This Happened to Me: A Reckoning

This Happened to Me: A Reckoning

by Kate Price

Released August 5, 2025

Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. At the insistence of her mother, and through her academic accomplishments, Price escaped the unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse that had plagued her family for generations. She started a new life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in pursuit of her master’s and PhD. But despite having left this dark world behind, it still kept a firm grip on her.

Overcome with unexplainable grief and sadness and having sustained a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a “chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones,” Price sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist to help heal her constant emotional pain through EMDR therapy. He went on to write the bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, which features Price's story, as the two worked together to find out about her past. When Price, whose brain had been protecting her by shutting out these horrific memories, felt safe enough, she along with van der Kolk as her guide, discovered what that darkness that lay within her was. Her father had abused and trafficked her as a child.

Price grappled with what had been revealed. Did this really happen to her? How could a parent do this to a child? A dedicated researcher and academic, she knew she needed confirmation, proof that what she had remembered had happened. And so began a 10-year quest alongside a journalist, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned evidence Price had been searching for.

Kate Price is an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, a gender-based research institute at Wellesley College. She is also a senior research scholar at the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars, an advisor for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Child Sex Trafficking Expert Working Group and Global Platform for Child Exploitation Policy, and an alumni scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. An internationally recognized child sex trafficking expert and lecturer, Price’s research has influenced the passage of state-level children’s human rights legislation. Price is the recipient of a My Life, My Choice Beacon of Light Award, a Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize medal, a Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award from the International Centers for Research on Women, and an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship. She has worked extensively with trauma pioneers Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, in which Price is featured, and Dr. Judith Herman. Price received her MA in gender/cultural studies from Simmons College and earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.