IT seems slightly odd, counter-intuitive, that Cheyenne O’Connor would say that she wouldn’t change anything about her life.
This is a woman who was sexually abused by her grandfather as a young girl, his crimes covered up by her father. A person, now aged 32, who was sent to prison when, as a 16-year-old, her rage boiled over and she took a paedophile’s eye out with a stiletto. That was back in 2009, before she was known for her work as a paedophile hunter, a champion for survivors of sexual abuse and a community leader from the wrong side of town.
The JEP report of the Royal Court sentencing hearing at which she and her two co-accused, another 16-year-old girl and a 22-year-old man, were sent down paints a graphic picture of the attack, which the judge, Sir Philip Bailhache, described as “gratuitous and appalling”.
The court was shown CCTV footage of the grave and criminal assault in Mulcaster Street.
“There were shocked gasps from the public gallery as the girls were shown jabbing stiletto heels into his face,” the report states.
“All three defendants then kicked and stamped on his body and head before leaving him in an unconscious heap.
“The victim lost the sight in one eye and faces surgery to reconstruct his eyelid.”
The girls, covered in blood, were arrested a few hundred metres from the scene.
The attack did nothing to quell the rage. The court heard that, after the assault, one of the 16-year-old girls put out the following warning on Facebook – “Grasses get it big time”, and taunted the girlfriend of the victim, saying: “He don’t know what he has coming next! Oh wait, he can’t see wots coming next. Hahaha.”
It is interesting rereading that court report and considering how differently many would view it today, knowing what we now know about Cheyenne. The past 15 years have been quite a journey. She remains unapologetic about taking the fight – literally and in many other ways – to those who abuse children. She has changed her modus operandi a number of times since 2009, but the rage remains, albeit expressed differently. And so does the absolute and unapologetic resolve to help survivors and bring paedophiles to justice.
The attack was both a low point and the event which probably changed the course of Cheyenne’s life, for the better. Sitting on a couch in the window of The Butterfly Café, she says that she is happy, a very different person from the one who spent three years in HMP La Moye. And yet in so many ways she remains strikingly similar.
“I wouldn’t change it at all,” she says. “I wouldn’t be the person I am, would I? I wouldn’t be doing this? I guarantee that I wouldn’t be doing this.
“I loved prison. I loved it. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? There was no structure at my house. As a kid, like, we didn’t have a great upbringing. There was actually no structure at all, just do what you want. We were drinking, drinking at 12, taking drugs at 12, doing whatever we were doing. There was absolutely no structure. I didn’t know I needed it. When I went to prison, there was not a young offenders’ wing for women, so I was on the adult wing. I think that really helped me. There were a lot of the women on there and they helped, like, mature me a little bit.
“I got my education there. I had no education before I went to prison. I qualified as a bricklayer and I can decorate. I mean, I’ll probably never use it, but, you know. I did a diploma in there on mental health. I never would have done that at school because I hated it.
“I think if I hadn’t gone to prison, I probably would have killed someone. Really, genuinely, yeah, I would have done.
“I think for some people prison is a really good thing, especially for young girls. I think everyone should have the experience – well, not everyone. But I think, like, I suppose the point is that it definitely shaped me into, like, a better person.”
She looks up and smiles, before adding: “Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to go back.”
“This”, what she is doing now, is important. Cheyenne has become a trusted advocate, spokesperson, fearless champion and so much more for abuse survivors, and many others who feel able to talk to her.
The café is the first space designed specifically for survivors, and it is run and staffed by people with that lived experience. Put all that together and she and her team have created a piece of Jersey, physically and in innumerable intangible ways, that people who have too long felt the stigma of being marginalised, dispossessed and hidden have a space, a piece of Jersey that is unambiguously theirs. It is a huge step forward. Cheyenne and her team created this and in doing so she has, it seems, found some peace and renewed purpose. It is a remarkable success story.
One wonders where she would be if she had been dealt a different hand in the game of life. She’s smart as well as savvy, articulate, can think fast on her feet, is a leader to thousands who already follow and come to her for help, empathetic and ruthless, a streetfighter with a nose for sniffing out bullshit and bullshitters at 50 paces. And she will call it and them out without a moment’s hesitation.
But, as has become so apparent through the glimpses of her enabled by the quotes above, she speaks with such authority because of her unfiltered honesty. It is amazing how so many people find their voice, their ability to find the purest honesty, in adversity. It shone from these pages yesterday in new JEP recruit Antonia Rubio’s reflections on her journey as a young woman who has had cancer. It was such a powerful feature of Simon Boas’s writing, and in countless others. It is something that enables deep and trusting connections, and Cheyenne has it on tap.
The affirming reality, though, is that she would almost certainly rather be doing this, helping people who have walked the painful but potentially enlightening path she has walked.
“I don’t dwell on anything that happened in my childhood,” she says. “I just think that’s happened, that’s just the emotional response from being a kid. I’m not hard, but I can hear the most horrific story and just go, ‘OK, I’m done now’. Just turn off. Nothing fazes me. There’s nothing that someone can say to me that I’d be shocked at or that would bother me. Sure, there’s been a couple of things that have pissed me off, that I’ve not been able to, like, get over, you know.”
She offers an example, the case of a person she knows is a paedophile who has been allowed to keep their child, something she sees as a failure of the system and the manipulative nature of offenders.
But any flash of anger the case provokes soon dissipates when the conversation returns to the café.
“We’ve supported over 500 people since we opened in July 2023. Although we set up to help survivors of abuse and children in care, we actually see a lot more people than that. We have people who have mental-health problems coming in here. We have people who have been victims of domestic abuse come in, and we don’t turn anyone away, although we don’t always offer, like, full-on support. We’ll just listen and then we’ll make sure they go to the right people. But we have all sorts of people coming here because they know it’s safe and it’s relaxing, and you can have a chat.
“I think a lot of these people have either never asked for support or the support they’ve gone for was poor. I think it’s really important to have people who have lived experience as well.
“Not everyone wants to go out and support people once they’ve been through something, but I think, like, when people can say, ‘We understand because we’ve been there’, that’s very different from going to see someone who’s read a book. They might have all the care in the world, but they don’t really understand. That’s why all our peer support workers have lived experience, all our advocacy workers have lived experience. The people who work here have lived experience of abuse or mental health or of being in care, or all three.
“They all really understand people who come in for support.”
When passion, experience, drive and a burning desire to make change come together in the right team, great things can happen. How does Cheyenne feel about the café and its various offshoots?
“It’s good. I mean, it’s not just me. Obviously, there’s been loads of background, and I think, like, everyone’s worked together to make it happen. But I didn’t expect to be doing this years ago.”
The idea for such a space came from the findings of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, but it is Cheyenne and her team who have run with it, supported by many along the way.
She has seen the best and the very worst traits, through her own eyes and those of the people she has supported and snared while she operated as an online paedophile hunter. In that phase of her life after leaving HMP La Moye, her work exposed and helped convict several abusers. Her tactics, and the unflinching rhetoric that went with it, were frowned on by many, but today she has 12,000 social-media followers on her Unknown Jersey Facebook page and has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Pride of Jersey awards as a community champion and leader several times.
It is clear that people trust her, an authentic and honest voice among so much self-serving spin and blather. But after seeing humanity in its basest forms, does she still trust people?
“When I started doing the paedophile hunting, I definitely felt like I just trusted no one, right? I trust very few people anyway, but those I trust, I trust a lot, but when I started doing the paedophile hunting, I distrusted everyone. Even when my kids were starting school, I’d look around the room at the male teachers, and I know this sounds ridiculous because their teachers are great, but at first I was like, which one is a paedophile? Statistically, one of them could well be.
“I was looking at everyone. I wouldn’t leave my kids with just anyone. My kids go to immediate family, and that is it. I was quite bad with looking at people sitting in a big room and thinking, like, a good percentage of you are paedophiles, because of the statistics. That’s like the way I was thinking for a long time. I’m not so bad now.
“I don’t look at people and wonder if they’re paedophile. I am not doing it so much any more. I’ve seen more, but I think when I was doing it, like, my whole life revolved around doing it. It got to a point where it was really bad, it was just stressing me out all the time. Like, all I was thinking about was paedophiles.
“There’s only a handful of people I’d ever trust in this island. I’m definitely, like, more cautious about a lot of stuff, with my own kids and stuff.”
What Cheyenne has known her whole life – that there are many men who will groom and manipulate as a gateway to abuse of all kinds – is making headlines as a result of the Pelicot case in France. In Britain, we had Rotherham and Cheyenne has gathered all the evidence she will ever need to be convinced beyond doubt that there are many dangerous men out there here in Jersey.
“They are often the nicest people,” she says, “when you don’t know what they’re doing behind closed doors. But they are so smart, they really are. Not the idiots I was catching. You know, they’re stupid, but others so smart, often targeting family members as victims.
“I don’t find the extent of it shocking at all. It’s a lawyer, or it’s a copper or it’s a doctor. You couldn’t trust the finance person any more than you could trust anyone else.
“I’m not surprised at any of it. I just think, like, things get swept under the carpet so much, don’t they? I think Jersey’s getting a little bit better, right? Maybe, I think, from personal experience. It is definitely better than when I was younger and I went forward about my abuse, hundreds of times better than it was then. I do think we’re getting there, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be.”
And she is uncompromising in her advice to parents. You wouldn’t let your children wander alone at night through a park which was infamous for daily headlines about men hiding in bushes, in trees, in the toilets – everywhere – all seeking to groom and abuse children. And yet we let our children wander freely around the net that so many predators use to snare their prey.
“It’s about finding common ground, isn’t it? That’s a feature of grooming cases. It might be that the person really likes to play the same game as your child. He’s chatting away about it, and it’s, so easy, because kids can get, like, so scooped into that. ‘I’m just playing with this guy. He’s really sound. He really likes the same game as I like.’
“That’s how it starts, isn’t it? And then it just slowly builds from there. They’re not gonna just come in and go, ‘Oh, he sent me a picture of your penis’. That’s not how it happens. There’s a long build-up to build the trust.
“There’s no safe way for kids to be online. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that people have their kids on Snapchat and Facebook and all that at such a young age, especially when they’re not legally allowed on these platforms.
“Are they going to bed with their phones? Are you actually monitoring it? Because kids aren’t stupid. Kids know how to use their phones. If you put restrictions on, they could override them in three seconds. They know what they’re doing. And I just think, like, you can never really monitor it, and that’s it.
“I just think your kids are never going to be safe on there, because there’s always going to be a danger out there.
“I’m just honest with my children. They know what a paedophile is. They know what a rumour is. They know how it can work. They know how it can start. They know how strict I am on who they speak to online, and I’ve had that conversation with them.”
If there is a long way to go before the Island really gets it right, what should change?
“I think people should be on the sex offenders register for life. I don’t think anyone should come off it. People don’t just change, in my opinion. I think you can’t help it if you’re attracted to children, but I do think that they can help acting on that. I think there needs to be more help for people who do have those sexual interests, which is probably a weird thing for me to say.
“They have a great place in America. I can’t remember the name of it, but sex offenders get sent there indefinitely and they get all the treatment. You’re not released until you’ve passed every single test in there. We don’t have anything here. The register should be public.”
The reward and satisfaction Cheyenne gets from her work at the café is perhaps the dominant theme in the current chapter of her working life.
“I love this. And I think this the difference between what I was doing and now – this helps people. Like this helps the actual victims, although I guess the other one did in a completely different way.”
That may be so, but the motivation is the same – and she has certainly not lost the anger, she just chooses to channel it in other directions.
“I still feel, like, I get as angry. I just show it a different way. I guess screaming and shouting didn’t work for a lot of things. It worked for protests, but I feel like I never had a good enough relationship with the Children’s Service or with the police or with anyone else to be able to say what I’m thinking, but now I have that relationship a lot of the time.
“We want the same thing, but they’re doing it in a completely different way. I get more done now doing it this way. They were like, ‘She’s over there. We’re over here’.”
Today, many of those people are now on the same side, standing together. That is a consequence of the care inquiry, which validated and confirmed what many had been saying for a long time. And that is something she is glad to see change.
