SID: Hello, Sid Roth, your investigative reporter here with Joan Pierce. You think you have problems? How would you like to have been Joan? You’re kicked out of the only home you have. You have two little children. You have a third on the way. You have no money. You have nothing. You don’t know where to go, what to do, you can’t even read. How does someone pull themselves up? I mean you’ve listened to this, and run a two million dollar business? There is an answer but I want to go back to the beginning. Joan, you were raised as many families here in the United States are raised, with a single parent.
JOAN: Right.
SID: Did you ever know your father?
JOAN: No, I do now but I didn’t when I was a child.
SID: and you spoke Italian at home –
JOAN: right, right.
SID: And your mother remarried and I imagine that must have been the happiest day of your life, because you just had a need for a daddy.
JOAN: I sure had a need for a daddy, I wanted one so bad. From the time I was born till my mom got married that’s all I wanted was a dad because all the kids at school talked about how their daddy took them here. But you know the happiest day of my life when my mom got married and got me a dad. But three months after my dad started sexually abusing me and he decided he wanted me to be a straight “A” student.
SID: Now, how old were you at the time?
JOAN: Seven.
SID: Oh my goodness.
JOAN: Seven years old.
SID: Why didn’t you tell your mother?
JOAN: I did tell my mom. I told my mom what was going on by my mom, but he told my mom that I lied and my mom believed him. And I never found out until my mom died. Just before my mom passed on to be with the Lord which was just a few years ago, I said, “Mom when I was a little girl and I told you that my step-dad was doing that, did you ever really believe me?” And she said, “I knew it was happening but you were the only one from that, and the rest were his own children, and I decided that you only had a few more years and I didn’t know where to put you, and I thought it was better that you stay here and I try to protect you if I knew he was going into your room so, she knew but she never did anything about it.
SID: But in addition to that, he was a perfectionist and he wanted you to have straight “A’s” and is it true that he would slap you?
JOAN: Yes.
SID: Up till like one o’clock in the morning?
JOAN: Sometimes. Sometimes, till two and three in the morning and my mom would say “she can’t learn, she doesn’t know how. I had dyslexia, and I also found out later that I was handicapped and I was actually in the mentally retarded class in school. In fact when I took a test in school they had me listed as an idiot. I mean literally, and I had to, which really wasn’t a true –
SID: Did you buy that fact though? Did you believe that was true?
JOAN: Yes.
SID: How in the world with such a bad perception that you had, how in the world did you pull yourself up, but again we’re getting ahead. Okay, you’re out in the streets.
JOAN: I had been beat up, I’m two months pregnant, people, the place I was staying threw me out on the streets, they were drunk, and they threw my, they took my babies out of an afternoon nap, threw them on the front porch, threw my clothes on the front porch. I put the clothes in my backpack, I grabbed my two boys, one was three, one was a little over a year, and I took them, it was raining, I was in a total strange town, I didn’t know anybody. And I, it was raining so bad I went in a phone booth to try to get out of the rain, and I was hurting because I had fallen down two flights of stairs because they had knocked me down the stairs.
SID: Talk about hopeless, you think you’re hopeless, listen to this, go ahead Joan.
JOAN: And so I put them in a phone booth, and I was raised Catholic and Mormon, if that, anyway it’s a long story, we won’t go there.
SID: That’s quite a combination.
JOAN: So I said, “Rob, please be quiet. Alan, please stop screaming.” Because the boys were screaming and I stood there I this phone booth and I said, “God if you are real, if this God I heard about as a child, if this Jesus I heard about as a child is real, I need help now. God, I don’t know if you know how to talk to me, but speak to me now. And I heard an audible voice say to me, I mean, talk about when God speaks, I mean you don’t have to worry about it.
SID: Joan, had you ever heard an audible voice?
JOAN: No.
SID: What was it like?
JOAN: It scared me. I’m being honest, it scared me, I started trembling and like what is that? And He didn’t answer the way I thought He would anyway, if God was going to talk to you. He said, “Call the lady you met in the donut shop.” And I went, “That’s how you’re going to help me God?” And He said, “Call this number that you got from a lady in a donut shop.” And so I called her and I said, “I don’t know how to read, I’m illiterate, I’m hurt, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how, if you don’t know how to read, you can’t use a phone book, and I don’t know how to use a phone book. So I said, “Please just tell me where to go for help. Is there a shelter, I have no money and I’m homeless and I don’t know what to do.” And she said, “You just go sit in the donut shop and I’ll be there in 40 minutes and I’ll come get you. Just order something for your children, don’t worry about the bill, wait, don’t leave. And that lady took me in her home and then when it came time for me to have my baby I had no clothes because I couldn’t get on welfare at that time because of some legal law. But anyway, when it came time for me to have this little girl, first of all, I couldn’t do an abortion; I just didn’t have that in me. But I had already signed her up to be adopted but when she started kicking about the fourth month, you know I said, “I can’t give this,” and this lady said, “You can’t give your baby away. You already have two boys and if you can raise these two boys, are you going to give the boys away? And I said, “No.” And she said, “Well it’s not going to take much more to feed one more baby.” So then I said, “I can’t give my baby away.” So I called the people that were lined up for adoption and says, “You can’t have my baby.” Anyway when it came time to have my baby, I had no clothes, nothing, I mean, when I say nothing, I didn’t have a blanket to wrap my baby in, nothing. When I went to the hospital I had nothing to bring that baby home. And so the lady bought me a cute little outfit for her. It was a little girl, I said, “Thank You God, thank You for a little girl.” And I wrapped her in that little outfit. And when I walked into my welfare apartment with my baby in arms, I looked and the house was full of food. There was clothes’ there was a crib.
SID: Now where did all this come from?
JOAN: It was just filled with stuff and…
SID: I’ll tell you what. Hold that thought, we’ll be right back in a moment. But it is, a woman with that kind of background, not even being able to read, running a two million business. Give me a break. Don’t go away, we’ll be right back.