>> I think they were gonna maybe kill me because I think that I had been kind of used up completely.

>> Narrator: "The Whitney Reynolds Show" is supported by Sciton, because results matter.

Leigh Marcus with at properties, sold on helping our community and closing homes.

O'Connor Law Firm, when it comes to your injuries, we take it personally.

Children's Learning Place, excellence in early childhood education since 1998.

Happy To Meat You, prime, fresh, fast.

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

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby International Realty.

My Buddy's Chicago, Love Your Melon, Brendon Studzinski at State Farm, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, UFC Wrigleyville, The CryoBar, Bark Busters Leah Chavie Skincare, Deluxe Cleaning Service, STI Moving and Storage, and by other sponsors.

(upbeat music) Today, we are talking with women who have had to rebuild their lives, their families, and their communities.

They've actually torn down physical and emotional walls to start over on a firm foundation.

Let's meet these ladies who are wearing hard hats in life.

(light music) You're watching the "Whitney Reynolds Show."

We start with self-worth and how a woman who was a victim of sex trafficking had to rebuild it.

Women who rebuild and you have rebuilt your self-worth.

>> Yes.

>> You are amazing.

I'm gonna start with that.

>> (laughing) Okay.

>> Yeah, but your story is one that has been hard.

>> Yes.

>> Can you take us back to when you were 15?

>> Yes, so, when I was 15 years old, I ran away from home in California and it was impulsive, it wasn't planned or anything like that.

I was on my way to work one day and kept going.

And I thought it was a good idea at the time.

Long story short, I ended up in Las Vegas and my logic was it's a 24-hour town so I'll always have shelter, but I found out quickly that the security guards kick you out of the casinos right away when you're 15, they can spot when you're under age.

So, I find myself wandering around on the streets and ran into the very stereotypical, kind of bad people that I could see for bad.

And the day that I really kind of like lost my cool was my 16th birthday.

I saw the date on a newspaper on a newspaper stand and realized it was my 16th birthday and I thought, this should be my sweet 16.

It should be totally different than this.

And I literally sat down like a baby and started crying on the sidewalk and this car pulled up and this fellow said, "You can't be crying on the sidewalk.

There's bad people in this city that will hurt you.

You can't do that."

So, he got out of his car and he's like, "It looks like you need some help.

My sister's out of town.

You can stay in her place."

And he left me there.

He drove me to this nice little apartment and left me there for like three days on my own.

>> And I just wanna stop you right there real quick because he led with, "There's bad people out there."

So, in your mind, did you automatically think, this guy is trying to protect me?

>> Yes, I did.

He had to earn my trust a little bit, but he was so neutral and nonthreatening.

And once the first three days went by, I just thought everything was fine.

Then he started bringing his friends over and we would go to a park and they would play basketball.

I would watch them and it felt just really fine.

And he kept asking me if I needed to call my parents or anything.

So, after about maybe the first month and then the second month I let my guard down.

>> And then tell us what happened after that.

>> So, then right then I just started sensing that there was a difference, but I couldn't put a finger on it because nobody was really acting any differently, other than I was never left alone.

Somebody was always sleeping out on the couch or something.

And then the horrible kind of initial breakdown, they all just came in one night while I was sleeping and beat me to a pulp and just said my name, said where I was from, and that they were gonna tell my mother and my boyfriend what a bad person I was.

And then they took away all food and any water, anything, they just left me in there.

And then like pretty much would hose you down like a dog or something to clean you, it was awful.

>> And at that point, did you know I could be getting into the sex traffic circle?

>> No.

>> Okay.

>> I didn't think at all, you're just in shock when something like that happens to you and my only kind of tool was just to say nothing and think nothing and do nothing.

And then they gave me, they drugged me.

They gave me some kind of muscle relaxant and obviously they were taking pictures for porno and things like this.

I would wake up and not be able to move, but really be made up like a doll and all, you know, just people having their way with you and lights and camera and everything.

So it was, yeah, it's been a long time so I can talk about it.

>> I was gonna say, I know this isn't easy to go down and this is what's amazing with the woman that you've become as you did go through this.

And this is what I want our viewers to know is that like you can go through trauma.

>> Yeah.

>> You can go through a situation like this and you can get out on the other side and be okay and find your self-worth.

>> Yes, 'cause every day when I was awake, he would just make a point to say to me, "I'm going to ruin you."

>> How did you eventually get out?

>> I think that they were gonna maybe kill me because I think that I had been kind of used up completely.

And so, they left me at this lady's house.

I changed her name in the book, but they left me at her house kind of drugged up and her job was to just keep me kind of not, immobile, but she felt sorry for me.

So, she would let the drug wear off and just say, "Go ahead and get something to eat."

And then she would like talking me.

And then they came one day and she mentioned that I was really hungry and eating up all her food and then they beat her up 'cause they're like, "How the heck can she be eating up your food if she's supposed to be not moving?"

And so, she got scared and started like keeping me immobile.

And then one day I just said, "Just please, just let me go."

And she's like, "I can't."

And it was a really a rough conversation because she said, "It's either you or me."

And I said, "Well, then let it be me."

>> Oh, man.

>> Yeah.

And then I did wake up.

She had left the apartment and I woke up and I couldn't move.

And then I just was completely out of my mind, like just in terms of like, could hardly walk and I went down the stairs and there was an apartment door open downstairs and I just went in there and hid.

And that was a pretty bizarre circumstance.

It was an Army vet that had PTSD and he was strange, but it was a perfect fit.

So, I could just hide there.

>> Yeah and then you were able to escape.

>> Yeah, he drove me to the Hoover Dam and I just started walking off into the desert.

Eventually this family took me in, in Dallas, Texas and I did walk a long ways in that desert.

I'm gonna tell you that.

They took me in, in Dallas, and just kind of like literally, just kind of left food for me, it was like taking in a wild animal or something.

And I felt guilt brought me back.

I felt guilty that my mother didn't know where I was where I must be, about two years.

So, I tried to go back home, that didn't work out.

And then I immediately just thought, I have to get out of here, but with a plan.

So, I made my first plan to get out of there and ended up in Minneapolis and started hanging around a music school 'cause singing is what I do.

And this jazz man heard me sing.

It was the faculty and they're like, "Hey, you wanna come on tour with us?"

So, I went to Germany and France with them singing and singing is a healer.

That's probably why I did music in the first place.

So, that was just the beginning of starting to heal.

And, also I need to share my stories.

So, I did write a book called, "Walk Until Sunrise," because I felt like I couldn't do anything else until I did 'cause it was literally like taking that whole experience out of here and putting it over there.

>> That is beautiful.

Well, thank you for going back there today for our viewers.

>> Sure.

My pleasure.

(light music) >> The hard reality of rebuilding life after the loss of a loved one, let's take a look.

Rebuilding a life in a direction she did not choose.

>> My husband and I were avid scuba divers.

We learned to scuba dive together.

He was an officer in the Navy.

We were living our dream life in Hawaii.

Honestly, I could not have handpicked a better life and partner for myself than I had in that moment.

And that we had just that year moved to Hawaii.

We had suffered two miscarriages and Christmas morning found out we were pregnant with our third child.

So, so excited, just really living this dream.

And then May 20th, 2018, he left for the morning for a scuba diving class.

I was at home with our one and three year old, six months pregnant.

Our big plan for the day was to go buy some new baby stuff for the baby we'd be expecting in the next few months and my phone rang, it was like nine o'clock in the morning on a Sunday morning.

And I thought, oh, you know, who's calling me?

Like a car salesman, insurance salesman.

You know, this is an odd time for a telemarketer, but as a military spouse, anytime an unknown number calls your phone and your spouse or partner is in potential danger, which scuba diving is, just something inside tells you to answer the phone.

So, I answered the phone and already kind of annoyed, expecting a sales call and said, "Hello."

And the voice on the other end was panicked.

And it was this man and he said, "This is the manager of the dive shop.

There's been an accident involving your husband.

Where are you?

We're coming to get you."

And you know, I'm in baby and mom mode.

And you know, thinking through my checklist for Target and not in there's an accident on my husband's dive boat mode.

And so, I panicked in return and I said, "What?

No.

Where is he?

What's going on?"

And he said, "We don't know anything.

Where are you?

We're coming to get you?

Do you have the kids with you?"

And I somehow gave him my address and they came and picked me up, drove me and my two kids to the hospital.

A very long and sad hour later, I found out that he didn't make it.

And so, six months pregnant with my one and three year old in the car, I had to say goodbye to my husband.

>> Whitney: Within moments, Ashley Bugge went from living the dream to being captured in a real-life nightmare >> Trauma and grief just make you react in different ways and I just went blank.

I have these vivid images, pictures in my head, but it's not a cohesive story like a regular memory.

It's literally like looking at pictures of this pregnant woman running across an ER parking lot, running inside saying, "Where's my husband, Brian Bugge," hearing the word "quiet room" and thinking, okay, maybe he's resting.

Is it quiet room because he's resting after an accident or is it quiet room because they're gonna tell me that he's dead.

He can't be dead, I'm six months pregnant.

I have a one and three year old in the car.

Like, that can't be the story.

And then it's sitting in the waiting room with his dive team who had all come to the hospital.

It's going back and it's seeing the double doors open and a doctor and a security guard walking towards me.

And as soon as I saw the security guard, I knew, I just knew what they were gonna tell me.

There was no reason for a security guard to come out unless I was about to hear that my husband died.

And, I remember her looking at me and I remember seeing tears in the doctor's eyes and just crumpling to the floor.

And then I have an image of this pregnant woman in a blue tank top lying on the hospital hallway floor with his dive team around me and begging the doctor and just saying, "You don't understand, you don't understand, like I'm pregnant.

I need you to keep trying, please, please, please."

>> Whitney: Despite all the grief, she had to keep going, for her kids and for her new baby she was about to deliver.

>> A few months after giving birth to my daughter, by myself, I was literally clutching a picture of my husband.

It was very traumatic to give birth to her, but I did it.

And as soon as she was born, it was kind of like, okay, this is it.

Like it's really me and these kids and I need to figure out how I'm gonna live life and do this.

And I don't want to be a victim.

I wanna use my circumstances to propel me forward and to make a life for myself.

>> Whitney: And propel she did.

>> Part of that was planning this two month trip across Europe with all three kids.

We visited eight countries.

I made sure we visited places that were special to us as a family, places that Brian and I talked about taking them, places where other people have experienced trauma and pain.

I took them to Poland to see Auschwitz, the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands.

We sailed through Malta and Greece.

We celebrated birthdays and milestones and first steps in Switzerland from Addie.

It really was not a conventional way to do grief, but it was what we need as a family.

We needed to come together and nothing like international travel to push your boundaries of how to get through something.

>> Whitney: For Ashley, this new life that is being rebuilt comes from the strong foundation of her past.

>> It's a mixture of what was because Brian was such a part of our life and our story and he will be forever more, but also recognizing it's just us now, too.

And we need to find how we're gonna do this together as a family of four where we're at now.

>> Next up, we have a woman who's rebuilding communities, brick by brick.

Welcome to the show.

>> Thank you very much, great to be here.

>> So, we've been talking about women who rebuild and you are actually rebuilding communities.

Tell us about your work.

>> So, I am extremely lucky to be surrounded by an amazing group of people, both at the Cook County Land Bank, which I had started almost 10 years ago now, but also in the community.

So, the whole purpose of the Land Bank is we look at neighborhoods all over Chicago, some of which have harder barriers for redevelopment.

They've had harder economic times, there's back taxes, maybe there's been a lot of foreclosure, and we go in and say, "What are the barriers you need to get out of people's way?"

Because there are amazingly talented people in the community who can redevelop, wanna buy homes.

What we do is almost exclusively for home ownership.

So, you're building the community wealth and stability.

And so, it has been not only incredibly successful, all over Chicago, but it's been a true labor of love.

>> So, when you say communities, like how do you identify what communities need the help?

>> It's a great question.

So, Chicago has 77 neighborhoods and then there are about 100 suburbs that surround Chicago in Cook County.

And you can look at a map, or you can drive around and see that certain communities have experienced much harder economic times.

They might have higher unemployment rates, or they'd seen foreclosure.

After the great recession 10 years ago, you saw a huge transfer of wealth where people maybe had stretched to buy that home and then really hit hard economic times and so the house went into foreclosure and then one of the things we found is once it enters the court system, through no fault of the court system or the individual, it can take years.

And then that house sits vacant.

And when you have a number of vacant homes in a community, it really starts to drag things down.

And so, one of the things the Land Bank has gone in to do is to say, okay, where are the governmental structures, the tax system, the court system, where is that stuff getting in people's way?

Because everybody wants to solve the problem of having more development and more occupied homes, but sometimes the laws we set up, even to protect ourselves, end up getting in the way.

And so, we've come in and there's a lot of communities on the south side, some on the west side, in the south suburbs, and those are the communities we focus in because we wanna make sure the market works everywhere.

>> So, you said vacant homes can drag down a community.

>> Yes.

>> Can you explain more of that?

>> Yes.

So, when say someone moves into a house, they can't make the mortgage payments.

The bank steps in, it goes into foreclosure.

That process in court can take several years.

And during that time the house is vacant.

Or, someone older lives there, they die, there's no family and they're trying to figure it out.

When a house is vacant, the studies have shown that the houses next door, even if occupied and very well taken care of, drop in value by 7%.

It's using police protection, garbage has to go by there, the lights are still on.

It's using all the resources of the taxpayers, it's not contributing and it also can be a detriment in terms of crime.

>> Well, and think about this too.

When you have someone living there, they're spending their money in the community, they're sending their kids to school.

So, if there's an issue they might want to fix it.

There's a lot of thing about being a community member that when these homes are full, it adds people to the actual community.

>> It does.

And no one wants to live on a block with vacant homes.

And so, one of the things we found is in many of the neighborhoods we're focused in, the neighbors wanna buy the house or they know their daughter wants to buy the house and they just couldn't get out from under the difficulties of the court system and the vacant kind of building and tax system.

In the state of Illinois, the way the property taxes code is written, it can really throw up a lot of barriers.

And our job is, not to kind of pick who should win and who should lose.

Get the barriers out of people's way, they come in and they find these opportunities themselves.

We're 10 years into the Land Bank and we have over 500 community developers.

The vast majority of whom are African-American or Latino.

They're living in the community.

They know what the community wants.

They're designing these amazing homes and that's really the successful outcome.

>> So, that's the other part of this too is it's now putting people to work as well in the community.

>> Yes, yes.

I mean, just an example for you, during the outbreak of the pandemic.

So, we hit in the middle of March.

Everything starts to shut down.

The work of the Land Bank, there were 300 existing projects of single family homes and two to four flats in communities on the south side, west side, and south suburbs.

There were 1,200 people that remained working because rehabbing a single family home is a very socially distanced job.

There's only one or two people usually, maybe three in the house at a time.

They can remain distant from each other.

A lot of the work is outside, but we kept over 1,000 people working.

And that to me is an incredible opportunity for us to add value at one of the most difficult times we've all seen.

>> Can other cities mimic this?

>> Yes.

In fact, they say that imitation is the best form of flattery.

We totally copied this from Flint, Michigan.

So, Flint, Michigan came up with this idea.

Then Detroit adopted it.

Then we adapted it.

Minnesota and Minneapolis adopted it.

There's one in Atlanta.

There's some around Erie in Pennsylvania and New York.

And the idea is growing because what it's saying is neighborhoods fall on hard times.

People fall on hard times.

That is not a reason to give up because these infrastructures of houses, one person's vacant house is another person's treasure.

And so, we just wanna make sure that the laws that we set up to protect foreclosed houses or vacant homes, they don't get in people's way.

Clear all that stuff out of the way and then all these amazingly talented people, who have a vision for how it should be redeveloped, they come in and all of a sudden you see a thriving community.

>> I love that.

>> It's great.

>> And it's kind of just that domino effect.

>> Totally, absolutely, absolutely.

>> Well, thank you so much for coming on.

>> It was a pleasure and we'd love to keep talking about this.

>> How to rebuild a family after divorce.

Let's take a look.

>> I was in a marriage for 18 years and had a wonderful experience raising five children that I gave birth to and had a very supportive relationship with my mom and dad.

And about four years ago, I found out that my husband wasn't who I really thought he was and I actually had to unexpectedly file for divorce.

>> Whitney: There's no turnkey solution or smooth how-to guide when it comes to rebuilding a family post divorce.

And this mom, Kathleen Sarpy, had five kids depending on her.

>> Marriage is a partnership.

So, I was expecting to be in a partnership, raising my five children for the rest of my life.

I'm a woman of faith so I was never expecting I'd ever have a divorce happen to me, but it was a very dark time for me after my divorce was final and I was a single mom to five kids.

I have a large company that I built out of my basement, 20 years ago almost, that now employs lots of people and we work with great clients all over the country and being able to juggle, I guess, the despair and having the determination to actually have to keep getting back up in the morning and going back to work and smile and then get back to home and smile again and take care of the kids.

It was a really challenging season, but it taught me a lot about resilience, really.

It taught me about the importance, I think, of that muscle >> Whitney: And the resilience muscle, she flexed.

Even when she felt like she couldn't go on.

>> There were times during my journey of divorce early on where I wasn't sure I wanted to go on.

I was so feeling hopeless.

And you know, I think a lot of people feel that way.

And I feel like there's no way out of a situation.

There was a time I was sitting in the parking lot of my, I think it was my financial advisor, who was basically telling me how dire my circumstances were at the time.

And I was very afraid that I was gonna have to support five kids all by myself and didn't have a lot of resources to do so because of the divorce process.

And I remember really praying about like, how do I have hope to go on?

And I gotta tell you that one, I did ask for help and I got some support from both a therapist and also from friends to just tell me I'm not alone.

I had, you know, I believe in Godwink moments.

So, there was a friend that I was introduced to, very new friend, who told me about her own experience of divorce and that I'd be just fine and I'd be okay.

>> Whitney: Through pressing on and friendships, she now has rebuilt her family.

>> One of my friends through a charity had connected me to someone in my hometown here in the suburbs.

And she said, "My third cousin from Louisiana would be great with you."

So yeah, now I'm the mother of six kids ages 21 down to 11.

We all continue to go through hard times.

I just know it always works out somehow and not to lose hope.

That's I think the biggest thing don't lose hope.

>> Well ,today's guests have showed us the rewards of putting in the hard work and truly inspire us to rebuild the different things in our life.

No matter what they are, make sure your foundation is strong.

Remember, your story matters.

(light music) >> Narrator: "The Whitney Reynolds Show" is supported by Sciton, because results matter.

Lee Marcus with at properties, sold on helping our community and closing homes.

O'Connor Law Firm, when it comes to your injuries, we take it personally.

Children's Learning Place, excellence in early childhood education since 1998.

Happy to Meat You, prime, fresh, fast.

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

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby International Realty.

My buddy's Chicago, Love Your Melon, Brendon Studzinski at State Farm, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, UFC Wrigleyville, The Cryo Bar, Bark Busters, Leah Chavie Skincare, Deluxe Cleaning Service, STI Moving and Storage.

And by other sponsors.

(light music) 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 WhitneyReynolds.com or follow us on social media, on Twitter @WhitneyReynolds and on Instagram at Whitney-_Reynolds.

(light music) >> Our mommy!