I have written before that there is no original evil left in the world; everyone is just recycling pain.
Ariel Castro was, of course, wrong when he claimed, bizarrely, Thursday that there was “harmony” in the house where he kept three women hostage, repeatedly beating and raping them. But he was correct when he stated that he is not a monster.
Ariel Castro was not born a predator. He became one. I believe him when he says he himself was sexually abused. And, while most victims of sexual abuse harm no one later in life, Ariel Castro is an extreme example of what can happen in adulthood, when a child has been destroyed psychologically.
Based on my nearly two decades as an adult, adolescent and forensic psychiatrist, talking at the level of the soul and the gut about the human psyche with everyone from anxious kids, to abused women, to gang members, to men who have raped and killed, the origin of Castro’s evil is the house of horrors in which he alludes to being raised.
I promise you that what Castro has been convicted of creating in Cleveland—a “home” where three women were allegedly held in ropes and chains, beaten and raped, where children were either enslaved or aborted—will turn out to be a magnified version (perhaps 2X, perhaps 100X) of the home in which he was raised.