What it was like: She was married to a pedophile and didn’t know

Darlene Ellison knows the shame of being married to a man accused, and later convicted, of pedophilia.

She’s been speaking out, frequently, since the Jerry Sandusky scandal, and now in the wake of the Bernie Fine allegations.

“Laurie Fine doesn’t represent many wives who are betrayed and have gone through this,” Ellison tells 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ron & Don Show.

For instance, while she realized that her own marriage was in trouble, she couldn’t put her finger on the exact reason things were amiss.

She and her husband had dated for a while, been engaged for a time, and were married for 10 and a half years before they separated. They were in the process of divorcing when his security company called her because she was her husband’s emergency contact. The alarm had been going off in his rental home and they had not been able to reach him.

When she got to his home, she walked in on an FBI investigation.

Listen to Darlene Ellison, former wife of a pedophile, author of “Predator Next Door”

Ellison says she didn’t immediately learn the extent of the crimes.

“It took me 18 months to find out, for instance, that he had been a part of “man love” with a part of the American Man-Boy Love Association, since before we were even married.”

Ellison says when you’re talking about a troubled marriage, you think of the “rocky times” instead of looking for a single red flag that could point to the troubles.

“[People will] ask about your own physical relations with your husband because everyone’s sure that if you’re having physical relations with a pedophile, you must just know about it,” Ellison says. “That’s just crazy.”

She says she later found his old typewriter cases she had assumed contained typewriters, actually contained clippings of young actors from teen magazines.

In the aftermath, Ellison says she didn’t leave her house for three months. She says she knew her friends were thinking, ‘Idiot, how did she miss it?’ I was asking myself the same thing.”

Having gone through this painful experience, she knows that for cases like Bernie Fine and Jerry Sandusky, this is just the beginning of victims stepping forward and acknowledging the abuse.

“This is not the end. There is courage in numbers.”