March 9, 2026
Reclaiming Voice After Silence: Andrea Leeb on Hidden Trauma, Truth Telling and the Children No One Talks About
Send a text In this raw and deeply human episode of Kali Kat Tap Talks, Kat sits down with Andrea Leeb National Bestselling Author of Such a Pretty Picture: A Memoir, survivor advocate, former attorney, registered nurse and a powerful voice for those who were silenced long before they ever had a chance to speak. Andrea’s story is not just about trauma. It’s about truth. It’s about the lifelong impact of what happens behind closed doors. And it’s about the courage it takes to reclaim a na...
In this raw and deeply human episode of Kali Kat Tap Talks, Kat sits down with Andrea Leeb National Bestselling Author of Such a Pretty Picture: A Memoir, survivor advocate, former attorney, registered nurse and a powerful voice for those who were silenced long before they ever had a chance to speak.
Andrea’s story is not just about trauma. It’s about truth. It’s about the lifelong impact of what happens behind closed doors. And it’s about the courage it takes to reclaim a narrative that was stolen in childhood.
Growing up in a home defined by secrecy, Andrea survived incest and carried the weight of silence for decades. Today, she breaks that silence with intention, clarity and a fierce commitment to protecting others. While the world fixates on headlines like the Epstein files, Andrea asks a question we don’t hear nearly enough:
“What about the kids in the homes—the ones being hurt by someone they know?”
This conversation goes far beyond a memoir. Andrea opens up about:
- The hidden trauma that shapes a lifelong before the world ever sees it
- The moment she realized she could no longer stay silent
- How writing became both a lifeline and a form of justice
- Why truth‑telling is an act of liberation, not shame
- The emotional cost and emotional power of reclaiming one’s voice
- Her work with the UCLA Rape Treatment Center and Stuart House Advisory Board
- Mentoring young women from post conflict and climate challenged countries
- What survivors need, what they deserve and what society still refuses to confront
Andrea’s honesty is unflinching. Her compassion is unmistakable. And her message is one every listener needs to hear whether they are a survivor, love a survivor or simply want to understand the realities so many endure in silence.
This episode is a reminder that healing is not linear, truth is not optional and silence is never the answer. Andrea shows us what it looks like to step out of the shadows and into a life defined not by what happened to her, but by what she chose to do with it.
If this conversation resonates with you, please share it. Someone you know may need it more than you realize.
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All right, everybody, this is Callie Cat Tap Talks, and I've had Andrea Leib here.
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And sh we need to sit back and listen to her story because she's got a story to tell us.
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Go ahead, Andrea.
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Thank you, Callie.
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So I'm gonna start with the beginning.
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Um, and um for some of you on the line, I always like to give a little trigger warning about because I'm going to talk about something that involves child sexual abuse.
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And my story begins when I was very young, when I was four and a half, and the first time that I remember my father molesting me.
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And that day my mother asked my father to give me a bath, and I was very young, but I knew there was something strange about the way my father was touching me, something strange about his breathing.
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And that day, when my mother walked into the bathroom, she came to check on us to see what was going on because it was taking a long time.
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She screamed, crumpled to the floor like a paper doll.
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My father caught her, and I actually was so little, I thought I had killed her, I thought I had ceded her.
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Whatever it was that we were doing, I was responsible for killing her.
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And she um she fell to the floor, was unconscious for a few minutes, and when she woke, she was blind.
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And um, I my that day, my father took my mother to the hospital, and he told me that I had caused my mother to go blind, and that we had to keep the secret of what happened in the bathroom with us.
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Now, my mother did get her sight back in about a month, but as um, as I I have written a book more recently, and as I write in my book, my mother remained physically blind for a month, but willfully blind for decades.
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So the abuse continued, and um despite it, I survived.
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I was a really good student, a good, you know, and I was able to keep going.
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I was 13 when the abuse finally ended.
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And I was able to keep going, although to some harm to myself, I cut, I acted out, I I I acted out both.
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I didn't know the day, you know, I was hyper-vigilant on one end, and on the other end, when it came to boys, I didn't know where danger safety ended and danger began.
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So I had a very traumatic childhood.
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There was a lot of violence.
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Like my dad was an alcoholic, but I kept going, and I told myself, I'm gonna keep going, and if I pretend long enough and hard enough, I'm never gonna tell the secret.
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I'm gonna keep it the secret, you know, everything that happened in the house, and uh my parents wanted the keep secret kept, and I was a kid, and I listened to them and kept the secret, and I um and I thought if I'm smart enough, pretty enough, perfect enough, I can keep going and put this this whole thing into a little box and pretend it never happened.
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So it's a long story, and I'm not gonna tell you all of it today, but what I am gonna tell you is is how I came to be today.
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So eventually what happened to me is when I was 33, I had kept the secret all that time, and and you know, it was very hard.
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I had my I like to say my intimacy muscle was severed, and I couldn't keep long relationships with people.
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You know, everything was was on the surface for me.
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And um when I was 33, someone uh uh uh I was on a subway and it went dark.
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This is before 9-11, and we were less scared than we are today, and you know, everybody was angry as opposed to scared.
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A man or somebody grabbed my breasts, we'll say it was a man, because it felt like a big hand on the subway.
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And after that, I had a complete, I completely spiraled.
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I I by that time I was an attorney, I had been doing pretty well uh from the outside, so I thought with my life, but like I said, if you peeled back the little band-aid very far, you could see it wasn't so perfect after all.
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I had a complete breakdown, and I I finally started having panic attacks.
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I started wanting to kill myself.
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I had cut all the way through high school, but had stopped, forced myself to stop in college, and I started cutting again.
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I really unraveled, I had to get help.
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I ended up spending 12 days in an inpatient facility, and it was there that I finally realized I couldn't tell, I couldn't live anymore.
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That that I couldn't live without telling the secret.
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I had to keep going.
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So that is the beginning of my story.
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I mean, that's that's the beginning.
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Um, why I'm here today is um in the years that passed, you know, I I got therapy and I I slowly and surely started to heal.
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It took a long, long time for me to heal, but I slowly started to heal.
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I ended up ultimately getting married and I have a successful relationship.
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But for a long time I wasn't gonna tell my story.
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I I I was, you know, I told my story to my therapists, I told my story to my husband before I married him.
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I did keep my relationship with my parents in my life, only because despite everything, I really loved my mother.
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And you know, these these incests and child abuse like this is such a complicated issue.
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It's easy to judge from the outside, but really complicated.
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So I kept my mother in my life, and um I had to keep my father, but I kept going, um, but I kept getting therapy, and finally, and I wasn't going to tell the story, but then two things happened.
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In 2017, as you all recall, we had the Me Too movement.
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And when I started reading all the information about the Me Too movement, I started thinking to myself, wow, I have a story.
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I could tell my story too.
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Right around the same time my father died.
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So it was a little bit more freeing, although my mother was still alive and she still absolutely refused to acknowledge what happened.
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And it and as much as I hate to admit it to you all, to anybody, you know, she she knew what happened.
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I have a younger sister.
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Uh she was not abused by my father, but my mother knew what happened.
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You know, she knew about the violence in the house and she knew about the sexual abuse.
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There was there were telltale signs, you know, there were sheets.
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I was a very, you know, just hyper-vigilant, frightened child.
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She knew.
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And um, but she wouldn't admit it.
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And maybe she couldn't admit it.
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I I can't say.
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I mean, she was only 20 when she had me.
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So maybe she just wasn't ready.
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Maybe she shouldn't have had children at all.
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But regardless, you know, she knew.
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But I hadn't, you know, I kept my relationship with her, but my father dying allowed me a freedom, and then the Me Too movement.
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I started thinking, wow, you know, maybe, just maybe, I could write this story and I could help somebody else.
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Because I suffered for a really, really long time.
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The ages between, you know, uh four and and even third or three, even when I looked like I wasn't suffering, I was suffering a lot.
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I had shame, I had guilt.
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I I, you know, really suffered as a person.
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And maybe I could help somebody else and get them to tell their story sooner.
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So I started writing a book.
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I had always been a writer.
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Um, there are things people always ask me, what are the things that saved you as a child?
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And you know, sometimes there's a person, but I didn't have a person, and my family moved a lot, so there was no teacher or close family friend.
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Uh, even my grandmother didn't want to see it.
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But what there were for me was books, and what there was for me was writing stories.
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I, when I was 10, my mother bought me a diary, but I knew I couldn't write my story into a diary, so I made up another girl named Emily.
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And Emily kind of had a much better life.
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She was popular, she was had a good family, so it was writing and books saved me from a very young age.
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And I decided maybe it was time for me.
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And, you know, when I was 14, I read Maya Angelou's books.
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Now we know Wyatt Cageberg sings, and I I it was the first time I realized that I was not alone, that I wasn't the only person who went through this.
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And Maya Angelo's case, it was her stepfather.
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But, you know, I knew, and I started to find my voice on the page.
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So we fast forward and I kept writing.
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Wasn't easy.
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It I had to excavate all of that childhood information.
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I can tell you right now, I went right back into therapy.
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I needed help and did a lot of yoga, a lot of therapy, but I kept writing.
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And in 20 um, this year, I I finally I finished my book last in 20 um 23.
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And right around that time, my mother passed away.
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And um, which was also made it a little easier to tell to tell the story because I still had a lot of guilt with my mother.
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Um and I I will tell you, it's in my book, but a spoiler alert, my mother did forgive, did ask for my forgiveness two weeks before her death.
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Wow.
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It was the first time ever she knew she told me she should have left my father, and she told me I hope that I'm gonna get choked up because she told me that she hoped that someday I could forgive her.
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And actually the last words that I said to my mother before she died were I forgive you.
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I I I found it in my heart to forgive her.
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I I um she asked about my father and not lie and tell you I forgave him because I didn't, I'm not going to.
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But for my mother, I forgave her.
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And I um I had this book and I published it.
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And I thought as I was writing it, like I said, I thought, okay, I'll write this book and I'll help one person.
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But as I started writing it, I got this great gift.
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And the gift that I got was from the book.
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The book gave me a gift, and what I started realizing is I could do more with this than just help one person.
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I could help a lot of people, not just from healing and help a lot a lot of people heal, but it wasn't just from the book.
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I could get out there, I could speak to people like you, Callie, I could get on radio shows and TV shows.
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I and um I could do more.
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And I was really fortunate I was able to join the UCLA um rape treatment center um advisory board, and I have connected with the an organization called RAIN, which is the Rape and Incest National Network, and I have the I've been having the ability to go out and speak publicly.
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And I got another gift because you know, I had all the time of my life been an attorney and I've worked hard, and I realized that you know what, I didn't need the royalties from this book.
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I could do better if I gave those royalties to someone else and these these organizations.
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So that was my other gift, was that I I call this my third act.
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Because my first act as a young girl, um, I didn't really touch on it, but I I started my career as a nurse and then went to law school.
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And now I'm in my third act, which is writer and advocate.
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And as part of my third act, I was able to donate, I've been able to donate money from the book.
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And the book's done surprisingly well.
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It's it's become a bestseller, you see USA Today bestseller.
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I was able to write my first check to Larape and Incest National Network for$3,000 and give them money.
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So this is where my story is today.
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I've gone through it kind of quicker than I normally do.
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I have this book.
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It's called Such a Pretty Picture.
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And um the book, as I said, the royalties, I'm not the publisher's money is the publisher's money, but the money for the the book what is um um goes to the rape and incest national network now and to uh local local rape treatment centers, including the UCLA rape treatment center.
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I also get to volunteer once a week.
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I I get to go and I have the best job ever.
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It's non-paying, but I get to be um at where in LA the the rape treatment center has a program called Steward House where they bring children who have been abused.
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Um they come into Stewart House and they have their entire um the police are there, the social workers are there, everyone is in one place, the forensic social workers.
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And so the child doesn't have to tell their story ten times to ten different people.
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They can they can tell their story once to the forensic, um forensic psych um social worker or psychologist, and and there those other people are kind of listening in a room below, they get to see it, and but there's also this huge playroom, so it's a long day for the kids because they have to either talk, the parents, if they're non-perpetrating, have to talk, and I get to be the playlist for the kids when they come in, which is really great because I'm gonna tell you, I never got to play as a child, so and I get to play with the kids when they go.
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Oh, that is so cool.
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That is so cool.
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It is incredible.
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Yeah, that is incredible.
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You're you're an amazing uh young lady, and um, and you are giving back in so many ways.
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Um it's just amazing to hear from you.
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Thank you here on on the show.
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Your your book is deeply uh personal.
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What gave you the courage to finally put your experience into writing?
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Well, and it's funny because I have a degree in writing, but I always wrote fiction, and I was like, no way, never gonna write a memoir, never gonna write this story.
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But like I said, I think it was reading the other um survivors of other things and sexual um other kinds of sexual abuse as part of the Me Too movement that really helped because I was reading everybody come forward and I was inspired.
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And I was inspired by Maya Angelo, I was inspired by inspired by a couple other writers whose whose work I had read, a woman named Silw, you know, Sue Sue William Solerman and also Dorothy Allison and reading their books, I was like, well, they did it, they told their stories, and so that helped.
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Um, I wasn't an easy process.
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I second guessed myself a lot.
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I I cried a lot.
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Um, like I said, I went back in therapy, and there were a lot of moments where I I questioned, like, why am I doing this to myself?
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Like, do I really need to go back here?
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I've had all this therapy, but I really it it became clearer and clearer to me that I could maybe help somebody.
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And honestly, I got to help myself.
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Um, I get to live this whole other life now, you know, which is is which is dedicated toward toward doing something that's purposeful, which is when I in the time that I was practicing law, I I I was worked at for profits and non-for-profits, but I did work at and I always thought I want to do something more.
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I mean, it's great, I I had a good salary, I had a good job, but I want to do something more with my life.
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I want to look back on my life and say, I gave people something that maybe to help make the world another better place.
00:17:49.519 --> 00:18:10.319
So I think knowing that that I was gonna do that, and the more that I got into it and started following the survivor community, you know, unbeknownst to me, the survivor community, you know, all of these stories were gonna start blowing up, I think, because of Epstein and some of the things that we've all been been reading about.
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You know, I didn't know that that was gonna happen when I started writing.
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But the more that I read, the more that I realize, you know, I know about the statistics, and you know, the sexual abuse among children is really, really high.
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It's one in four girls and one in six boys.
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And unfortunately, 90% of those cases are from somebody the child knows.
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So knowing that I wasn't alone really, really kind of helped me.
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As I as I started reading more about this, I realized that I could, you know, so that that was part of it.
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I think that's how I stayed inspired.
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Although it wasn't easy.
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I mean, a lot of selling the, you know, getting the book published was really hard.
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I was told on no uncertain terms several times that the lighting was good.
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And I I think it is, actually.
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I'm gonna let I'll let myself own that.
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And um, and then uh um, but I was told that you know, neither I nor my father was famous enough to merit this memoir.
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And the point is, this doesn't just happen to famous people, it happens to regular people.
00:19:20.880 --> 00:19:23.119
I mean, my father was a college professor.
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My mother was, you know, not, you know, she wasn't educated, she didn't have a degree when I was young, but she got a job as a teacher.
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My family was, you know, middle class to upper middle class family.
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And what I learned, you know, this isn't a crime, this the crime of child sexual abuse, it's not a crime of race, it's not a crime of socioeconomics, it's not a crime of religion, it's not any of these things.
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This is a crime of opportunity.
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And I started realizing I want people to know that this exists because maybe there's a kid somewhere that's suffering and is going to be able to get the help that they need, and that can change the trajectory of their lives.
00:20:02.880 --> 00:20:12.640
Maybe they're not gonna cut themselves to sh to pieces or act out promiscuously, or want to kill themselves by the time they're 14 years old.
00:20:12.880 --> 00:20:17.680
You know, maybe all of those things can be spared for that one child.
00:20:18.720 --> 00:20:19.519
That's true.
00:20:20.240 --> 00:20:23.680
So the title itself is powerful.
00:20:24.319 --> 00:20:33.599
Um, what does such a pretty face, you know, the picture, to symbolize yeah, the picture would symbolize to you emotionally.
00:20:34.559 --> 00:20:38.000
So I I have to be honest because that's what I am.
00:20:38.240 --> 00:20:39.680
I didn't come up with the title.
00:20:39.839 --> 00:20:42.240
My um I was really struggling with the title.
00:20:42.319 --> 00:20:46.720
I had all kinds of titles, complicit, you know, all these different titles.
00:20:47.039 --> 00:21:01.440
And my publisher helped me find it, but there's a line in my book where my mother and I are looking at a picture of me when sh I'm a baby and she's holding me, and she says, such a pretty picture.
00:21:02.400 --> 00:21:23.839
And I I it, you know, and it was a p in I in the book I write, and at the time I I thought I was about 10, that was the time in my life where I was happy or my mother loved me, because my mother got a little cold, got very cold and distant to me after the abuse happened.
00:21:23.920 --> 00:21:25.920
I mean, she really couldn't handle it.
00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:38.480
So I think what the title means to me, you know, why I stuck with it when they suggested it, it means it it was so perfect because the my family was a pretty picture.
00:21:38.640 --> 00:21:42.799
I mean, if you looked at us from the outside, everything looked perfect.
00:21:43.039 --> 00:21:48.880
The, you know, looking if you didn't open the door, uh as long as you kept the door closed.
00:21:48.960 --> 00:21:51.519
And to some extent, I was a pretty picture.
00:21:51.680 --> 00:21:56.559
You know, I was I had gone, like I said, to nursing school, to school for nursing.
00:21:56.640 --> 00:21:59.680
I went to a good college, I I had gotten scholar.
00:22:00.559 --> 00:22:05.119
To school, I went to law school, I was had a good job.
00:22:05.440 --> 00:22:12.319
I always, you know, was really careful about the way that I presented myself in public.
00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:16.480
You know, I was a pretty picture for lack of a better term.
00:22:16.640 --> 00:22:25.680
So and the uh on the book cover that they gave me, the lines, there's little lines though crossed out through the words.
00:22:26.079 --> 00:22:27.440
They're very small.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:28.000
Uh-huh.
00:22:28.240 --> 00:22:34.559
I'll show you the book cover because I have you can see the little lines are crossed out.
00:22:34.880 --> 00:22:35.279
Yes.
00:22:35.440 --> 00:22:40.480
In in just almost so, because it's not such a pretty picture after all.
00:22:41.200 --> 00:22:50.880
And and that was what it meant to me was that you know, we we can't just rely on the outside because we don't know what's happening to people inside.
00:22:51.359 --> 00:22:59.680
Uh, you know, where I volunteer, they give the children one year of therapy as well as a non-perpetrating parent.
00:23:00.160 --> 00:23:03.599
And you know, like I said, it makes such a big difference.
00:23:03.839 --> 00:23:10.720
But if you just rely on the pretty picture, everybody can pretend to a point, and then we can't.
00:23:11.039 --> 00:23:24.799
And that's what I've learned about this too, is that you know, a lot of people try to just any kind of childhood sexual trauma or abuse, some people try to pretend it doesn't happen, and it always catches up with you.
00:23:25.119 --> 00:23:35.359
There's just you can't, it just is going the secret for me almost became as bad as the abuse, if you if that can make sense to you.
00:23:35.920 --> 00:23:42.559
Yeah, because you were keeping it inside and it was hurting you more, and you want to tell somebody, so that yeah, that does make sense.
00:23:42.880 --> 00:23:44.400
Does make a lot of sense.
00:23:44.640 --> 00:23:44.880
Yeah.
00:23:45.200 --> 00:23:54.960
So while writing your memoir, what was was there a chapter um that was the hardest for you to revisit?
00:23:56.319 --> 00:24:03.519
Well, I think the first chapter is the the scene of the molestation was really hard for me to revisit.
00:24:03.680 --> 00:24:07.599
Um, I I I think there were chapters throughout.
00:24:07.839 --> 00:24:19.039
Um there was another chapter in about the mid um early in the book that um that was um hard.
00:24:19.279 --> 00:24:29.920
My mother, as I said, turned away from me after, and when she got her sight back, she really didn't uh I I sort of changed our relationship.
00:24:30.079 --> 00:24:31.839
I became her protector.
00:24:32.079 --> 00:24:35.759
I was so worried that I would hurt her again, like kept that wing.
00:24:36.400 --> 00:24:44.240
And she started my mother had her own breakdown and she would hit me all the time, all the time.
00:24:44.640 --> 00:24:54.880
And I realized, you know, I I thought as a little kid that I, you know, she hit me because there was something bad about me.
00:24:55.039 --> 00:25:00.960
And I I was a pretty hyper-vigilant, well-be hyper well-behaved child.
00:25:01.759 --> 00:25:08.319
And there was a chapter I wrote about um the first time with somebody I know died.
00:25:08.559 --> 00:25:10.880
I went to the funeral with my mother.
00:25:11.039 --> 00:25:19.200
We were we're Jewish, and there's a there's something called um sitting Shiva, um, that that Jewish people do.
00:25:19.359 --> 00:25:22.799
It's like they sit, and it's every religion has it.
00:25:22.960 --> 00:25:24.480
It's a mourning period.
00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:28.880
And we went to pay our respects to um the this family.
00:25:28.960 --> 00:25:41.839
It was my friend's grandmother, and I was about, I was just about five to three-quarters, and I I noticed that everybody was was very sad, very, very sad.
00:25:42.160 --> 00:25:57.839
And and they all were crying, you know, the family particularly, other people were eating, but the family I noticed was sad, and I it hit me that they really loved the grandmother because they missed her so much, and I wanted to make my mother love me again.
00:25:58.720 --> 00:26:03.440
So I didn't really know what death was, but I was starting to have some idea.
00:26:03.599 --> 00:26:05.920
I was a pretty precocious kid, too.
00:26:06.160 --> 00:26:14.000
And um, I thought if I die, then my mother will love me again.
00:26:15.119 --> 00:26:24.000
So I and uh this was harder to write, more even harder in some ways than the abuse, although that was pretty hard.
00:26:24.160 --> 00:26:26.559
Um some of the abuse scenes were very hard.
00:26:26.799 --> 00:26:31.200
I stuffed my I I stuffed my nose with toilet paper.
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