Key people who had also broken off contact with Justin after the affairs.

• 31:34Speaker 06

  Well, we can't be the only ones that like woke up in 2014 and said, enough, you aren't who you say you are.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  They come up with half a dozen names to work through.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Vienna's just had this baby, like she's not, you know, she's got a crying baby. It, you know, she's got two kids. It's like, there's a lot going on. I don't have any kids at the time.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Detective Shaughnessy is unleashed.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  I'm got a quite a flexible, you know, work schedule. And so I said, do you want me to call them on your behalf?

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Shaughnessy would carry the ball for a bit and in her own way, she'd report back.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  And I recorded those conversations on B notes to the people that I was talking to.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Which in Canada is legal. And then she could send the recordings to Vienna.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  And I think that was really key because I think that helped keep the trust between us, like that she could trust me.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  This is the first phone call. It's with a veterinarian, one of the women that Justin had had an affair with.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  The one thing about Justin is he likes to get out in front of things and send stuff to you.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  She's given us permission to play this call. We've agreed to not use her name. A lot of what you're going to hear in this conversation does not reflect well on her. And she's expressed deep regret about keeping his secret until this phone call. That's part of why she's letting us use it.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  So, and the reason I'm saying this is because long before any of this happened, like even probably in the first six months I was there, I remember.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  There was this story that workers at the clinic would gossip about. It was about Sonny being away and Vienna having too much to drink. Justin and the vet started talking about that, how he had declared his love for Vienna and tried to hold her hand. It's a strange confession, a man telling the woman he's having an affair with at work about a time he tried to cheat on his wife with his sister-in-law. And then it gets stranger.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  And I discovered he gave me a lot more information later about what actually happened. And that's how he worked.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  So you want to know about that, I guess?

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it'd be interesting to corroborate the story because she doesn't have a memory. There's an element of this.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  That's because he put ketamine in a drink.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Yep, I knew it.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  I knew it.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  I remember just being like, I knew it was drugs. It was just like so validating and it was just so shocking in the moment that she would say that.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  If this recollection is correct, what happened to Vienna is a lot more serious than she ever knew.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  And then it was, and then your just brain goes into everything like he could have killed her, right? Like if you don't know how much, like she could have died. Like, what? Like this is so crazy. I'll keep saying it because I don't want it to ever feel normalized. Like that's not normal.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Oh, I just, I'm like, I'm like, I have to calm myself. I'm like shaking right now.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  So what he told me was that he had put ketamine in these drinks, but he didn't know how much was enough to like make her forget.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  And so he wasn't sure how much she remembered.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Here's what you need to know about ketamine. Ketamine is a powerful dissociative drug that can make it hard to resist sexual assault. And mixing ketamine with alcohol can create a risk of choking on vomit.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Like I got the impression she was pretty out of it and I, I feel like he took her clothes off and jerked off on her.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  How does that even come up in a conversation? The vet says they were talking about their past sexual histories. So was it bragging?

• 35:46Speaker 05

  It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, I mean, it's full on assault. There's no consent.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Like this is.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  What happened that night.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  So, but he went and took pictures.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  The vet tries to explain she thinks she was in the wrong place at the right time. The silver lining of her affair is she got this crucial piece of information. She's carried the guilt of not reporting for all these years and now she wants to help Vienna.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm going to just process everything and then I don't know how else to thank you for, you're just being so candid and open, like, like I could just cry because we have had nobody to be, you know, nobody to talk to.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  To like confirm or deny.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  I'm probably the only person he ever shared that information with.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  I know. Yep.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  After the call, Shaughnessy replays that night in her imagination. Now with the information Vienna might have been drugged.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  No one was there and no one was there. She's up on that hilltop, Crescent or wherever the heck the place is, that house. And no one would have heard her. Even if she was screaming, nobody would have heard her. And poor Vienna not knowing what's even happening to her, not even having a moment to even understand what's happening to your body.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  It's horrible news to share with Vienna, but as Vienna's gotten older and actually experienced being drunk, she's had her doubts about that night. And so this information registers with her in a surprising way.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  It was like, okay, wow, I can, I can breathe. I've been holding my breath for so many years. And then finally it's like, okay, wow, huh, I can finally let that one, put that like one little bit to bed. I can finally just relax.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  For a couple of months, they digest this new information. The revelation about the drugging made something else click for Vienna for the first time. Was there another factor that had helped to make the birth of her son so transformative? Here's what she wrote in her journal.

• 38:11Speaker 06

  At one point when the pain became too much and I screamed through each contraction, I asked my midwife if there was anything I could take, anything. The nurse chimed in suggesting they give me fentanyl. The pain was still there, but suddenly I could focus on it, not avoid it.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  I was on drugs. Yes, it was for pain, but could they have done something else? It was a drug that rendered me unconscious that night I was sexually assaulted, a drug that took away my memory. Unfortunately, a drug couldn't bring back memory that wasn't there, but maybe it helped with the memories I did have.

• 38:50Speaker 06

  The darkroom I labored actually lent itself to me seeing more of my labor than one might hope. There was a light panel just above me and the panel acted as a mirror and reflected my labor, my vagina back at like, so I could see everything.

• 39:08Speaker 06

  It sounds a little psychedelic, but maybe it had to be. There I was seeing everything and trusting myself for the first time in a very long time. New life and a beautiful new chapter.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  A few months later, Vienna marches into the local police station. She files a report. Shaughnessy is there by her side. Well, actually, in the waiting room, holding her baby.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  What the hell are you going to report a historical sexual assault? Oh, the guy, like, I got drunk and I don't know what he did. And then I heard there's some pictures. That's not going to go anywhere. Oh, but we have a veterinarian willing to go on the record saying, oh, yeah, he confessed to me that he used ketamine.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  And the whole time, Vienna is thinking about her older sister, Sunny. Is this what it will take to get Sunny to see the truth?

• 40:10Speaker 06

  If she knew this, would it not change everything? I have to get the truth for her.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  But one person knows the evidence the sister detectives have gathered is not enough. They need Justin to tell the truth on tape.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  And I just kept using that phrase with her, like, you are taking your life back. Like, fucking right, I got this and I am going to get the answer that I've been wanting.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  That's in episode three of Agent Layla.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Agent Layla was produced in consultation with Vienna Luke and Shaughnessy Luke. The series is written and reported by me, Jodi Martinson. Sophie Woodruff is associate producer. Jeff Turner is our senior producer. Mixing and sound design by Graham McDonald and Julian Uziale, with additional mixing support from Evan Kelly. Anna Ashite is our coordinating producer. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is the senior manager. Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Tune in next week for an all new episode of Personally, Agent Layla. Or you can listen to next week's episode now by subscribing to our CBC Stories Premium

• 41:28Speaker 04

  channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description. If you've liked this episode, please share it with your friends. That's the number one way people find out about good podcasts, and it would mean a lot to us.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.