Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 28, 1993 TAG: 9308280039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LISA DANIELS NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Long
Barrettes hold her straight, brown hair in a French braid. Tiny, white earrings set off her dark eyes. As she talks, she keeps her hands folded neatly on her flowered dress.
When the cameras roll, she turns to talk-show host Maury Povich. And in a quiet, steady voice she describes how she was repeatedly chained naked to the ceiling and fondled by a man she once trusted.
It was her idea to come on Povich's show, to take her own story of sexual abuse public. In a letter written on notebook paper, 12-year-old Monique Williams of Hampton explained that she had something important to say.
"I have strong feelings about this," she had written months earlier. "I'm counting on you, Mr. Povich, to let me speak out."
That was the beginning. Since then, Monique has been on a personal crusade to help other victims like her. She has founded an organization that will help her talk to as many children as she can about sexual abuse. There's talk of a book and a made-for-TV movie.
For several minutes during that appearance on Povich's show, Monique speaks almost clinically about the sexual abuse of children. The show stops for a commercial break. When it resumes, Monique has been joined by her mother and a disembodied voice that makes her stiffen.
The voice comes over the studio telephone. It belongs to a man who says he feels terrible for what he did. He says he hurt his family. He says he's sorry.
"I knew I was being a bad father," he says, his voice booming into the television studio. "I couldn't stop, and it was so frustrating for me."
Monique shakes her head and grumbles. Her eyes narrow. Her lips twitch. She clutches her mother.
The voice belongs to the man who for eight months repeatedly chained her to the ceiling, the man who raped her with inanimate objects and later claimed she enjoyed it. Monique listens and glares until she can sit still no longer.
"Frustrating for you?" she blurts out. "How do you think I felt? You did it for your own self! You did it so you could just have some fun out of me and my childhood!" Her words ring through the studio. She blinks back tears, then buries her face against Povich's shoulder.
Monique's nightmare began nearly three years ago. She got home from school one day and plopped herself in front of the television to watch cartoons.
Nine-year-old Monique had grown accustomed to this routine since she, her mother and her stepfather had moved to Hampton from California several months before.
Her mother, Alexa Triggs, worked at a computer operating job until 5 p.m. Her stepfather, Bill Triggs, a chief petty officer in the Navy, worked as a mechanic supervisor aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise until 3:30 each afternoon.
Monique, who rarely saw her real father, liked Triggs because he made her mother happy. Monique was happy, too. She felt safe in the modest, one-story house.
Until that day.
Months later, Monique told police and prosecutors what she endured that afternoon and many that followed:
Triggs ordered her into his bedroom, took off his clothes and told Monique to take off hers. Sometimes he made her take a shower with him and touched her between her legs. Sometimes he showed her pornographic films and made her dress in lacy lingerie. On several occasions, she said, Triggs stripped her, wrapped her ankles and wrists in leather straps and pushed her on a padded swing that he hung from eye bolts in the ceiling.
"It's hard," Monique said when then-Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Cathy Krinick asked her to describe Triggs' advances. "It's hard to put them in these words." Triggs had told Monique all stepfathers did these things to their children, but something told her it was wrong. Still, she was afraid to tell. Afraid she would destroy her mother's happiness. Afraid of what Triggs would do to her if she did.
Instead, Monique tried to stay away from her stepfather. She begged her mother to let her go out and play with her friends. She went straight to her room when she got home in the afternoon, immersing herself in homework.
But more times than not, Monique explained later, Triggs grabbed her and dragged her kicking and screaming into his lair.
She finally shared her secret in March 1991 at Kraft Elementary School. Monique, jealous because a boy she liked was talking to another girl, began crying. When her teacher asked what was wrong, Monique explained that her stepfather "touched me in places that wasn't right."
Police arrested Triggs four days later.
Alexa Triggs was stunned when authorities knocked on the front door and told her why they sought her 32-year-old husband. Monique seemed fine, her mother thought.
Alexa says she screamed, cried and vomited when she learned what had been going on. "My whole world blew up in my face, realizing I was married to a monster."
On Aug. 6, 1991, Circuit Judge Nelson T. Overton sentenced Triggs to life in prison for forcible sodomy, life for sexual penetration with an inanimate object, 20 years for aggravated sexual battery, 20 years for abduction with the intent to defile and five years for taking indecent liberties with a child.
Two years later, on a warm summer afternoon, Monique sits on the porch of the small Hampton-area house where she lives with her mother, her new stepfather and baby half-brother.
Though Triggs has been behind bars for more than two years, the abuse has become a driving force in Monique's life. When she was younger, she wanted to be a model or teacher. Now she wants to become a prosecutor, specializing in child abuse cases.
"I just want to be a child advocate," she says, "and tell them that it's OK to say something."
She's spoken on national television a few times and appeared with Matilda Cuomo, wife of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, during Child Abuse Prevention Month.
Monique's short-term goal is to speak to as many children as she can. She has already spoken to hundreds of students in Virginia Beach elementary schools as part of a traveling child abuse prevention program.
"I'm glad I made the decision to tell, because I can be a regular kid now," says Monique. "I don't have to scream and hide the pain."
by CNB