No One to Tell

Blending the emotional candor of Nobody’s Girl with the cultural urgency of Know My Name, No One to Tell traces how what a fifteen-year-old believed was love became a lifelong reckoning with grooming, abuse, and survival.

On a steamy September day in New Orleans, a charismatic social studies teacher chases a teenage student down the hallway of her all-girls Catholic high school. The thrill is palpable; the girl’s heart beats wildly as they run laughing down the hall and burst out onto the breezeway. It doesn’t matter that he is twenty-seven and married. In this moment, she would follow him anywhere.

No One to Tell follows Claudia Barker’s journey from teenage victim to courageous survivor who names her abuser publicly at sixty-three on the front page of a major newspaper. This brave memoir uses meticulously detailed calendar entries to document how a predator carefully groomed and hooked the young girl he continued to pursue into her thirties, and tracks the evolution of her beliefs about culpability as a mother in her forties and fifties.

A compelling story of how sexual abuse impacts a life and of the healing power of the written word, No One to Tell urges survivors to revisit their own experiences through the lens of criminal behavior—and to tell their stories in whatever ways they can.