Thankfully, when I've written to Dan while stoned or drunk, he's been kind enough not to publish my rantings.

WOE, I hope you’re not thinking to show those pictures to others, in order to prove your grandfather was an abuser of children? That would be a further betrayal for your mother.
Everybody has redeeming qualities. Your grandfather was a stealer, of your mother’s chance to find her healthy sexuality with her peers, and he did the same to you.
Our sexuality is precious, and he dirtied it,
for both of you.
Burn them. Get him out of the house.

LavaGirl @2: I didn't get the impression that show 'n' tell was WOE's plan. WOE not destroying the pictures is an opportunity for her to imagine her mother's reasons to refrain from doing exactly that. She should take it slow.

"As Iliza Schlesinger said in Elder Millennial". I wonder who could have written that. Hmm?

I hope you’re right fubar. I know if it was me, I couldn’t get rid of those pictures soon enough. Such deep tragedies, and how often is this happening in families.

I once had a married, ostensibly straight chiropractor explain, apropos of nothing, as he was working on me, that he couldn’t have a relationship with a patient until two years after last treating them. When I randomly ran into him a couple of years later, I was tempted to sat “hey, it’s been more than two years” but I didn’t.

I can understand that WOE finds it difficult to burn the photos down, they are part of her mother's history, and hers too. It's a bit like why we need Holocaust museums with photos of all those piles of dead people - so that it cannot be denied it happened.

I agree with fubar @3 that the need she is feeling to hold on to those photos (at least for now) may help her come to terms with the fact that her mother too needed to keep them. I wish them both all the best.

Also, I hope WOE keeps in mind she is not immortal.

When my brother died, and my mother and I were going through his things, I found on the back of a high shelf an envelope with a pack of photos. I just had the time to open it, understand in a split second what I was seeing - a very explicit photo of him and his girlfriend - and distract my mother so that I could hide it again. I was so relieved I found it, rather than my mother! Out of respect and pudeur, I never opened the envelope again. There is something distinctively disturbing in seeing the image of a member of your family in a sexual act. I hesitated between burning it or giving it to his girlfriend, not knowing if the latter would add further trauma (and embarrassment) to her loss or bring her fond memories. I ended up deciding the latter was the correct thing to do: it was also her photos after all, and so her history. So one day I just put the envelope in her hands, blurted "I only saw the top one, sorry!" and ran out of her sight to give her the space to digest it. We never discussed it again, of course. Years later, it occurred to me that it was a completely stupid thing to do, because I do not know what else was in that pack, and it may have included photos of previous girlfriends, of which there were many. I am still mortified by this idea. Dying is such a messy thing...

Sorry to hear about your brother Plural, your dear mother, glad you saved her those visions.
Even if those photos were of your brother with multiple women, if his gf loved him, one would hope she’d be glad that he did have a lot of fun.

This is a topic I have not thought a lot about - I haven't been forced to make these decisions yet in life. It is interesting to see what people's opinions are about what to do with such sensitive subject matter.

Also, I think @7 hit the nail on the head here:
"I can understand that WOE finds it difficult to burn the photos down, they are part of her mother's history, and hers too. It's a bit like why we need Holocaust museums with photos of all those piles of dead people - so that it cannot be denied it happened."

Plural @7: Sorry for your loss. You did the right thing, from a good place, and it seems to me that your brother's girlfriend was a more appropriate recipient of his photo collection than you, regardless of the subject matter.

This is why a trusted person, who knows me well, has a key to my home and instructions to remove my most mortifying possessions upon my demise.

I arrived to the other thread about the grandfather too late, so will post here. The problem for me about the willingness of the grandmother and then the mother to not do anything about the grandfather is that this allowed the abused to continue. They each failed their daughters. Moreover, the LW noted in that original letter some suspicion that the grandfather might have molest other neighborhood kids. There was a responsibility in this family to do the right thing and nobody did. I know this is harsh, but fuck the grandmother and the mother. They failed as human beings.

No surfrat. Don’t blame the victim. Leaving grandmother out of it.. because we know nothing about her... mother was groomed. From one guesses the same age as that devil of a man, was starting to groom WOE.
THREE years old.
Praise be he died before he could do any more damage to WOE.
Mother had no way back from that, especially as he’d up the anti till they were having sex. Mother poor poor woman, is a victim of total betrayal by a parent. All around were colluding with this psychopath.
So many this has happened to, reading the main thread for WOE.

Lava- Mother also betrayed daughter, knowing all along what grandpa is up to. Continuing your argument, what do you know about grandpa's devil of a man past? Was he also abused by a parent? Does it change the picture for you? Does the mother's complicity change the gravity of the abuse LW had to endure, and deal with it now once again? Why did mother leave the pictures for others to find, intentionally or not, yet wouldn't talk about the subject?
Why didn't mother say, "No more," packed up the car, placed her daughter in the booster seat and drove to California?

CMD @13: WOE wrote that her mother hadn't been molested as a child. She personally remembers one incident (her words) with grandpa during a "cuddle session" but didn't say at what age it occurred, or whether or not her mother ever became aware of it. In hindsight, it's easy to say mother should have been watchful, or taken action, but alas that changes nothing.

WOE seems to be processing all this with courage and grace. I hope that she's able to speak about this, when she's ready, before those memories die with her mother.

Can we agree that the granddad did some seriously wrongdoing without starting to blame the people around him for that (inc. the victims of said wrongdoing)? There is an awful lot of jumping to assumptions above.
For example:
@13 "Mother also betrayed daughter, knowing all along what grandpa is up to" - If you re-read the letter, you will find no evidence that grandpa had sex with mother while she was a child. She might have believed what they had was a forbidden love between consenting adults. Or perhaps he did start abusing her as a child, but she may not have processed it (and understood how that posed a risk to others inc. her infant child) until much later. [see Dan's advice]
@11 "the LW noted in that original letter some suspicion that the grandfather might have molest other neighborhood kids" - yes, and WOE also says she found out about those when she herself was an adult (grandpa long dead). What makes you assume it was common knowledge when he was alive that he was a paedophile, everybody turning a blind eye? WOE mentions the godmother and aunt "knowing" but in a context that suggests her mother was by then an adult.
@13 "Why didn't mother say, "No more," packed up the car, placed her daughter in the booster seat and drove to California?" - why are you assuming the mother & daughter lived in the same city/house as the grandpa when the LW was a child?

There are some real people behind this letter, with real traumas to deal with. Please measure your words, and if in doubt err on the side of compassion...

To clarify, blaming the mother was more of a rhetoric response to Lava placing it entirely on grandpa. That said, I still think LW has a right to ask her mother those very questions if she chooses to do so.
She may opt to assure mom there is no blaming, yet for her own peace of mind she would like to know what was going on. Communicating this in the right manner may also help mom, who must be feeling guilty to some degree.

Plural #15: "There are some real people behind this letter, with real traumas to deal with. Please measure your words, and if in doubt err on the side of compassion..."

Thank you for saying that. Those same real people are sometimes reading this commentary, and the assumptions and rhetoric - not to mention the trolling - sometimes get overheated.

@LavaGirl: I think there's a slight difference re: blaming the victim here. Blaming the victim language would be something to the effect of "the LW put herself in a position to be molested." And I would never say that. Instead, what I am suggesting is that grandma of LW and mother of LW knew what grandpa was up to. Grandma didn't protect the daughter. Mom didn't protect the LW (grand daughter) and both grandma and mother (as she got older) can't let grandpa be around neighborhood kids. No fucking way for me. LW suggested in that original thread that she suspects retroactively that grandpa was molesting kids in the neighborhood. Of course, the LW couldn't do anything because all of this came back to her as she got older but grandma and mom knew what was up and were adults.

Surfrat, she was a child and her whole relationship with her father was intertwined with his sexual violation of her. He wasn’t a total bastard, because pillar of the community. However you look at it, this woman was violated to her core and any clear and rational thinking around her father was stripped from her. Brainwashing. You heard of that? Why do you think these vile men get away with it.

@18 surfrat Yes you are victim shaming here. Not the letter writer but her mother. At a guess I would say he probably started grooming her really young (and probably did fun things (from his viewpoint) that she doesn't even remember when she was really young. My abuser wasn't that patient (he started molesting me when I was 6) but he could have been if he had thought about it. It stopped when I was 8 because he had a girlfriend by then. I guess I should be thankful to her for that. Except she knew what he did with me and kept seeing and having sex with him. Oh and she molested me also a few times. It sort of warped my views on things that were acceptable and not acceptable. I had worked thru that before my son was born so there was no risk of me molesting him thankfully. Of course I originally kept quiet about it because I knew if I had said something my dad would have gone to jail for a (probably) gruesome murder. On the order of quite literally ripping an arm off and beating him to death with the arm. My dad had the build to have called Mike Tyson a wimp and gotten Tyson to agree with him. To give you an idea of what my father was like, in his 40s he carried a 600+ pound chain clamp a 1/10 of a mile then put it on his shoulders and went up a 30 foot ladder because that was easier than getting a forklift to carry it to where he needed it.

So I'm a victim (altho I broke the chain of abuse) just like the LW AND her mother. I can understand her mother's reaction even if I don't condone it. But unless you have been a victim of sexual abuse as a child... STFU. If you haven't been groomed for sexual abuse you have no idea what goes thru the mind of the victim. If the girlfriend had gotten pregnant by my abuser I'm fairly sure that the child would have known BOTH parents in ways that a child should not know and I'm still not sure I'd have said anything then. Now yes, back then, I'm not sure. It really messed me up inside for quite a while. It still haunts me to a small degree even now. Or large degree depending on how you look at it. At heart I'm Bi. I can appreciate a good looking guy (especially a naked one) but the thought of doing something with him gives me flashbacks. So pretty much half of my sexuality is locked away from me because I was abused. I can sometimes work around the flashbacks but only if a lady is involved (thankfully abusers GF only let him watch) as I don't get the flashbacks as badly.

Sorry I went off like that. Maybe I needed to get it off my chest and you just happened to be the victim (along with anyone else who read that to the end. I'm not going to edit it tho. I'm just going to apologize for making you be the one I ranted at.

Romial, I’m sorry you experienced such violation. Glad that you pushed against it to protect your son. Thank you for sharing.

@7 Not to go too far off topic, but I find 'all' the Holocaust Museums to be overkill. In the Seventh grade my kids went to the multi-million dollar one here in Illinois because the state has mandated a significant Holocaust curriculum. They had a hard time correlating what the Nazis did with what their grand parents did in WWII (fought, built planes, you know...).

Which gets me to the photos. Love of heaven, GET RID OF THEM. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow no one on this planet needs to process that and there's no greater societal good being served. If you must, copy them to your private email account that no one will be able to access after your death. Please?

Tim @22: I don't think WOE owes protection to anyone, or is obliged to forward some imaginary greater societal good. She should simply carry on processing what happened, however that works for her.

Romial @21: Thanks for sharing your story. I really wish you the best.

(as above)
Romial @21: thank you for sharing, wish you and your family the best.