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TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses about sexual assault.
No one deserves to be violated. But for those who have faced such a miserable situation, they could experience trauma-healing through the power of resilience. In this episode, Corinna Bellizzi sits down with Delicia Niami, a survivor of sexual assault and kidnapping. She looks back on how these heartbreaking experiences turned her into a stronger woman and an inspiring author who now leads other abused individuals towards transformation. Corinna and Delicia also delve into the importance of upholding your rights, the dangers of Trumpism, and how the looming Project 2025 initiative could reshape the US government for the worse.
Human Trafficking Hotline:
- By phone: 1-888-373-7888
- By email: help@humantraffickinghotline.org
- By text: text HELP to 233733 (BEFREE)
Online chat: humantraffickinghotline.org
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
National Runaway Safeline: 800-RUN-AWAY
About Delicia Niami
Delicia Niami is an inspiring author whose life journey has transformed her into a symbol of resilience. From a young age, she faced unimaginable trauma, including a kidnapping that took her to a distant land. Raised by a single mother in California’s challenging neighborhoods, Delicia’s early years were marked by struggle. Her deeply vulnerable memoir, Kissing Asphalt, chronicles her triumphs and hardships, from abduction to surviving a devastating assault at seventeen. Through her eloquent storytelling, Delicia aims to help others, using her own experiences to inspire and provide solace. Her memoir series, Resilient AF, is a testament to her unwavering commitment to overcoming adversity and prioritizing personal happiness. Delicia Niami’s resilience and dedication shine through her poignant writing, inviting readers to find strength in the face of darkness.
Guest Website: https://www.delicianiami.com
Additional Resources Mentioned:
https://www.kissingasphalt.com
Show Notes:
01:24 – Looking Back
04:01 – Trip To Baghdad
07:12 – Getting Kidnapped
09:41 Resilience And Positivity
12:23 – Writing Process
18:58 – Sexual Assault
25:12 – Disempowerment
32:04 – Idiocracy
36:33 – Project 2025
40:08 – Book Series
48:30 – Episode Wrap-Up
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Trauma-Healing, Project 2025, And Trumpism With Delicia Niami
We’re going to deepen our discussion about trauma and the sorts of things that we all need to do as individuals to be resilient and overcome. I am joined by someone local to me, Delicia Niami. She is an aspiring author whose life journey has transformed her into a symbol of resilience. From a young age, she faced unimaginable trauma, including a kidnapping that took her to a distant land, her deeply vulnerable memoir Kissing Asphalt chronicles her triumphs and her hardships.
She joins me to talk about this work and her memoir series Resilient AF and you know what that AF stands for. Now, I will preclude this episode with a bit of a trigger warning, much like when we dove into the challenges around sexual assault and sex trafficking when we interviewed the director and producer of California’s Forgotten Children. We may tread into territory that makes you a little uncomfortable. If you have young children with you, it may be time to pause and revisit this at a later time. With that, I’m welcoming her. Delicia, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
Looking Back
It’s lovely to have you here. Now, as we get started, I know you have quite an audacious story to tell, but before we dig into the substance of that, I’d love for you to kick us off with what inspires you and what you hope will be the effect of telling your story in this raw and vulnerable way through your memoir and through coming on shows like this one.
I’m happy to. That’s the entire reason why I wrote my story. It was not to put my horrific life out there into the world but more to inspire others. Psychics had told me several times that if I wrote my story, it would be turned into a television movie or something like that. I kept thinking to myself, “Why? What would be the point of that? There’s no purpose of putting trauma out into the world.” It wasn’t until I read the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk that I had so many a-ha moments. One was that I had PTSD for many years and didn’t even know it because I was four when I was in Baghdad. Everybody would ask me, “That must have been so traumatic.”
Now, you’re giving away part of the story.
Sorry.
I want to I want to dig into this together because even the story of how you landed in Baghdad is one of note. I heard a little puppy yelping in the background, so if we need to pause for a moment, that’s okay, too.
No, it’s okay. He wants attention. It’s his touching time.
Maybe we can meet him a little bit.
He’s a sweetheart and that’s a big part of the story, too, but we can get into that. This book is what motivated me to write my story and made me realize that I did have something to say. It wasn’t all about trauma. I made it through and not only did I make it through, I thrived and I’m happy. I am a well-adjusted individual who has friends who love me and have stood by my side for many years. I feel so grateful every day that I get to walk this Earth and to be able to take the trauma that I’ve had and turn it into something beautiful and positive to help others is the greatest gift I’ve ever known in my life.
Trip To Baghdad
I love that and frankly, as I prepped for this interview, I went to look at your audiobook on Amazon. Even just click that sample story to hear five minutes from it. You narrate it. While listening to Kissing Asphalt, I heard you tell the beginning of this very harrowing story in which you described that you thought you would be going on a trip to Disney World and it turned out to be something entirely different. This lands us in Baghdad, but I’d love for you to tell that story and how it changed your perspective on the world.
I wrote a blog post that I put out about what being American and gay means to me. It had a lot to do with me being taken a Bagdad. It has affected my views of the world on a big scale. Nobody’s asked me that question, so it’s very interesting. What happened was I was 4 and my brother was 7. My mother and father had been separated for about a year. She was dating a cop and was on a vacation in a big bear in Southern California.
She had arranged it so that our father was going to pick us up for Easter break and spend five days with us. We hadn’t seen him for months. At four, you don’t understand that. My aunt was watching us and she was in the backyard. We were playing on the front lawn and he showed up and said, “Come on, kids. Let’s go.” We knew we were supposed to go with him, so my brother, three years older than me, said, “I’m going to go get our bags.” He said, “No, don’t worry. I already got all your stuff packed.”
Without thinking about telling our aunt or anything, we hopped in the car and he told us we were going to Disneyland. We ended up at LAX and I didn’t know much, but my brother was like, “Excuse me. This isn’t Disneyland.” He said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m taking you to Disney World. I wanted to surprise you. We have to go on a plane to go to Disney World.” We’re both like, “We’re going to Disney World. We’ve never been there before.”
We got on a plane and twenty hours later, I woke up in Baghdad. He had this all planned out. He had gotten passports. He was in the midst of getting us Iraqi citizenship and it was harrowing. The fact that my mom got us back was huge for me. The end of that chapter ends with her taking us to Disneyland and the safety that I felt. I still cry every time I walk through those arches at Disneyland, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.” Every time, I felt like that little tonnage passageway was my passageway to safety, and I knew that I would never be ripped away from my mom again.
Getting Kidnapped
That’s so touching. I know that having been kidnapped by your father because it’s within the family. It’s almost like, “I’m supposed to be with my dad.” Here you are, a four-year-old and you’re doing what you’re told and was expected of you. I’m hoping that you can help our audience understand what that was like for you and, perhaps, at what stage you were when you were finally able to be back with your mother.
He sent us home on my fifth birthday because the airlines would not allow us to fly any sooner since we were kids. Even though my brother was 8 at the time, he had turned 8 while we were in Baghdad. That was the soonest he could without him coming back with us. The reason he sent us back. It was very interesting having to go through all of the records and data that I have. My mom kept everything, every receipt and every message. Everything from anyone. I was able to go back through everything and see what she had done to try and get us back. It was pretty incredible.
The moment that you crossed state lines, it’s difficult to know, but at least then, you’re within the United States. You’re a day’s travel away easily and multiple flights. That must have been a very disruptive and challenging thing for her to experience. Especially not knowing how you’re doing on a daily basis. As a mother of two young children, that story alone shook me.
It’s a frightening thought and it happens often. This was 1975 when he took us and 1976 when we came back. Imagine, too, without the internet and without the access to that to be able to figure out what to do to get your kids back when they’re in a country where women have zero rights. I don’t know how she did it. Thank God, my mom was tenacious and resourceful. She was able to figure it out. Part of that was she had threatened suicide. There were correspondence letters back and forth between them. One of them was, “I don’t know what you want from me, but I can’t live without my kids. If I don’t have my children back, I’m going to commit suicide.”
Resilience And Positivity
As I think about your work thus far, you have shown yourself to be a survivor in so very many ways. I understand that you came back to the States not even confident anymore and your ability to speak English, then to have to re-engage and learn again in this new space and time. I wanted to see if you could talk a bit about how you think you have been able to retain this resilience and stay positive.
People have asked me that before and I don’t know. I feel like it’s something that was innate in me something that I knew from the time I was a little kid. I was constantly teased in school after we got back and I always had this resilience in me. I remember times where the days would be horrific of people teasing me all day long. It’d be raining and I would walk home by myself. This was elementary school in 3rd or 4th grade.
When I was by myself, I felt happy. I would dance and sing in the rain and pretend like I was Gene Kelly. It was fun. I had fun and I don’t know where it came from after being bashed down so much all day. I knew that I had to find that joy somehow and someway. I had to figure it out, even if it was something as silly as dancing and singing in the middle of the street. I had to do that and I still do that to this day.
It’s funny because people look at little kids doing that and think, “That’s so cute.” People look at adults doing that and think, “What a lunatic.” Part of my thing is like, “Why aren’t we allowed to have fun as adults? Why aren’t we allowed to dance and sing in the street and play in the rain? Why is it cute for kids and not for adults?” We’re allowed to find our joy.
For adults, it looks like sports. That’s the socially accepted place, so to speak, or surfing or bounding up walls as a rock climber or mountain biking and things along these lines. Dancing is something that we don’t explore enough as adults.
Also, playing.
There’s something to that. Where I have children, being a goofball is suddenly socially acceptable again.
Exactly, and now, hopefully, with my puppy, it’ll be socially acceptable again for me to be a goofball as well because I am ultimately a goofball at heart.
Writing Process
I was curious and this has to do with the process of bringing your books to fruition because you sent me the audiobook for Kissing Asphalt, which was step one. Now you have step two, Not My Circus, and then the next installment, which you’ll be releasing later. What made you choose to separate this into three books? What can people expect from that? I understand that you’ve taken a bit of a non-traditional approach to writing a memoir for one, and then I have my own thoughts about the first story you tell in Not My Circus.
I wanted to do it all in one book until I started taking memoir classes and I realized that memoir is a slice of life. Since I’m not a known person, I couldn’t write an autobiography that was 800 pages. Instead, they encouraged me, and I felt like I couldn’t inspire people enough unless I told my whole story. They were able to see from start to finish the life that I lived and how I overcame that. That was my inspiration for splitting it up.
The reason I split it up the way that I did, I didn’t mean to do something that was a faux pas in memoir, which is leaving it with a cliffhanger. I did mean to do that in one sense because I had to continue the story. There’s something that happens in the first part of Not My Circus that plays into a later part of my story without giving it away too much. It’s a very poignant piece in my story, my healing journey and my a-ha moment, which didn’t come until later.
I try not to write forward-thinking stuff in my books. I’m trying to keep it in the space that I met at that time so that when people come to the third book, they are with me, like they’re living this with me. That was my goal, but it was important in the second book to have the continuation of the end of the first book because it plays out. People will see it and they’ll be like, “I see why she did that now.”
As we started this episode, I started the show with a trigger warning because some of the things that we can talk about, including sexual assault, can hit people, especially if there are remnants that remind them of their own lives and any capacity. We are to talk about the fact that your mother was killed by murder. That’s a trauma-inducing event and can bring people back to their trauma and open fresh wounds and make for uncomfortability even as that individual might, in the reading of it, be doing their own form of healing as well.
As you kick off this second book, Not My Circus, at least with the portion that you’ve shared with me thus far, which is still in the works. It essentially starts with the story of the sexual trauma of a rape. As it stands, I wonder what your reasoning is first starting off with such a traumatic story, if that was intentional, and what the reader can expect after they get through that initial rip the Band-Aid off the deep dark story.
It’s super intentional because that’s where the first book ends. I’ll just throw it out there since we’re talking about it. The first book ends saying, “Mom, I was just raped.” It goes into the wrap-up of the book, what I think, and all that stuff. Some people hated that. They were like, “She lived through such BS and this is how it ends?” That’s not how it ends and that’s what I want people to know that I do have a happy ending. We’re just not there yet.
This was a continuation of the end of that book where I say, “Mom, I was raped.” It wraps it up for people. The first chapter of Not My Circus is called Unjustified. It talks about how and why the police decided not to prosecute my perpetrators. The reason I didn’t end the first book with that chapter was because it leads into something very poignant and something very important in the second book, which people will wonder about the trustworthy monster chapter number two. In the first book, there’s a trustworthy monster chapter number one and people were wondering, “Where is chapter number two?” It’s in the second book.
What you did do in architecting your books this way in particular is create the desire to continue reading a series. In that way, you did it the way somebody would approach it in a fiction work, but it’s nonfiction, so it strikes a different chord, so to speak.
It didn’t sit well with a lot of people. I call myself raw and edgy. What can I do?
For those people who are waiting for this second book, where are we now, it’s in pre-sale at the present moment on your website, DeliciaNiami.com. If they’re interested in hearing this and continuing your story, when can they expect this book to be available?
The book will be out August 1st, 2024. I am just finishing the very last edits now in design and my distributors are waiting for it. We’ve already got everything else ready to go. I’ll be going to record the audiobook. That takes a little bit longer. The last time, it took Amazon about eight weeks to approve it. I’m hoping the sooner we can get it in, the sooner it’ll be out for everybody because I know a lot of people liked the audiobook. I am recording this one myself as well.
Sexual Assault
That’s fantastic. I’m sure it will be a much loved story. It’s unique to hear it in your own voice as well. I wanted to talk about this perspective because you felt secure enough in your relationship with your mother to essentially go to her right away and say, “Mom, I was raped?” At the time that this happened, it was late ‘80s. I think it was 1988, if I remember correctly.
In that period, people had a hard time looking back and remembering what it was like back then. Also, it varies so much by state what happens in the case of sexual assault when you report and what happens with that reporting, what can be prosecuted versus what can’t, or what the statute of limitations are.
All of these things change by state and it makes it incredibly difficult for people from the outside looking in to understand what that could have been like for you at that moment. I wanted to open the door for you to share that story, at least as it pertains to how you felt about it, the emotions you were running through, and how you feel about it now that you are looking back.
The feelings I had were defeat. It felt like I was somebody who was just a burden to the police as opposed a victim. The reason being was immediately, when I told the police that I was intoxicated and passed out drunk, they said, “Good luck in the future. I hope you’re more careful.” Things have changed quite a bit, thankfully. Back then, they didn’t even have rape kits at the hospital when you came in. They didn’t have these things to test to see. Although, the doctor did do the tests and saw that,”It was clear that you were violated.”
It was haunting in a different way to me, and I’ve never said this on any show, put it in any book, or anything like that. I’m not a sexually active person because of my past. I didn’t have sex since the date that I was raped. That was seventeen. When I was 23, I was diagnosed with HPV and I had been going to the doctor every year. I said, “How was this possible? I don’t have sex. I haven’t had sex since I was seventeen and that was not something that I wanted to do.” The doctor said, “Unfortunately, it can stay dormant in your system for a long time.”
Lucky for me, they froze it all off. They caught it in time. I’m confident it’s not going to cause any more issues in my life because God wouldn’t do that to me. That’s something I had never said. It affected me lifelong, and it wasn’t something I had asked for. I felt like the police weren’t on our side. Rape was something that was looked at like a joke in a way.
Honestly, that’s one thing that scares the bejesus out of me about this upcoming political thing. Trump is saying if he wins, he’s going to give police complete immunity. In this book, you’ll see that’s dangerous. They take that power and abuse it. That’s the problem. I talked about Rodney King in this book and what happened to Rodney King. I talk about the AIDS epidemic, how that came about, and how we were living in the heat of the AIDS epidemic. All my friends who were gay were surrounded by this.
There’s so much that has come about throughout history that people don’t see from back then. It’s important, and that’s why I am trying to put history as a part of my memoir. You’ll see in this memoir where I talk about, for example, there was a time in California when we tried to get equal rights for everyone as far as working rights goes. There was a bill called AB101 and the governor of California vetoed it. This was before we had internet and anything.
As I’m driving, I get stuck at a light the day after he vetoes it. I’m annoyed because I want to get home and get out of traffic. All of a sudden, I hear chanting starting and I’m like, “What is going on? This is ridiculous. This is not a good time in the world.” I worked at the advocate at the time, the National Gay and Lesbian News Magazine. I was steeped in LGBTQ politics.
I rolled down my window and the chanting got louder. All of a sudden, thousands and thousands of protesters lined the streets holding these signs like, “We work just as hard as our straight neighbors.” I just sat in my car and cried. I was like, “How did all these people know to come together without the internet? How did all these people know to band together on the street and come together fighting for their rights at the same time at the same place?” Thousands of them on the street. I was in my early twenties and I had just started to learn about all the discrimination because you’re shielded as a child from that stuff except for the teasing in school, but you don’t know that it happens outside of school until you get outside of school.
The only way to get people in the streets is not through things like social media but through phone trees, letters, and true campaigns. I’ve seen so many very interesting protests erupted over the years of things that were not even possible and the days before, we had a more immediate technology like flash mobs, for example, which is a creative way to come together and sometimes even through the power of dance to disrupt something or be utilize that moment to barricade a road on a day. You’re giving no warning essentially because that’s the only way you can truly disrupt something.
Disempowerment
There’s great power in organizing and there’s great power and showing that through physical protest. In this day and age, it almost feels like we’re being discouraged from utilizing the rights that we have in our hands already. I wanted to bridge this conversation from your experience into something that is at the root of that. When you’ve experienced so much trauma over the years and you could look at things like the COVID pandemic. That is trauma.
You could look at things like the Roe v. Wade being taken away from you. This is political trauma. It’s the government telling you, “You don’t have authority over your own body anymore.” Especially if you’re somebody who is experienced sexual trauma or rape, you have a deeper understanding of what that could mean for somebody because you’ve lived through something like that. Now, we get into a space where it’s almost like we’re all the black sheep that were, therefore, marked an earlier age and we got picked on through school or whatever. Now, what’s happening is an erosion of rights.
People across the country, from coast to coast, yourself and myself included, are starting to feel more disempowered, which is exactly what the political system essentially on that far right side. They want us to feel disempowered. We can’t change anything. You just have to accept it. What was the quote from the Heritage Foundation?
As long as we’re peaceful.
“The second American Revolution will be bloodless as long as the left allows it to be.” I think that’s the direct quote. As close as possible as I can I remember it.
What I say is I’m loved. I’m not a Democrat. I’m a no party because I don’t fit into the Democratic Republic. I believe in a lot of different things, but I am calm and peaceful until you give me a reason not to be. A lot of the people on the left field that way as well. Don’t threaten me with your bloodshed. I’ve got a lot of pent-up rage inside of me from everything that’s happened. It’s like I am scared, and I’ve thought I would move from this country if that happens. I don’t want to live in a country where there are that many bigoted people.
At the same time, I feel like I need to fight for this country. While we’re on this subject, can I say I’m mind-boggled at the Democratic party? If you look at these Trump supporters who are like, “I would vote for him if he killed somebody in front of me.” Joe Biden goes up and messes up on a few words and were like, “Dump him like a piece of trash.” What kind of party does that? You need to support.
In all fairness, it’s more than a couple of words, but that being said, I am voting blue no matter who when it comes to the presidential election.
It’s for our freedoms. It’s for nothing else.
It’s become an issue of freedom. That’s why so many Republicans are jumping ship from the party, at least as it relates to the presidential seat. They’re choosing to vote blue for that reason and it’s about time. What has happened is that the Republican party has essentially become corrupted and it is no longer necessarily the party of conservatism.
We are essentially living in a bizarro world where it is all about the elite class and developing profits for the few while riding on the backs of everybody else. The interesting thing about this is they’ve pulled us into a situation. The very people who will stand to lose the most from this type of system are the ones who are jumping into the streets to vote for Donald Trump, which is terrifying. It goes to show you how brainwashing happens. This is part of what has caused many people to refer to it as a cult. I don’t think it’s any surprise.
I think MAGA should be its own party, personally. I know a lot of Republicans and they’re saying they are not MAGA people. They’re not extremists and White supremacists. They appreciate the fact that we have lower taxes. All of the Republican things that Republicans would run on before that were actual political things to run on, Not like, “I’m a lunatic and this is what I think. Hannibal Lecter’s a great person.”
The fact is that most people are going to end up paying more taxes than they were before. We’re already seeing that from the tax cuts and the tax code that Donald Trump and his time in office landed us in.
Harkening back to what we were talking about before, my time in Baghdad made me very grateful to be an American. My patriotism runs deep. I will never not put my hand on my heart if I’m saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Never. This country means so much to me and I grew up in the ‘70s. I was raised to know that America was a melting pot and it was land of the free and anybody could make something of themselves if you could make it to America.
That’s what I grew up believing and this is totally opposite. It’s not freedom. I say to people, “If I had to pay $100 a gallon for gasoline in exchange for my freedom, I would do it.” Not just because I’m a woman. Also, because I’m a woman of color and I’m gay. I appreciate being free. I like my life. It doesn’t matter and it shouldn’t matter to anybody else, whether I’m dating somebody, which I’m not.
I’m not having sex and making out in front of people. I’m alone. I just want to be free, be me, and feel like I can be without someone bashing me just because of who I am. I do talk about that a lot in the book, too, how the LGBT people have fought so hard for their rights. I feel like things are not even just for us and everybody. It’s being ripped away.
People have fought so hard for their rights. But right now, it is being ripped away from everybody.
It’s a hard time for a lot of people. Frankly, I’m hopeful that we will see the tide turn to something that does get back to protecting our rights again. I know that there are people in Congress and in particular, in the Senate who are putting forward some initiatives to disempower a bit. The Supreme Court has a presently stands from its authoritarian present state. We’ll see what happens.
Go ALC. She rocks. I like her.
She’s in the house and she is quite something. Let’s see what happens with Clarence Thomas and whether or not. His feet are held at a task.
She’ll come in like a Twilight Zone episode or something.
Idiocracy
I have something I wanted to bring up just for the fun of it. Have you ever seen the film Idiocracy?
No.
Terry Crews plays the President of the United States in that film. He’s like this bodybuilder guy with a bandana and long hair. He’s buff and wears an American flag, like bodysuit shorts but like spandex. He’s running for president and gets elected president. They have this initiative where there’s an electrolyte drink called Brawndo, which contains caffeine, electrolytes, and sugars. Through lobbying, the company Brawndo gets this approved as the thing that they’re going to water their crops with. They’re going to throw salts, all sugar and caffeine in all these plants. All the plants go away.
It’s this bizarro universe, but it’s funny. It’s too close to truth now for how our political system is imperative. Terry Crews has started taking to social media as President Camacho, which is his character. The first time I saw it, I thought, “This is a skit. How cute. How funny Terry’s coming onto social to have some fun,” like he did when he had the muscle-flexing drum set thing going. I don’t remember that, but I thought, “He’s having some fun.” Now, he’s doing mock press interviews.
That’s so cool. I got to see this.
I’m just so in love with it. If we can have a little bit of fun at ourselves at the same time that we address the political system and the way that we’ve presently architected how things are working, then there’s hope. That’s not to say I want to be in the bizarro land we’re stuck in. It is to say there’s a way to engage young people, even if it is with a bit of humor to get them to the ballot.
Keep voter rights at the central focus. Make sure that everyone’s registered to vote and have your voice heard. Ensuring that your voice is heard can come in a number of ways. It can come through protests and by speaking up at City Hall. It can come through attending the trial of somebody who deserves to see that an audience bears witness and disproves their behavior of something that happens to just exercise your rights. Use them because my present feeling is if we don’t use our rights, we risk losing them.
I have faith as well and hope that there are way more people. I have faith that he’s going to lose by a landslide because there are enough people in this country who appreciate our freedoms and want to embrace that and embrace our democracy as a country that we have known since its inception and not go backwards to the 1700s.
Also, to hold the rule of law to be applicable to every person so that no person is above the law. I feel like that needs to be the case. I understand the president has certain protections for acts like when Barack Obama sent SEAL Team Six to assassinate.
He didn’t need that because there was nothing he did wrong.
He didn’t do anything that would have been called to questions that we know about, and I will say that we know about it because, frankly, there is so much that is considered confidential and top secret that we will never learn.
When you see that, the most important thing is when you go to other countries and you watch the news in other countries. You realize that the American news, I don’t care about NBC, Fox, or CNN or any of the news and New York Times. They want us to see what they want us to see and that’s all they want us to see and it’s frightening.
American news shows the people what they only want to see.
That’s the reason I listen to podcasts.
Project 2025
That’s the reason why you have to dig deep and share. I shared something on my Facebook that was political, which I don’t normally do. One of the guys I watch on YouTube, Adam Mockler, is this smart 21-year-old kid. He did all these talking points, basically showing how Trump knows about Project 2025, how the people who wrote it worked for him, and how his current press secretary has already made a video for them. All this stuff to combat that.
I know I have some Trump supporters on my Facebook. I thought it was important to put it out there so that they are informed, and I’m not saying not to be a supporter, but I’m just saying to be informed. If that’s who you want to vote, I don’t know if I want you in my life because you don’t support me as a human being, as who I am at my core.
I understand, but I also think that even that type of thinking is polarizing. If we can get to a space where even the people who do support him can essentially compare Agenda 47 and Project 2025, if you look at the two side-by-side, which unfortunately, most won’t because it takes time, effort, and energy, you’ll see pretty quick that the Agenda 47 is essentially like the cliff notes version. I call it the Ten Commandments version of Project 2025. If the mean potato’s end goal is the same, they’re the same. We also know that Donald Trump has mentioned over 200 times an agenda and the Project 2025 manifesto.
He already complied to 64% of policy changes in his first term that they wanted within the first year that he was in there. Not in his first term within the first year.
I first learned about Project 2025 shortly after Trump lost the election last time. That’s when they got active because they essentially said, “Our goal is to ensure that whoever ends up in the office in 2025 will have the playbook so we can get back everything we lose during these four years under Joe Biden.” That was their whole message.
If you know that’s the case, they want to walk back as much as possible, as quickly as possible and put these agendas into effect so that you can understand that from the top line outside of perspective. They’re looking to make a lot of the changes that we were able to enact temporarily under Donald Trump into permanent solutions. Part of how they did that was restacking the Supreme Court. We need to get to some solution in that arena. I’m sure we will. I don’t think that all the chips have fallen yet.
I hope so because what they did is so scary. I’m somebody who studied law, who wanted to become an attorney and to become a judge. That’s what Not My Circus, the end of the book, talks about. Watching my mother’s murder trial and realizing how I’ve worked my whole life for something that I don’t want to do. What am I going to do now?
It’s like 32 years old figuring out, “Everything I did was for nothing.” I’m still very interested in politics and in legal the system and what they did was scary. I am beside myself. I hope and pray that this can be overturned because, as you said, every single solitary person in this country should be upheld by the law of the land.
Every single person should be upheld by the law of the land.
Book Series
We’re on the same page there. Delicia, I very much look forward to the release of your second book in this series, Not My Circus, which comes out you said on August 1st, 2024. This episode should be released right around that time. Probably a week later. I think it’ll hit right in the timeline, and you’ll want to see it out there.
Hopefully, we can see some success for you in that arena, and I understand that after that book, you will have the third in the series coming out, which you’re calling The Queen of Silver Linings. In my mind, this is la piece de resistance. It’s the solutions and finale of this series. That is your memoir. Do you want to close with a little information on what people can expect from the entire series?
The second book will take you through my mother’s murder trial, as I mentioned. It also takes you on a bunch of fun stuff, like when I lived in Switzerland. When I lived in Switzerland, it was very poignant because I was able to have a lot of a-ha moments around men in particular and the abuse that I had suffered from men for so long. I encountered so many men who were kind and didn’t expect anything from me other than a conversation, friendship or a nice meal.
That was not something I was used to and not something I ever encountered before. That part of my travels to Europe is a very poignant part of the book. It starts making me question the walls that I build, what I’m losing because of these walls that I build up around me, and how I might be missing out on certain things in life because of the walls that I was forced to build up around me. It talked about a little bit about politics and all that stuff.
The third book goes into my healing journey and the things that I’ve done to try and heal, which have been any on the spectrum from therapy, regular talk therapy, art therapy, hypnotherapy, EMDR, CBR, DBR and all these different kinds of therapies that I’ve done then I branched out. Therapy wasn’t just working. I needed more than therapy. I started with plant medicine and made trips to Sedona to do breathing work sessions, which was probably the most powerful thing. I was able to go back and hold hands with my little four-year-old girl in Baghdad, take a match and burn down that house that we lived in together and walk away from that terrible time in my life.
I shed some of that copious weight that I was holding onto from that. You’ll read about times like I did a mushroom trip where the guy that I did it with was supposed to be focused on figuring out the sexual abuse, how it started, how I met my first abuser, Isaac. Instead, it took a completely different turn. My mother was violently murdered. She wasn’t just murdered. She was violently murdered in her home.
She was beaten to death on her living room floor by a stranger. It was noted by the district attorney and the judge that it was Placer County’s most violent crime ever. I didn’t realize until I did this mushroom thing that I held deep within my soul somewhere the question of how much she suffered. I didn’t even realize. I held it so deep down that I wouldn’t even let that question surface because it would hurt me so much to think about it.
During this mushroom trip, my mom came to me and she said, “Come on, let’s go.” I went with her without question and we were all of a sudden in her living room. I saw my picture on a mantelpiece and I said, “No.” I started slapping my face to come out of the trip because I didn’t want to go back there. I didn’t want to see what happened, but she literally talked me into it and said, “I’m not going to show you anything that will hurt you.”
I literally lived the murder through her eyes of what happened. She took me through step by step. I write all about it in the book, so I don’t want to go too much into it. The reason she did it was to show me she didn’t suffer. The minute that he hit her, that first blow knocked her unconscious and she was gone. That shed a lot of weight for me as well, emotional baggage and emotional weight that I didn’t even know existed.
I have a shaman who wants to take me to Peru and take me through the junk forest and the jungles. I’m like, “No way, Jose. I don’t do that.” Ayahuasca scares me. Some of this stuff scares me, but it’s strange. I write about how I did toad venom in this book. It’s called Sapo or Bufo and it’s supposed to be one of the most hallucinogenic drugs out there.
The reason why I did it is in the second book, I write about how my brother and my mother didn’t talk for about a year and a half before her demise. My brother went in and did this toad venom thing and he called me right after. He said, “You should do this.” I have Crohn’s disease and he said, “This is going to heal. You’re going to get better. I don’t know. I went and waved by them all up in heaven.” I’m like, “I’ll try it.” I did.
I didn’t experience anything like he experienced. Afterwards, I read about Sapo, Bufo and toad venom, a plant medicine. You could either go dark or light like he did, and it depends on your past. Since I had such a traumatic past, when I got out of it, my voice was gone. I was like, “I can’t talk.” They both started laughing, and I said, “What’s so funny?” My brother was like, “I heard sounds come out of you that I never heard before. I thought I was going to have to call the police because it sounded like a triple homicide in here.”
He said, “You were screaming so much.” That trip lasted four days, and I kept a journal of the whole time. What happened was all of my molesters had died at that point. I went to the underworld, wherever they were. They were all there in one place, and I unleashed my rage at what they had done to me. That stuff like that is still heavy, and it’s the stuff that I’ve done to heal, but in the end, I’m happy and well adjusted. I’m back on land that I lived on 23 years ago, which had burned. I’m rebuilding my dream home here and I’m living in the place that I’ve always wanted to live, which is Sta. Cruz and I couldn’t be happier.
That’s a good ending to a terrible historical story. I wish for you all the warmth, the light, love and happiness. I hope that your telling this story both heals you on that deep and profound level and also offers insights and healing to those around you. I know this is not easy and I appreciate the tremendous effort that you’ve undertaken to bring it out into the world. Thank you.
Thank you so much. It means a lot to me. I want to help people and kids find their voice around pedophilia and help them say, “No, don’t touch me,” and know that they don’t need to internalize the shame. There’s just so much I want to do to help people with my series. Once I realized that I could, here I am.
Episode Wrap-Up
Thank you again for joining me. You and I could talk much more deeply and continue this conversation as well, but our time has come to a close. I want to offer you a moment for any closing thoughts that you might have. Perhaps, a wish or a prayer.
I hope that this country all bands together, appreciates everybody’s freedom and individuality, and knows that it’s okay. We inspire the rest of the world. If we are run on hate, the rest of the world will run on hate. If we’re run on love, the rest of the world will run on love.
The United States inspires the rest of the world. If they are running on love, everyone else will do the same.
Delicia, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you.
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To find out more about Delicia Niami, you can visit her website DeliciaNiami.com. As a reminder, we are getting ready to launch our new cause before the commerce site. Eventually, this website for Care More Be Better will redirect to that one. All of our assets will live there. Ultimately, what we’re seeking to do with this new development with CircleB.co is to provide you with resources to live a little greener and a little more thoughtfully each day. We will offer products that can engage you with that, give you how-to resources on how you can live and engage in a more green, socially responsible way, and help you minimize your ways.
Now with that, I want to say to all of you. Thank you so much for reading. To those who have experienced trauma like that has been expressed by Delicia, I hope that you will also connect with the resources that we provide. There will be several different resources that you can connect with. These are replicated from California’s Forgotten Children episode.
I want to make sure again that you have access to resources to support your journey if you’re confronting some of these challenges. It’s my belief that by banding together, we can create a better world. Thank you again for joining me and my hope for everyone is that with this content and with this share that you’ll all be able to step forward with a little bit more confidence into your today and into your tomorrow. Thank you.
Important Links
- Delicia Niami
- Kissing Asphalt
- Not My Circus
- The Body Keeps the Score
- Facebook – Delicia Niami
- The Queen of Silver Linings
- CircleB.co
- How One Film Aims To Put An End To Sex Trafficking With Melody C. Miller – Past Episode
- A Safer Society: Ending Sexual Violence Through Survivors’ Stories With Tim Mousseau – Past Episode
- Kissing Asphalt
- Help@HumanTraffickingHotline
- Human Trafficking Hotline
