Maddie Corman Discusses “Accidentally Brave”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, we turn to a very difficult subject, the victims of child pornography are, of course, the children, many of whom carry feelings of suffering and shame that can last a lifetime. And child pornography, those who view it on the Internet, actually increase the illicit trade. That’s only grown stronger in recent years. On the other side of this painful crime sit the families of the perpetrators, wives, children, mothers who must grapple with the reality that someone they love was watching child pornography. This is what happened to actress Maddie Corman, when her husband of two decades was arrested on child pornography charges in 2015. After going through years of therapy, Corman then went a step further. She wrote and performed a one-woman play about her experience called “Accidentally Brave.”And she’s been talking to our Michel Martin, discussing the complicated path to forgiveness and her decision to stay with her husband, who is now a registered sex offender and on 10 years’ probation.

MICHEL MARTIN: Maddie Corman, thanks so much for talking to us.

MADDIE CORMAN, WRITER & ACTRESS, “ACCIDENTALLY BRAVE”: Of course.

MARTIN: Just briefly, if you would, just for people who don’t know the story —

CORMAN: Sure, sure.

MARTIN: Just give us the short version of —

CORMAN: Yes. And I still, by the way… as much as now I’m used to doing the show eight times a week, I still get the tightness in my chest, and I have my fake lashes on, and my hair done, and I still feel like a little scared —

MARTIN: And I’m sorry to have to ask you to do that.

CORMAN: I mean, I wrote the damn thing. My husband, a few years ago, late July, I’ll just tell it the way it happened to me, because I do say that in the play, I try to tell my story, not my kids’ story, not my husband’s story but, so, I was driving to work at 5:00 in the morning. I am an actress, so I was going to shoot a T.V. show, a guest spot, and my phone rang and it was my daughter screaming and I couldn’t understand what was going on, and the police were in my house, and they were seizing our computers, and they had found child pornography, or at least evidence of child pornography on my husband’s laptop. I didn’t even comprehend that that — I didn’t even understand at first what was going on, why they were there, what they had found. I wanted it to be a mistake.

MARTIN: And you found out that it wasn’t.

CORMAN: It wasn’t a mistake.

MARTIN: And not only it wasn’t a mistake, you confronted him, you said, “is this true?” and he said —

CORMAN: Yes. And my heart just — my heart sank. My stomach fell. I can feel it now, and I do feel — it was unbelievable.

MARTIN: To your knowledge, he never touched a child or harmed a child.

CORMAN: To my knowledge, he never touched or harmed a child or a person.

MARTIN: Do you draw a distinction between watching and doing?

CORMAN: I do. I know that some people don’t, but I absolutely do, and that was an important thing to me to find out. I asked him. But I more than just asked him. There were polygraphs involved. There was forensic evidence, making sure that both legally, but also for me, to make — there were no chat rooms, there was no texting, there was no contact. This was a very, very private, secret activity for him.

MARTIN: But does he acknowledge, though, that the viewing of child pornography creates a market for child pornography, which means somebody is going to be inducing a child or touching a child?

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: Des he accept that?

CORMAN: He accepts — yes, as do I. And we both would say there are — it is absolutely not a victimless crime, and I’m not talking about me and my kids. Absolutely. And not taking the moral out of it, putting it back in, I have said to him, “I just can’t believe.” And he would say, “I feel the same way. It is against everything I believe. It is not who I am. It is not what I want.”

MARTIN: You know what’s so hard about this is that because your husband — I just want to mention, he’s a very distinguished director, right, very highly regarded, and also by your accounting, a great dad. I mean really involved in —

CORMAN: Yes, way more so than what —

MARTIN: Just doing all kinds of, you know —

CORMAN: And we were a good team. Like we weren’t in this —

MARTIN: So it’s just hard to understand how somebody who, you know, respects, loves and wants to support kids is then involved in seeing other kids being treated in a way that could be damaging forever. It’s hard to get. It’s hard to understand.

CORMAN: It’s hard for me to understand too. And it’s taken me a long time. And I will tell you the truth that, a couple of days ago, I was at couples’ therapy, still talking about the same thing. And I don’t know that I will ever fully understand it. There is a compartmentalization that addiction seems to bring out, and that people can have a part of their life that is completely separate, and do things that they swore they would never do. Pornography has its own special brand of addiction where I think that even if you’re not viewing children, which is obviously just horrible, but even if you’re viewing something legal, I would — well, I would say now that I, with what I’ve learned, that a lot of people look at things that they would not actually be OK with doing in real life.

MARTIN: You had no clue because I know a lot of people are going to ask that. I mean I know a lot of people did ask that, did you have any idea, did you in any way think or did you suspect? And you were like, no, no, and no.

CORMAN: He was a great —

MARTIN: Husband.

CORMAN: — and is a great person with some issues but certainly, I didn’t know this. And I didn’t know he was watching pornography, which is — I have a lot of shame about that. We never talked about it. It wasn’t a part of our romantic life. It wasn’t something — and yet, we are not super religious or super conservative. And this is part of the recovery for me, and part of the putting my history back together that is a whole other thing that partners of sex addicts or, I would say any addicts, have to go through, or anybody whose partner has kept a secret from them. I know the topic is salacious and exciting, but if we put that aside for a minute, it’s putting back together your history and going wait, we joked about that. We were not precious about that. You are a person who’s funny and could make jokes about sex and things. We weren’t like “let’s not talk about that.”

MARTIN: How on earth did you come up with the idea of making a play out of the worst, not just day, but months of your life?

CORMAN: Yes. When I received this news and I was lying on the bathroom floor and I was — the last thing on my mind was, you know what I should do? I should make this into a one-woman show and maybe star in it. No. I was just, like, how can I get the kids to school? How can I go to the market and see the fewest people possible and not start crying when I’m at the checkout? Like, I was just — and I was in triage. It was one thing at a time, one minute at a time, putting my oxygen mask on, then putting it on the kids, sometimes putting it on them, falling down, remembering to put it back on myself.

So that was the last thing on my mind but about a year and a half ago, I had come up for air. I wouldn’t say I was fine, because I still don’t say I’m fine, but I was feeling a little bit more stable. And I thought, I think, maybe, possibly, I’d like to write about this.

MARTIN: Did you think, I’m going to actually tell my story myself? Or was it more, I just got to get something down on paper because I have to?

CORMAN: I thought I had some need to tell the story. Mostly because the way that I got off the metaphoric and literal bathroom floor that I was falling on, over and over again, was through someone sharing her story with me, the truth, the messy, the ugly, the heartache, the anger, the love, all of it, and she was kind enough, a stranger.

MARTIN: The person you call your angel.

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: Somebody who really steps up for you and you’ve never named.

CORMAN: She read the story in the “New York Post,” which, by the way, if I had read that story, I would have said, “ugh.” And she read that story and she saw past the headlines, and the details and said, “there’s a family that must be hurting so badly and I believe that I can be of service.” And she found me, and I am forever grateful, and I don’t know that I would be OK had she not. And it helped me so much, more than any of the therapy, and any of the friends ,and amazing family support that I had. It was this stranger telling me her story.

MARTIN: And then you committed to sharing your worst day.

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: Eight times a week. And I just have to ask, you know, what is that like?

CORMAN: You know, one of my sons said to me the other day, “Mom, are you having fun doing the show?” Because I love doing plays and I said, that is not the word I would use but it is fulfilling sometimes. I’m in group therapy with other partners of sex addicts and I would dread when we would get a new person, when someone would leave and we’d — or not leave and we’d bring in a new person, because that meant I had to tell my story again and I had to see your face when I tell you my story. Because I had so much shame and the trauma of the way my story unfolded, which was an arrest first thing in the morning, my kids were there, I wasn’t there. I mean there’s so much, and the shock of it being a total surprise, and secret revealed and then it being in the newspaper within 24 hours.

And I started to see there was some method to the madness of my therapist actually wanting new people to come in and encouraging us to tell our stories once again and reliving — not reliving the trauma, but re-examining what it is to share what happened to you.

MARTIN: What’s going to be hard for some people to believe is that the play is hilarious. I mean I’ve got to be — I just have to assert that it’s hilarious.

CORMAN: Thank you.

MARTIN: And I know that that’s going to be a hard thing for some people to hear because, like, how the heck —

CORMAN: Gallows humor, at times.

MARTIN: But I want to play a clip from the play where you are, I guess we’d call it in family therapy.

CORMAN: Family week at rehab.

MARTIN: Family week. He goes to rehab while he’s awaiting the disposition of his legal case, right?

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: And you didn’t want to go, and you go through this sort of array of emotions, but let me just play this clip, and this is where you decide that you’re going to go to family week and you’re telling us a little bit of how it goes down. So here it is. Let’s play it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CORMAN: “And I learned that my husband has some more secrets, things that happened to him long before I met him and hearing him share those secrets makes me really sad but also really angry because I’m me, I shared everything with you, how could you not trust me with that? And we learn about shame and abuse and I ask him why he couldn’t just have an affair like a normal person and we do ropes courses. And even though we aren’t supposed to talk about the future, I break the rules and I tell him I will never, ever be OK with the things that you chose to look at and we all wish that our partners had been struck by anyone of the way cooler, more socially acceptable compulsions.”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN: I’m curious about whether before this thing happened to your family, if you read something in the paper, or if you saw that somebody had been arrested for something, was there a part of you that was like, well, that person is —

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: I mean, you had to be like, wow I looked at these things very differently before.

CORMAN: Yes, absolutely. And I think it’s one of the reasons I was so scared and continue to be so scared because I know, or I made up in my head, what people would think and what I thought. And going to family week was a huge deal. Not everyone at this rehab was there for the same reasons, but I met people who had done other kinds of unspeakable things and they became human to me.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CORMAN: “I’m not going to lie. It really helps that all of the ladies here at family week are beautiful, smart, and ferocious, and they are entrepreneurs, and professors, and moms, and models, and bad [bleep] still happens to them. And I meet their husbands, doctors, generals, musicians, rabbis, and they are not evil trolls at all. And I start to feel something that I can’t quite put into word but it is compassion, which I can’t feel for my own partner, at least not yet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN: Well, this play really has to be a part about forgiveness, doesn’t it?

CORMAN: And I think there’s acceptance and there’s forgiveness. And for me, I had to come to a place of saying this happened. I’m not going to change it. That doesn’t mean I’m OK with it. It also doesn’t mean my husband’s OK with it.

MARTIN: Spoiler alert. You do stay together.

CORMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: And I think many people might be wondering, like, what was that like? What was that process like?

CORMAN: Early on, it was triage. It was, we got to put one thing in front of the other. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know — I can’t even see. The last thing I need is to — I actually said to my therapist, well, I just want to run away and she said, OK, you can run away, but the pain’s going with you.

So I’m not telling you what to do but you can’t run away from the pain. You can run away from that guy, but you’re still going to have to do the work, so my suggestion is don’t make any big decisions for the next six months. Just take a breath, deal with your kids, deal with all the legal stuff that’s going on, let him go to rehab, you do your work, and let’s — because I loved my husband. I didn’t — I had 20 years with a person who I loved. So I needed a minute to catch up. So I don’t — there was no big moment where I said, OK, I’m definitely staying. It just — I also had to see. I had to see what he showed up with.

MARTIN: You said you loved him. Do you still love him?

CORMAN: Yes, I do. I do. I think I said it in the past, because it was never a controversial or shameful thing to say how much I loved my husband.

MARTIN: How’s he doing?

CORMAN: Well, I would say you have to ask him but he’s OK. He, too, is pretty — the other day, I said to him, you know, I’m really — I’m — it may not seem like it but no one’s really harder on him than I am. I mean I have been — you know, I put a little bit of it in the play, but if there were a camera on me, there have been some pretty tough moments and I have said some pretty harsh things. And the other day, I just had a moment because maybe a magazine came or something, I don’t know, there was something where I said, you know, you’ve lost a lot. I don’t acknowledge it a lot, I don’t give you this a lot, but you’ve lost a lot, you know?

MARTIN: What’s been the worst part of this whole experience?

CORMAN: The worst part, I mean, not to be specific, but the worst part is just that my kids are hurt and that my kids, more than just hurt, because I think that there’s some good that can come out of seeing if I put it on a holistic level and say, seeing your parent fall, and seeing that parent get back up, is not the worst thing in the world.

MARTIN: Has he seen the play?

CORMAN: He did see the play. He snuck in.

MARTIN: He snuck in.

CORMAN: We had an agreement because we have no more secrets anymore. I mean, please, God. So he said I’m going to see the play. And I said I don’t think you should see the play. And he said, “I’m going to see the play and I’m telling you, but I’m not going to tell you when because I don’t think you could do the play if you knew I was there.” And I said that’s true. And so he did.

MARTIN: Any reviews?

CORMAN: Well, I said “how was that for you?” And he said, “It was really hard.” And about midway through, he said, “I’m aware every day of it, the hurt that I have caused, my family, my community, the victims, I think about it every day. I don’t — I’m not in denial of what I did. But this was a new refresher course in how much pain I have caused you and the kids and that was really, really painful.”

And then he said at some point, “I was able to separate myself enough to say, my wife created something beautiful and important and funny and that I’m proud of you.” And then he said, “And I have a couple of notes.”

MARTIN: I bet.

CORMAN: And I said I don’t want to hear your notes.

MARTIN: Exactly.

CORMAN: And then in the middle of the night, I said, “what are the notes?”

MARTIN: Maddie Corman, thank you so much.

CORMAN: Oh, thank you. It was really nice to talk to you.

MARTIN: Likewise.

CORMAN: Happy to meet you.