Any given Friday night, once the kids are in bed, you can find my husband and me on the couch watching our guilty pleasure, Dateline. So it’s no surprise that when I saw the advertisement for “Abducted in Plain Sight” on Netflix, I quickly added it to my queue to watch next. A few days ago, I was able to sit back and watch this mind-blowing true crime. The whole time I couldn’t stop watching with my eyes wide open and my jaw on the floor.
If you don’t want to know any spoilers, stop here and come back after you watch the show.
:: SPOILERS AHEAD ::
Abducted in Plain Sight is a true crime documentary which shows how a family friend “ B” abducted a young girl, not once but twice, and raped her. And to add on top of that, “B” also had extramarital affairs with both of her parents. Yep, you read that right.
What?
As a parent of three young children, I watched this 90-minute documentary with multiple feelings from sadness to anger to disgust. How could all these awful things happen to this poor child? How did her parents let a kidnapping happen twice? How could the mother sleep with B after she knew he raped her child? As the story went on, it got even more bizarre. I was fuming by the time the show ended.
The parents were also being groomed by “B.” He had a repeated affair with her mother and also an experience with her father. While you can see the embarrassment and disgust in her father’s eyes, you can’t help wonder why he didn’t do more to stop “B” himself. But, what about other family members? How was there not a grandparent or aunt or uncle to speak up and say something? It’s very hard to see how so many awful things happened and the lack of consequences for “B.”
The only positive thing I took away from this twisted documentary was that I need to talk to my kids more about sexual predators. It’s something that I surely don’t do enough but certainly have to have these difficult conversations. If you are like me and need some tips, head over to this blog post about how to speak to your kids.