As a child in 1970s Pennsylvania, Kate Price had a terrifying suspicion that something unspeakable was happening to her. The memories were buried so deeply that she couldn’t access them. But the fear was real. It would take decades of therapy, flashbacks, investigative journalism, and finally, her own memoir, This Happened to Me, to unearth the truth: her father had r-ped and s-x-trafficked her, starting when she was just six years old.
The first horror came with a knife. In the summer of 1976, Kate’s father, Kenneth, took a pocketknife and carved an “X” into the soft underside of her forearm. “You are mine,” he told her. “You will always be mine.” Creepily enough, even consciously, the man who was supposed to protect her became her captor. She didn’t have the words for it at the time.
But a moment later, it would start to unravel everything.
One day, she sneaked into his truck, grabbed the CB radio mic, and called out: “Breaker, breaker one-niner. I’m looking for Chicken Plucker.” It was a nickname she’d heard her father use. A gruff voice responded: “This is Chicken Plucker.” He was a grown man.
She and her friend froze. “Just (…) hearing him answer,” she says, “proved I wasn’t imagining it.”
That was the day her search for the truth began, People reports.
Kate’s upbringing in Bloomsburg, a blue-collar river town, was laced with violence. She recalls her father (an electrician at a local children’s hospital) ripping a door off its hinges to throttle her sister, Kari. Her mother, Carolyn, who worked at the same hospital, said nothing. “What will the neighbors think?” she whispered, pulling Kate back as she tried to run.
Her mother never intervened, paralyzed, Kate believes, by her husband’s rage and the fear of losing her kids. Carolyn died in 1993 without ever acknowledging the abuse. Kenneth, the man responsible for it all, died in 2025, never having faced charges.
But Kate Price wasn’t done. At 17, she broke down in front of a high school counselor and started therapy. She worked part-time jobs to pay for sessions. Her mother never knew.
Still, the worst memories lay dormant, only surfacing in 1998 after she watched Bastard Out of Carolina, a film about a young girl’s sexual abuse. It triggered something visceral. She began to remember truckers. Flannel shirts. The smell of beer. The sting of a needle. Her father’s hands. “With my eyes open, I saw a hundred trucker men who had r-ped me,” she says.
📅 Thurs. 8/7 @ 7PM: Kate Price joins us for a discussion of her new memoir “This Happened to Me: A Reckoning”. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. Judith Herman, author of “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice”. Learn more here: https://t.co/fshtEmiNuf pic.twitter.com/93lsVEy0Hb
— Harvard Book Store (@HarvardBooks) August 6, 2025
Panic-stricken, she called her therapist and went straight to the infirmary. It was the first time she felt cared for. The next day, she met with trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who helped her unlock more memories. Some were so graphic and devastating that they are best left unsummarized. He later included their session in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score; her name was withheld.
Eventually, Kate Price made child s-x trafficking her academic focus and became a leading voice on familial abuse. In 2022, The Boston Globe profiled her. A family friend corroborated her story: her mother had told her about the abuse years ago.
That confirmation crushed remaining doubts. Kenneth trafficked Kate, she believes, to more than 100 truckers along I-80.
Her maternal grandfather (also named Kenneth) abused her, too. She recalls being carried from bed at night and wrapped in a canvas tarp soaked in oil and booze. “I had no frame of reference for how horrific it really was,” she says. “But it was bone-chilling.”
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In 1999, she confronted her father. Over the phone, she told him, “You r-ped me. A lot.”
He denied everything. Screamed. Hung up. She never spoke to him again.
When he died in April 2025 (on Easter Sunday), she “felt nothing.” She says. “I was grateful. One [because] I’d never have to worry about feeling or being hunted by him again. Two, I finished the book while he was alive. That matters.”
Now 55, Kate Price is a research scientist, a mother, and a fierce advocate working to end familial child s-x trafficking.
