Activist Donna Hylton, who spent 27 years in prison, on understanding Cyntoia Brown: 'Believe us when we say someone hurt us'
Donna Hylton had faced sexual abuse for most her life when, at the age of 20, she entered prison — which is where she finally learned, however ironically, that she was not alone.
“I thought I was alone in my abuse,” says Hylton, now a 54-year-old activist, speaker and author, about the start of her long journey to freedom. “I realized as soon as I went into prison, like, oh my God, I’m not alone.” The realization was cold comfort, though, as she quickly put the pieces together about the stories of inmates in the system. “Prison is violent in its very being. And so to place someone who has been so traumatized, so abused, into an environment like that — how do we expect healing?”
Hylton received a tough sentence for her part in a brutal crime: 25 years to life for participating in a group kidnapping and murder of a 62-year-old man. She wound up serving 27 years in New York’s maximum-security prison for women, and realized many harsh truths along the way, including the fact that “We don’t think about what happens before a woman gets to prison.”
She knows, of course, what happened to her. “I was sex-trafficked,” she says. “I didn’t know that then. I was brought to this country to satisfy a grown man who I was told to call ‘Dad.’ I didn’t know. I thought I was going to Disney World.” She tried to reach out to various adults for help, Hylton explains, but no one believed her. “And from there I was turned into a liar,” she says.
“We’re human beings. And for the majority, we don’t just wake up one day and say we’re going to go commit a crime or be involved in a crime,” says Hylton. “They’ve labeled me monster, all kind of things. That is not who I am.”
It’s a pattern she still sees happening all around her. She was recently reminded of this in the case of Cyntoia Brown, who was granted clemency and released recently after serving a life sentence for killing a Nashville man who bought her for sex at age 16. “Unfortunately, there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Cyntoia Browns, Donna Hyltons. We wind up in prison. There’s a sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline,” she says. “I was convicted of a heinous crime. I hear that. But I am not the crime. I’m a human being. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a friend, I’m a sister.”
She’s also an activist, heading up From Life to Life, a support organization for incarcerated women, as well as director of the Women and Girls Project at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. “I created From Life to Life because I went from doing life to living life,” she says of her 2012 release from prison, where she had spent a brutal two and a half years in solitary confinement. “I am a voice and a face for women who have been abused and traumatized and have been incarcerated based on their abuse and trauma.”
And she is a published author, who began to write while still in prison. “It was therapeutic,” she recalls, explaining how meeting artistic representative Dan Pearson led to her publishing her memoir, A Little Piece of Light, which is in the process of being turned into a feature film starring Rosario Dawson as Hylton.
“I’ll never forget how [Pearson] said to me, ‘For far too long, women’s stories have been told by men. No one can tell a woman’s story but a woman, and you should be able to tell your story,” says Hylton, who has also given motivational speeches at many big events, including the Women’s March on Washington in 2017.
Incarceration, Hylton laments, “is so cruel and inhumane. But amazingly, we’re resilient.”
She sees this in so many other women like herself, too — including Brown. “She was sex-trafficked, continued to be abused, continued to be raped, and no one helped her. And she killed her abuser. She had a breaking point,” Hylton says. “I’m not saying it’s right. But we have to understand why things happen. I am so happy that Cyntoia was granted clemency. She’s been through a lot.”
Same goes for the women who allege abuse at the hands of R. Kelly. “When I watch the R. Kelly documentary, I [related to] almost every woman that spoke. … To say that that happened to you? You have to give those women credit,” she says. “Believe us when we say someone hurt us.”
Finally, Hylton says, “We’re all capable of good and not good. Today, I walk in the good.”
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