“Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, but no one blames Melania Trump for marrying the wrong man or say she is embarrassing her children when he is all over the news for sleeping with prostitutes. “
This is Cagney Richards story. This post once served as a password-protected evidence archive for her book, The Exposé: 40 Years, 40 Acres, but now it is public by demand.
There is a question I have been asked again and again while trying to escape trafficking, violence, and systemic injustice:
“Do you have any family?”
It sounds harmless, even compassionate, but anyone who has survived abuse knows exactly what this question really measures:
- How protected are you?
- Who will come looking for you?
- Who will hold us accountable if we fail you?
Law enforcement knows it.
Courts know it.
CPS knows it.
Advocates know it.
Abusers know it best.
Isolation is not accidental, it is strategic.
A survivor with a strong, supportive family behind them is a liability to institutions that prefer convenience over justice.
A survivor with no one behind them is the perfect victim: easy to dismiss, easy to discredit, easy to lose in the system.
And dysfunctional families know this too.
They create the isolation, then punish you for being alone, then hand that isolation to the system as proof that you are the problem.
My lack of family is not a coincidence.
It is the first chapter of the story, the foundation that made the later abuses possible:
- Childhood abuse was denied and minimized
- My removal by Louisiana DCFS and placement in foster care was hidden
- Scapegoating has lasted decades because they declare, “Cagney’s the problem“
- A family that prioritizes appearance and rewards silence
This abandonment is what predators and institutions profited from. Abusers and systems share one strategy: Isolate the victim so no one ever believes them when they finally speak out.
They knew no one was coming for me.
They knew no one would challenge them.
They knew I was the child who grew up without protection, so they assumed I would be the woman easy to get rid of.
Before anyone reads further, before anyone judges my case or my credibility, there is one thing we must all be able to anticipate:
Anticipating the Smear
When you expose abuse, you expose the people who depend on your silence.
Every survivor eventually learns the same truth:
⚠️ Breaking your silence does not free you from retaliation, it provokes it.
Cutting the shackles is never met with applause from those who forged them.
Families weaponize unity.
Abusers weaponize fear.
Institutions weaponize doubt.
Then they spin the Lazy Susan and gaslight you about reality…or is it jurisdiction?
So let’s skip the theatrics and acknowledge what’s coming.
WHAT THEY WILL SAY vs THE REALITY
✅What Dominique & his enablers will say:
“She’s unstable. She’s keeping him from his children. She’s lying about everything.”
Reality:
This is projection.
His own history includes:
- 2013 Felony DV charges from his first marriage
- Court-ordered anger management by the Army
- His own admission to his own childhood abuse
- Trafficking me using military resources (How did I get to Chicago, IL?)
- The death of our child Adryan (State and Federally recognized)
- Substantiated CPS findings in 2020 (he confessed to abusing me in front of our children)
- His confessions of abuse to VA, Therapist, and on video in the privacy of our Crown Point, Indiana apartment
- Three OWI charges (as of Oct 7, 2025)
My “instability” is simply the truth he cannot control.
✅What my Maternal relatives will say:
“She’s the problem. She didn’t go to my mother’s funeral. She’s jealous of us.”
Reality:
Louisiana DCFS intervened when I was a child.
Babies don’t “cause” neglect, parents do.
Their addictions, violence, DUIs, fraud, dysfunction, and family conflict long predated me.
I became their scapegoat because they are allergic to shame and accountability.
I didn’t skip my mother’s funeral.
I was not permitted to be part of it.
✅What institutions will say:
“She files too many reports. No evidence. Not credible.”
Reality:
Police and agencies admit:
- They never investigated
- They closed everything at patrol level
- They refused to collect evidence
- They contradicted themselves in their own statements
- They kept redirecting me to the FBI, the DOJ, or anywhere but them
You cannot claim “no evidence” when you refuse to gather any.
It is easier to discredit a survivor than admit systemic failure.
The Purpose of This Record
This record is not written to protect the image of anyone who harmed me.
It is written to:
- Honor myself and my children
- Honor those who did not survive
- Honor those still fighting
- Honor those who have not yet found their voice
This is not a plea for sympathy.
This is a documentation of abuse, betrayal, institutional failure, and my refusal to carry shame that was never mine.
Forgiveness, to me, is the ability to speak openly in truth without becoming what they are.
Forgiveness does not erase crimes.
Forgiveness restores humanity.
Family Reactions: A Mirror of Hypocrisy
My relatives had no hesitation bonding out Jaylynn Burbank who killed three people in a DUI.
But when I am trying to escape trafficking, seek justice for my murdered baby, and report sexual exploitation, suddenly they need to:
- “research,”
- “make sure the story checks out,”
- “look into it so they don’t look like boo-boo the fool.”
When I am harmed, it becomes:
“You must’ve done something.”
“Why didn’t you just leave/call?”
“My number never changed.”
“You put yourself in that situation.”
But when they harm someone, it becomes:
“Only God can judge.”
“People make mistakes.”
“Think of our trauma.”
“Family sticks together.”
My Facebook posts dating back to 2013 are filled with me praising people who hated me. In fact, I have never posted or stated anything disparaging about anyone, ever. However, can they say the same?
Drug and alcohol issues that leads to the death of three people a “mistake”?
And the “family” issues don’t end there.
Researching public records show every last one of them with issues paying bills, issues with speeding, issues with non-profit parties leading to shoot-outs (in which someone died), and Medicaid fraud. Don’t believe me, $20 is all you need to fact-check me, most is free with a basic account.
In contrast, I have no criminal record and lost my collector’s car (2001 VW Beetle TDI) due to being trafficked and unable to pay back the title loan I took out to try to escape.
Their empathy is selective.
Their outrage is conditional.
Their support is performative.
Maintaining image and community notoriety is more important.
After all, they didn’t spend all those years isolating me for no reason.
The Double Standard They Refuse to See
My half-sister Sam openly shares that she endured domestic violence with her children’s father.
I absorbed the physical abuse so her children wouldn’t have to grow up watching what I did.
And yet somehow:
- It wasn’t Sam’s fault she was abused.
- It wasn’t her fault she dropped out of high school.
- It wasn’t her fault she got pregnant, had an abortion, and then had three children by a man who didn’t want to claim them.
(You can find the paternity case and his failure to pay child support in public records.)
But every single thing Dominique did to me — the abuse, the trafficking, the violations, the threats, the isolation, the homicide that was never investigated, the threats to take my surviving children — is somehow my fault.
In their logic:
Her abuse = excusable.
My abuse = deserved.
The truth is simple:
People only question a woman’s credibility when they’re afraid of what her truth reveals about them.
In my case, it reveals I have been surviving life more than living it since the day I was born and blamed for it.
Now, that is weaponized against me as a personal failure and a illogical reason to question my “credibility”.
The Role of the Scapegoat
In dysfunctional families:
There is always one. The scapegoat — the repository for unspoken sins.
They are blamed for problems they didn’t create and punished for wounds that aren’t theirs.
This keeps the family illusion intact. “If they’re the problem, then we are fine.”
That was my assigned role.
While violence, addiction, and neglect tore through our household, I was labeled:
“Too much.”
“Difficult.”
“The one who didn’t show up.”
It was easier for them to call me broken than to face their own reflection.
Isolation as a Weapon
Abusers know that isolation is the purest form of control.
My family does not believe I can exist outside of Louisiana, outside of their influence.
They kept me from my mother in her final days, took her phone, and painted me as someone who “upset her.”
At her funeral, they told others I chose not to attend, erasing the reality:
I asked to contribute financially.
I dedicated a poem.
I begged to be included.
The truth?
I was not wanted there.
And even if I had been, I was trapped, abused, and raped while they buried her.
This is how scapegoating works:
Erase context, then blame the victim for the isolation you created.
The Crime of Truth-Telling
What made me dangerous was not my brokenness, but my clarity.
When I began speaking about:
- My childhood abuse
- The trafficking
- The death of my child
- The ongoing violence
- The patterns we all witnessed growing up
I became the threat.
With our mother gone, the family finally had the full stage to rewrite history.
Suddenly I had “kept them apart.”
Suddenly I had “pitted everyone against each other.”
I was the baby sister — 8 and 12 years younger — but somehow held responsible for conflicts that began before I was born.
They triggered me publicly, then used my reactions as “proof”:
- “See? Cagney has an attitude problem.”
- See? That’s why we don’t deal with her.”
Reactive abuse weaponized as reputation destruction.
How Discrediting works for abusers
Abusers have two primary tactics:
1. “We’re too nice to be abusers.”
They parade their good behavior in public so no one believes the harm done in private.
2. “We all agree — she’s the problem.”
Systems love consensus.
It relieves them from responsibility.
Police, CPS, agencies, attorneys all found it easier to agree with the narrative than investigate the truth.
But here is the flaw:
People who lie do not preserve evidence.
Survivors do.
Institutions That Betrayed
The family’s narrative did not stay in the family.
It leaked into the very systems meant to protect me.
Police dismissed my reports as “far-fetched.”
CPS substantiated abuse but failed to act.
Attorneys minimized my trauma.
Teachers ignored bullying.
Officials looked away.
The message was constant:
“You are not credible.”
“You are the problem.”
What I am facing as a trafficking survivor is the adult reenactment of my childhood but this time, I have children depending on me to break the cycle.
They deserve the life I never had. Breaking generational trauma begins with courage and truth.
Evidence Preserved
Unlike many survivors who are left only with memories, I have a substantial body of evidence that documents:
- The abuse I endured as a child
- The trafficking, violence, and coercion in adulthood
- The systemic failures that followed
- The family dynamics that perpetuated the harm
Every screenshot, voicemail, police report, public record, text message, CPS finding, and transcript is preserved in a secure digital archive — not to prove my worth, but to prove the truth.
Below is a summary of what this evidence reveals.
Venita Voicemail July 2017
One month after, what they thought was a joyous moment – the wedding, here comes the harassment that I am attacking/upsetting mom.
Venita often has selective Alzheimer’s. If you pay attention, she tells on herself every single time with the same narrative which is: I am the problem and “everyone agrees” (isolation by herd mentality), she doesn’t know what’s going (to escape accountability) & if all else fails – use mom (to reinforce the isolation and abuse as defense).
Emailing me about Kourtney’s birth of her child and asking about my wedding, then claiming you don’t know about the wedding months later while also asking me to tell Dominique “Hi” is intentional cognitive dissonance.
Sam Voicemail August 8, 2017
If I just call them first, then they can allow me to speak to my mom. You know, because I upset her.😒👌😂
This voicemail reveals what was actually happening behind the scenes:
- They believed I was in a healthy relationship and preparing to marry.
- My happiness threatened their control.
- They attempted to sabotage my relationship and narrative.
- They rushed Kourtney and Rashaun’s wedding in direct response to mine.
As Kourtney said herself:
“Rashaun said we can’t let Cagney get married first.”
The public records, messages, and timelines make their intentions undeniable.
Mom Voicemail August 2017
Use of her failing health to lure me back in. No apologies, no denial of family dysfunction, just blame-shifting that my absence is somehow hurting her last dying wish.
Mom Voicemail September 2017
Welp, what have we all learned? Emotional manipulation. It was about keeping tabs, not genuine concern.
The Pattern Is Clear: Narrative Control
Abuse → Blame → Discredit → Isolate → Abandon → Blame again.
They abused me, denied me, erased me, and then held me responsible for the aftermath of their own actions.
This pattern repeats in the systemic failures I faced with Dominique.
Their stories change.
Their tactics change.
But the theme is always the same:
“We didn’t fail her, she failed us.”
Except I didn’t.
And the evidence proves it.
On August 1, 2025, my half-sister Venita recorded more than two hours of our conversation.
I consented, believing this could finally:
- Document my isolation
- Demonstrate the danger
- Show the truth of what happened
- Show my willingness to cooperate
- Help me get support for me and my children
Venita asked probing questions.
I answered every one.
I cried through the trauma — the death of my child, the rape on the day of my mother’s funeral.
I was transparent, vulnerable, and honest.
Instead of compassion, she used my pain as performance.
When we later requested copies for legal and safety purposes, they refused to release them.
This is the hallmark of abusers and enablers:
- They record you when they think your trauma will entertain or benefit them.
- They hide the evidence when it reveals their complicity.
Proof of the recorded call with Venita on 8.1.2025
Gonzales Police Department Police Report – Rewrite the narrative
Far-fetched eh? How convenient for the people and systems of abuse to re-write the narratives.
Sam, the eldest half-sister, well:
- She acknowledged the abuse.
- She admitted what we all endured in childhood.
- She recognized the domestic violence I lived through with her and Bubba (her baby-daddy).
- She put all her grandchildren on the phone to greet me.
- She sent family photos to reiterate the image of their “unity”.
Acknowledging abuse in private while denying it in public is a classic scapegoating tactic.
They didn’t want me at my mom’s funeral (Dominique wouldn’t allow it anyway) and sent a photo of my dead mother in her casket.
The poem I dedicated to my mom, placed under a photo of her and her great-grandchild.
How many photos of me and my mom was there? ONE! Ask them, they will blame me for that too.
I was raped on that day and forced to look at that photo of my mother dead in her casket during. My entire pregnancy, Dominique kept saying that it was my mom in me.
Recorded call with Venita, Advocate (crisis center), friends and Legal on 8.11.2025
Venita performed and exploded with anger on a call with a registered nurse, a crisis center advocate, my friends and legal team. She blamed me for the impossible, lacked empathy and said I was “dumping all this on us!” Venita would call the crisis center back and bring up my absence from my mother’s funeral, as if to say that me and my children were deserving of what we have suffered because of that.
Sam blocked my number. Venita did as well.
The same pattern systemic abuse follows:
1. Law enforcement closes all reports at patrol level with no reports passed to investigations, then state they have investigated.
2. Law enforcement states there is no evidence of abuse or murder, but they refuse to collect evidence and investigate?
3. Law enforcement’s loyalty to image control and institutional protection overrides their duty.
And just like the dysfunctional family, isolation is the honey pot and public scrutiny their worst enemy.
We sent a formal email request for the recordings, copied to authorities for documentation.
There was no response.
Their silence is evidence.
Their avoidance is evidence.
Their refusal to release my recorded statements is evidence.
It closes the loop and exposes the truth:
They were never trying to help me.
They were collecting information to weaponize later.
The Ultimate Erasure
Let me also inform you readers that the succession started for my mother’s house was done in 2020, without notice to me, one of three heirs. Just like the money left to me under the tutorship of Sam was never given to me.
Sam and Venita initiated it and had Sam’s daughters, Lyssa and Kourtney, sign the affidavit.
Kourtney and Rashaun are still using my mother’s address as their basketball non-profit address.
While Venita resides in the home, as usual because without her New Orleans relatives and the land conveyances she has nothing, and they are paying mortgage and taxes.
However, the USDA loan (FMHA) isn’t over until 12/08/2026.
Maybe they thought using the address for business or living in it absolved my 1/3 ownership?
Their attorney Cherie Teamer Henley seems like she got stuck in that mess, but I made sure to reach out and let her know, “You only knew what they told you, but ‘Here I go!’“
See in Louisiana, successions (probate) require proper notice to all heirs under the Code of Civil Procedure (e.g., Art. 2951 for judicial openings, or even in extrajudicial ones, notice is key to validity). Excluding me without formal notice make the proceedings challengeable, grounds for annulment or reopening (with a 5-year limit from discovery for fraud claims, per Civ. Code Art. 2032). Sam’s continuous Facebook outreach shows she knew how to contact me, but chose not to for the succession.
So, go ahead let them try to sue for defamation, but all of this evidence in this post (and please believe I have far more) undermines their credibility and supports truth as an absolute defense (La. Civ. Code Art. 2315; truth isn’t defamatory). They would have to answer to their actions and all that dislike in numbers don’t hold weight without solid evidence of me EVER causing them any harm, because it doesn’t exist. And by Sam’s own admission, they failed me not the other way around.
What does Dominique, the “System”, and My Maternal Relatives All Have In Common?
They mistook my ability to withstand abuse as ignorance and acceptance. They thought being empathetic and kind meant being weak and afraid.
They grew more emboldened in their crimes because they truly believed their notoriety would be a defense, “But you all know us, we are so kind and we are active in the community! We got kids bikes!”
There isn’t one person caught in crime that people aren’t flooding the comments saying, “OMG he/she/they were so nice, I never would have never thought!” Yet, every last one of their victims was disbelieved until there was a mountain of evidence exposed.
What does that say about society?
Victims are guilty until proven innocent and abusers are innocent until proven guilty. Sick.
I was a baby. Stripped from my mother, chosen as the scapegoat, traumatized and isolated. That left me prime picking for abuse by perpetrators like Dominique and for systemic failure. Their logic, “If she doesn’t have anyone that cares for her, why should we?!”
40 years of evidence:
Isolation was their greatest weapon – going public breaks it
Silence didn’t protect me – it enabled them
Playing by the rules didn’t help – systems failed me repeatedly
Staying quiet didn’t earn me support – it made me easier to dismiss
After years of prolonged trauma (PTSD) and their intentional infliction of harm, it has risen to the point the state recognizes it isn’t safe for me or my children to remain here in Michigan.
So, when my husband (trafficker) and family (maternal relatives) tell you I am “making it up” are they also accusing Advocates, Crisis Centers, Senators, Governors, Congress, CPS, Attorney General and the DOJ of making it up too?
Absolutely not!
