Announcer: Coming up on The Whitney Reynolds Show.

And then my therapist leaned up in his chair and he said, "Christopher, it wasn't your fault that you were abused."

Announcer: The Whitney Reynolds Show is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by, Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Change Makers.

Meet the stories behind laws, national movements, and flipping the script.

[music] Erin: I came from a family of three girls.

And I felt like I had the perfect life.

I was the happiest little 5- and 6-year-old and had so much fun as a child.

Whitney: Erin Merryn had what looked like to be the perfect life.

That was until one night when everything drastically changed.

Erin: When I was a kindergartener, I had been asked by my best friend, Ashley, to spend the night.

And I was excited, that little kid going off to my first sleepover.

And after watching The Little Mermaid, we went into her room to go to sleep.

She climbed up in her bed and me on the ground in my little sleeping bag and fell asleep.

And eventually I woke up to the bedroom door opening.

And looked over there and there her uncle was.

I thought he was checking to make sure we were asleep and instead he closed the door, came down to where I was on the ground, told me... to be quiet and I did.

I stayed quiet and he sexually abused me.

And told me, "This is our little secret.

"No one will believe you.

"I know where you live, Erin.

I'll come get you."

I pinky promised my best friend I would never tell anybody what her uncle was doing.

What is your name?

Erin.

How old are you?

Eight.

[singing] Erin: It tore our family apart.

I went down the path of self-injury, a suicide attempt, very depressed.

This could be happening to your child.

Whitney: Moving away and going to a new school was cathartic for Erin until the unthinkable occurred.

Erin: I realized by moving, it was getting me that much closer to the next perpetrator in my life.

This time it was my cousin, Brian.

Wake up to him sexually abusing me.

And for the next almost two years, he repeatedly tells me, "This is our secret.

"No one will believe you.

You have no proof that I did this."

And I believed it.

I believed him that no one would believe me.

So, I stayed silent because my only education came from these perpetrators.

At 13 years old, my 11-year-old sister came to me with the same secret.

My little sister blurted out the words, "Brian's gross."

And I knew instantly what that meant and was just filled with anger and rage.

So, we broke our silence, our abuse ended.

We claimed our voice and that was the first stop in moving forward and healing our lives.

Because I had my parent's support in believing my sister and I, I wanted other people to realize that there is support for them out there as well.

Whitney: From having support to becoming the support system, Erin knew a lot had to change.

So, I created Erin's Law in my home state of Illinois.

All this money.

We made $2.00, actually $5.00.

Stop please.

They just kept on driving.

My mom brought this fresh lemonade just to make it look cute.

Erin: Back in 2010, I was working my full-time master's level job.

I was a counselor working with youth.

I quit my job.

Tried to figure out a way of how I was going to explain to people that I'm going to speak about educating kids and the prevention of abuse, because my own state lawmakers said, "Erin we don't talk about that in society.

They will never teach this in school."

And I made it my mission not just to get this passed in Illinois, I made it a mission to travel to all 50 states testifying to lawmakers on the importance on this.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Well, we just watched your story.

What does it feel like for you to see that play out?

It's empowering because it's a silent epidemic so many people don't talk about.

And you know it's not something I'm ashamed of, and that's something I want to put a face and voice on so others can break the silence.

And perpetrators want their victims to stay hush hush because that's what they do.

They groom them, they threaten them and so it's my hope by speaking out now for 17 years to encourage others to find their voice and not live in shame.

Seventeen years.

When did you first make that step of, this is my story and I'm not ashamed?

My senior year of high school.

I decided the diary I wrote and kept all my secrets in about what was happening, the abuse, and I decided to turn it into a book, to put a face and voice on this silent epidemic.

And it's been an incredible journey to see where it has taken me.

When you say put a face on it, what gave you that umph to know I'm okay being that face?

Well, I was going down such a destructive path in my life: suicide attempts, self-harm, I was a mess.

And then I realized by going down that path, I was letting the perpetrator win, you know, and keep me angry and upset and it wasn't healthy.

Why give him another day of my life?

And so, I kind of got empowered after confronting him to reclaim my voice and be like I want to be that voice for others.

And I've never had a problem speaking publicly about it.

Well, and being that voice for others, you're not just that voice, you're like a lawmaker for others.

[giggling] How does it feel to have Erin's Law out there now?

It's amazing.

I was told by my state senator back in 2009, "Erin I agree, we need to talk to kids about this, "but they will never teach person to body safety education "in school.

"It'll go nowhere, so I'm not going to introduce it."

I'll never forget sitting there saying on the phone, "Well, if you're not going to help me, I will find somebody that will."

And I kept writing every legislator in Illinois letting them know I'm not going away till I find one.

And I found one in the small town of Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Regan's hometown.

And he introduced it and it took me three years testifying to legislators to get it passed.

And kids are not just being abused in Illinois.

So, I quit my full-time master's level counseling job with kids and decided to pursue it in all 50 states.

And that's a task.

If it took three years in Illinois.

Yes.

What makes you keep pushing for the yeses?

Over the years, I've been able to start showing evidence that this law works in the more states it's been passed.

So, I'm now going to these legislators in their states going, here's your proof.

Look at what this perpetrator has been doing for years and look how it stopped because of this law.

All it took was an hour of personal body safety education for a kid to come forward and put this man behind bars.

And so, I've just been traveling from each state and I just keep pushing.

Some states, it takes nearly a decade to get it passed in.

The reason I show people that you can keep eventually getting it is because legislators that give you trouble don't stay in office forever.

And you eventually find those.

It's amazing how many legislators has come to me and say, "Erin, me too."

Like you said, when you put a face to something, and you put a-- It's not just a secret, it's not something you have to keep hush hush.

Let's talk about it.

So, with Erin's Law, that's what kids are doing.

They're talking about it.

Exactly.

They're getting educated.

They're being empowered.

They learn the difference between safe and unsafe touch, safe and unsafe secret.

Who are those safe adults you can go to if something is happening to you?

I sit in front of legislators and testify and say, "We mandate across this country, tornado drills, "bus drills, fire drills.

"We do the gun drills now.

"We do suicide prevention, bully intervention.

"But when it comes "to personal body sexual abuse prevention education, we don't talk about it."

People get uncomfortable, but you can't rely on parents to talk about this.

They only talk about stranger danger.

Ninety-three percent of the time kids are being hurt by the person they know, the coach, the family member, the youth group, you know, the neighbor, somebody they know.

They're safer talking to the stranger behind them at the checkout.

So, if we can't get parents talking about this, where's one place kids spend most of their time?

In the classroom.

What is next for you, besides getting it in every state?

I got 13 states left.

Its passed now in 37, going state to state.

And so obviously my goal is to get it in these last remaining states.

And kids are not just being abused in America.

I'm making connections with people on the other side of the world trying to get this passed in India, China, Germany other countries.

I have people reaching out to me asking, "What do I write my legislators in my country?

And I like to tell people, you can't change the past so why focus there?

Why not focus on the future and do something positive with this.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Stereotypes can be broken.

Our next guest is doing that when it comes to mental health.

He is being bold with his story opening up about his past.

I've been insecure my whole life, right.

So, family insecurity is like the toughest thing because I'm a Black man in America and that's already tough from the systematic standpoint.

And then you meet people and everyone has like these expectations and everybody want you to be something.

I'm just trying to hold it together.

[rapping] I used to live in the basement begging for it all, It's my imagination, it's the best that they recall, I used it as a youngin' now it's life or the grave But for me I chose hope, No longer enslaved.

Whitney: Christopher LeMark is vulnerable, open and going there.

Doing the hard work on his past.

He's recognized mental health is a real issue that needs to be discussed and available for all people.

That's what led him to start Coffee, Hip-hop & Mental Health: three words that changed his life and are becoming a lighthouse for others to see past their situation.

Being displaced as a child, abused and also going through many levels of what it meant to be homeless for the majority of my life, this organization is all about fighting the extreme issues like poverty, food insecurity and poor mental health.

That is the heart, that is the why.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Normalizing talking about mental health, that's what you're about.

Absolutely.

So how did you get to this point?

Because is one of those things that as you're creating a brand and actually creating three words that people know very well now, those didn't evolve overnight.

And did some of that come from your childhood?

Yeah.

There would be no Coffee, Hip-hop & Mental Health if it wasn't for the things that happened at 6-4-5-3.

That's why it sits at the very bottom of the logo.

It's small right, because I look at that as my super power.

When you say that number, is that your old address?

Yeah, South Side of Chicago.

What happened there?

I lived with my mother's brother and his family.

And we went through what I considered physical, emotional and mental of abuse.

I didn't realize that life was a little different for me until I started watching the Cosby Show, Family Matters, Full House.

Because the dynamic, the social and the family dynamic was extremely different.

I was like, "Oh, well, he talked to Theo.

"He actually had a conversation with Theo."

Stern, but there was no hitting, there was no being locked in the basement, which is what happened to me.

I was often locked in the basement through a span of 12 years.

From the time I got home, 3:30 in the afternoon, till 2, 3 o'clock in the morning I was in the basement.

That essentially took my childhood, right?

My teenage years and everything.

When you saw some of these other images of what maybe the TV world depicted as a family, did you say anything?

No, I didn't say anything.

I mean, how could I?

Because I'm still trying to understand is this entertainment?

Is my life like the real template or is TV just fantasy?

Did your schoolwork and did any of your teachers see that like, something's up with this kid?

No, not in that way because they didn't have the tools or the language to understand that I was just an abused kid acting out because of that because school was my refuge.

So, I did everything at school that I couldn't do at home, like be a normal kid, play.

So, I didn't have time to study and things of that nature.

I was always trying to vie for attention.

You're 14, 15, what progressed in a way that you're like, okay, I'm now almost a man.

How do I do this?

I knew I was older, and I knew I was being mistreated.

And I remember the day my aunt asked me to go to the store to grab food for my cousins.

But I had been sitting in the corner all day.

I'm 15 years old sitting in a corner and I haven't eaten and she wants me to go to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread or something for my younger cousins.

So, I go to the store and I had already developed a habit out of eating from the garbage can or stealing from the corner store, right.

Because I knew I'll be in the basement so take snacks like to be in the basement.

So, I go to the corner store and I see that the guy's watching me, but I didn't care.

Everyone knew everybody in the neighborhood back then.

And he saw me steal probably some candy and then he called my cousin, Corey.

And from there my aunt found out.

I was in trouble when I got home.

My aunt was hitting me and I started fighting back.

And that was the first time I was just through.

First of all, you mad at me for stealing, but you haven't fed me all day and I'm in the corner, I'm 15 years old.

And this has been going on for 12 years.

So, I fall back and she pushed me out, and she put me out and I walked the streets for about a few days, slept in my cousin's car.

I went from living in that environment to living with cousins in Hoffman Estates, Illinois which is like extremely different.

Different.

Extremely different, right?

I'm from the south side of Chicago.

I was isolated like the bulk of my life and now I'm going to James B. Conan High School, but you can't take an unhealed or troubled person and put them in a nice spot and dress them and think everything is going to be okay.

So, I rebelled from that.

And that's what you really preach about.

And I'm just going to say the word preach, but-- Sure, I mean it is.

You shout it out loud with Coffee, Hip-hop Mental Health.

You've got to do the hard work.

And I tell people all the time that while healing is cool, it's also a marathon.

Yeah.

But hip-hop was my first form of therapy, that's why it sits in the middle of the logo because if it wasn't for hip-hop, I would've killed myself a long time ago.

I always had the pen right, or the creativity to create something from nothing.

And the Coffee, Hip-hop & Mental Health aspect of it.

Coffee is something that a lot of people like.

Yes.

I'm sure our viewers are like yeah, I like coffee.

Yes.

Hip-hop.

Yeah.

Those are two kind of like fun.

You see those on a lot of shirts, those words, but the mental health, that is something that we don't see every day.

Yeah.

And I'm not even a coffee guy.

I only go and drink coffee to curb appetite or to wake up and I just fall apart, I start crying.

And what I recognized what was happening at that moment was all this stuff I was doing in my entire life to hold it together, it just wasn't enough anymore.

And I was sitting there and I said, "You know what?

I got to go to therapy for Christopher."

And so that mental emotional breakdown became my greatest breakthrough because it was in that moment I made a decision, I'm not going to die.

I don't want to die.

And then my therapist leaned up on his chair and he said, "Christopher, it wasn't your fault that you were abused."

And maybe someone said that to me before but I had never heard it in that way.

I had never been present enough to hear it.

And I went home one day and I wrote down coffee because when you think about coffee, it's a metaphor for, "Let's have a conversation," right?

The black and brown community, we're not taught to like go take care of you.

We're just now hearing in the last two years self-love, self-care.

We're taught to survive and we had to survive really.

Coffee, Hip-hop & Mental Health is our way of normalizing the mental health conversation and normalizing therapy.

But essentially rebranding that whole concept.

It's the broken language that we're sharing because we're all in survivor mode.

And when you're surviving, you're exchanging survival conversation.

So, no one's talking about living.

The most beautiful things about Coffee, Hip-hop & Mental Health, it's a store, you sell things, but the money is going back to help people have therapy.

Yeah, so it's bigger than that.

So, we started feeding families, gifting people with groceries, right.

And then we say, you know what?

At the top of the year in 2021, we're going to start paying for people to go to therapy.

And we started selling more coffee and more merchandise.

So, when we opened up the coffee shop in November 18, 2020, we already saw that everybody, every race, every color, every person from every neighborhood, not just black and brown, needed this.

That's the beautiful thing about the coffee shop.

Yes, our goal is to take care of 250 people at minimum every year.

To put them through therapy, to help them start the healing journey.

Thank you so much for coming on.

You're very welcome.

Thank you.

Now we turn to a familiar face, one that is changing it up for women in Hollywood.

Maggie Q is making waves as the newest action hero in the thriller, The Prodigy .

On the big screen, she is breaking down barriers and building a platform for women who feel under-represented in the action genre.

How cool is it to be a woman with ethnicity in this role on the main stage?

Awesome.

Just I think the right time, the right script to do a movie at this level with this director and these actors and this script was really the right thing to do.

Because if it was anything less than this, I honestly wouldn't have been interested because it's not like we haven't seen an action movie before, we have.

But working at this level with these people who were so dedicated to the right product was the difference and made this different for me.

And when you were reading through the initial lines doing the Vietnam War, did that hit home for you?

Yeah.

I mean, you know I have an immigrant mother who immigrated in the '70s and who is a huge inspiration to me.

And so, anytime I can portray a woman of her ethnicity on screen with strength, it makes me proud, you know, because men are pretty easy.

You know, there's a lot of women men like.

You know it's not hard.

[giggling] But when women like you, I think it has to be earned.

And being that sign of a strong woman is just a huge honor, I believe, to be in this day and age where we need people to look up to.

I certainly admire strong women in whatever area that is.

I mean, I definitely, it's always something that always strikes me and always makes me feel proud.

What did the movie teach you?

Just like having boundaries.

No matter what environment I'm in as a woman in Hollywood, you still weirdly have to stand up for yourself.

If you want something, you have to be vocal about it.

And if you're not, it's no one else's fault but your own.

From trauma to helping others triumph, through the lessons she's learned.

Our next guest is a true change maker across the board.

Change: what does it take to create change?

Well, for Annette Ramirez it took almost everything in a hospital bed.

I went into the hospital on August 1, 2012 for a routine hysterectomy, something that 600,000 women in America have every year.

It was my first surgery ever as a matter of fact.

I have two children but they came rapidly so I had natural childbirths.

But I really needed to get it done because the doctor had found a very large fibroid on my uterus.

And so, when my husband came in the next day, I was having a lot of pain.

I found myself kind of in and out of consciousness.

And I remember being on the bathroom floor.

And so, in the morning they called my husband and told him that he needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible because they think during surgery that the doctor had cut my colon.

So, my husband not really knowing anything basically said "Well, you know, just fix it.

If you nicked it, just fix the colon."

And she said to my husband that, "I think it's worse.

"I think she has developed sepsis.

"So, you need to get to the hospital right away and she needs to go into the ICU."

I was in complete septic shock.

I was put into a medically induced coma which I was in for four months.

And when I woke up, I had skin grafts over my complete body, and my arms and my legs had both been amputated.

Whitney: There were many battles in her recovery.

However, one fight she discovered was not just for herself, but for others.

Whenever you have a medical negligence in the state of California, the maximum amount that you can get for your pain and your suffering is 250,000 dollars.

This is what the state of California values my life as and my family's life as.

$250,000 doesn't amount to anything when you're talking about 24/7 care; when you're talking about mental, physical and occupational therapy.

In November, 2022 we have a bill on the California ballot and it's called FIPA.

It's the Fairness for Injured Patients Act.

And what we are trying to do is to raise that cap in the state of California from $250,000 to today's standard.

I really want this bill to pass for other patients who were harmed.

Today's guest didn't stop with the struggle.

They kept pushing.

They kept pushing for change.

Remember your story matters.

[music] Announcer: The Whitney Reynolds Show is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by, Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Announcer: Go beyond the interview with Whitney Reynolds and her 52-week guide of inspiration.

The book goes deeper into the topics you see on the Whitney Reynolds Show.

To get your copy for $12.95 plus shipping and handling, go to whitneyreynolds.com/store and use code PBS.

For more information on today's program, visit www.

whitneyreynolds.com or follow us on social media on Twitter @whitneyreynolds and on Instagram @whitneyó_reynolds.

Kids: Our mommy.