Éponine — The Daughter Of The Thénardiers.
In Les Misérables, Éponine represents the tragic child shaped by corruption — a young woman raised inside cruelty, emotional distortion, manipulation, poverty, and moral decay until love itself becomes tangled with jealousy, desperation, possessiveness, suffering, and ultimately death.
Within Scotland’s Les Misérables, however, the Éponine parallel does not belong to only one girl.
There were two Éponines.
And before either of them, there had been another daughter.
Then, years later, other women attempted to claim the identities, histories, or daughter-roles that had grown around the Thénardier household.
The chronology is complicated because the role itself kept being filled, replaced, abandoned, and claimed again.
There was an original biological daughter who died as a young toddler—a toddler so young she was still referred to as a baby.
Éponine One came afterward.
Victoria was later brought in to replace Éponine One.
After Victoria’s rescue, Éponine Two entered the daughter-role and was given Victoria’s altered identity.
Years later, Chris and Christina separately attempted to claim the identity and history of Éponine One, while Holly Laveda sought the daughter-position itself and later pursued Victoria’s identity for purposes of her own.
These are different people.
Understanding that distinction is essential to understanding the Éponine story.
Éponine One — The Victim Of Child Rape
The first Éponine was the girl whose place Victoria was ultimately brought into the Thénardier household to fill.
But Éponine One had herself come after another child.
There Had Been A Daughter Before Her
According to conversations Victoria remembers hearing within the household, Mrs. Thénardier had previously had a biological daughter who died as a baby or very young toddler after severe abuse.
Victoria remembers Mr. and Mrs. Thénardier referring to that earlier child during arguments.
They blamed one another for what had happened and for the consequences that followed.
After that child’s death, another girl entered the household.
That girl became Éponine One.
Before The Thénardiers, Éponine One Remembered Another Family
Éponine One told Victoria that she remembered another family before the Thénardiers.
She came from somewhere within Eastern Europe or the Soviet-controlled world.
Her precise nationality remains unknown.
Victoria remembers Éponine One as fair-skinned, with dark brown hair and freckles.
Éponine One said that when she was very young, her family was travelling with many other people inside a railway freight car or boxcar.
She remembered terrible conditions inside the train.
There was not enough food.
There was not enough water.
She was frightened that members of her family might die during the journey.
Then armed men intervened.
Éponine One told Victoria that the men who removed people from the train carried big guns.
People were separated.
Éponine One was taken away from her family.
She eventually ended up in the Thénardiers’ household in Kansas City.
Another member of the Thénardier family later spoke in Victoria’s presence about children being taken from boxcars in Austria and described the operation in a way that suggested personal knowledge of it—Mr. Thénardier’s brother. Victoria heard him reminisce about how he was among the men in Austria who intercepted the boxcar that contained Éponine One, and then personally transported her to his brother’s house in Kansas City.
Victoria cannot establish the precise route, country of origin, or trafficking network involved.
But Éponine One’s own account remained consistent on the central facts:
she had another family before the Thénardiers;
she travelled with them in a freight car under desperate conditions;
armed men removed people from the train;
she was separated from her family;
and she was ultimately delivered into the Thénardier household.
She Had Been With Them For Years
The chronology places Éponine One with the family by 1983.
A baby connected to the household was born in 1983.
Éponine One remembered the baby’s birth.
She remembered the child being breastfed.
She remembered bottles and jars of Gerber baby food.
And after the family moved from an apartment into the Kansas City house where Victoria would eventually be trafficked, Éponine One remembered the baby still using a walker at times.
By 1989, Éponine One had therefore been living within the Thénardier environment for years.
She had been brought into the household young enough, and had lived within it long enough, that she increasingly resembled the daughter-role Mrs. Thénardier had lost.
That resemblance mattered.
The Thénardiers repeatedly sought girls who looked similar enough to occupy that position within their household.
Éponine One became deeply important to the household because she looked and behaved increasingly like Mrs. Thénardier’s daughter.
She modeled her.
She reflected her mannerisms.
Her emotional patterns.
Her possessiveness.
Her jealousy.
Her ways of relating to other people.
The Mother Became The Daughter.
Not biologically.
Psychologically.
Éponine One had been formed by the household that acquired her.
She Was Groomed For Prostitution
Victoria remembers Mr. Thénardier speaking directly to Éponine One about the future he expected for her.
He told her that one day she would have “clients like the big girls.”
The “big girls” were women Victoria understood Mr. Thénardier to be managing in houses used for prostitution in the surrounding area.
He spoke about that future as though it were ordinary.
Expected.
Simply what would happen when Éponine One grew older.
And Éponine One had been inside that world for so long that it appeared normal to her.
Why would she automatically imagine another life when this was the model of adulthood that had been placed before her?
She grew up believing:
trafficking is normal,
prostitution is expected,
manipulation is survival,
identity is fluid,
and exploitation is simply “how the world works.”
Éponine One Was A Victim Of Child Rape
According to the account discussed openly within the family and known to Victoria,
Éponine One Was Raped By Mr. Thénardier As A Child, And The Rape Resulted In A Pregnancy.
Afterward, her grandparents intervened.
Victoria understood that the situation was handled through connections involving the Masonic Lodge.
Mrs. Thénardier blamed the child’s pregnancy on an alleged sexual encounter with Éponine One’s older cousin, claiming that it had happened accidentally during an unsupervised visit.
It was a blatant lie.
Éponine One had cried to Victoria about how “her daddy gives her the stick when she is bad” — something she was deeply afraid of — and she had described to Victoria what “the stick” meant.
Éponine One spent long periods with her grandparents and was later moved outside the immediate household.
But the break from the Thénardiers was not immediate or complete.
Mrs. Thénardier kept trying to get her back.
Éponine One returned to the house multiple times while Victoria was living there.
Victoria spoke with her during some of those visits.
Even though the household had already acquired Victoria as a replacement, Mrs. Thénardier remained emotionally attached to Éponine One.
Victoria did not assimilate into the household the way the Thénardiers wanted.
Éponine One had.
That made Éponine One difficult for Mrs. Thénardier to let go.
Some Children Are Not Only Destroyed By Systems Of Darkness — They Are Gradually Transformed By Them Until The System Begins Reproducing Itself Through The Next Generation.
To Victoria, Éponine One initially appeared tragic and pitiable.
She had been taken from another family.
She had been trafficked across borders.
She had been groomed for prostitution.
She had been sexually abused within the household.
She had been removed after that abuse resulted in pregnancy.
And still, by the time Victoria knew her, the household had shaped her deeply.
Rather than simply resisting its darkness, Éponine One increasingly appeared to internalize parts of it.
She became manipulative, deceptive, jealous, emotionally distorted, and drawn toward some of the same possessiveness and psychological cruelty that surrounded Mrs. Thénardier.
That does not erase what had been done to her.
It makes the tragedy worse.
That is the first Éponine of Scotland’s Les Misérables.
The daughter who had been taken from another family and absorbed so deeply into the Thénardier household that the mother seemed to reproduce herself through the child.
What Happened To Éponine One?
Victoria did not witness Éponine One’s death herself.
The account she later learned came from surveillance material connected to the Thénardier household that Joseph Cameron eventually obtained access to and reviewed.
Victoria understood that much of the surveillance had been conducted by Kansas City law enforcement, although she cannot establish exactly which officers or agencies were responsible for every part of it, or whether Joseph himself participated in any of the original surveillance.
What emerged from those materials placed Éponine One’s death within a larger crisis surrounding Mr. Thénardier.
Police had targeted Mr. Thénardier in an investigation involving prostitution and drugs.
According to Victoria’s understanding, investigators were not ultimately able to secure a prostitution conviction.
They did, however, obtain a conviction on a drug-related offense.
Victoria was never told the precise charge and does not know whether it involved possession, trafficking, distribution, or another drug offense.
The conviction resulted in a jail sentence.
But Mr. Thénardier was not removed from the household permanently.
He later bragged that he had “done his time” and been released quickly because of good behavior.
From what Victoria understands, the period he actually spent incarcerated was relatively short — measured in months, and possibly less than a full year.
During that period, however, he was gone from the house.
And according to the surveillance account Joseph later reviewed, it was during the upheaval surrounding Mr. Thénardier’s arrest, conviction, and removal from the household that men associated with his gang came to the property.
Mrs. Thénardier and Éponine One were there.
The women were gang raped.
Éponine One died as a result of the attack.
The assault therefore did not appear in the account as an isolated act of violence arriving without context.
It occurred during the crisis created by the law-enforcement action against Mr. Thénardier and his temporary removal from the household.
Mr. Thénardier Went To Jail — And Came Back
Mr. Thénardier eventually returned to the household.
For a period of time, he sought to cultivate a respectable public image.
Victoria understood that he attempted to present himself outwardly as an ordinary, responsible father and family man who worked hard for his money.
That public presentation did not necessarily reflect everything continuing behind the scenes.
Victoria does not claim to know everything Mr. Thénardier did during the years that followed, or the extent of his continuing involvement with people connected to his earlier criminal world.
Much of what she later learned came through information Joseph collected, conversations she overheard within the family, and what she encountered herself when she was trafficked back into the household years later.
The conviction nevertheless had lasting consequences.
In a conversation Victoria remembers from 2016, Mr. Thénardier discussed the matter almost casually, as though explaining an old piece of family history.
Victoria understood from that discussion that the conviction remained on his record for approximately twenty years and seriously limited his ability to obtain conventional, well-paying employment.
He described having to take relatively low-paying work, including jobs connected to vehicle detailing at car dealerships and airport rental-car operations.
The conviction had damaged his legitimate employment prospects.
But it had not represented the end of the larger story.
He Said Jail Had Made Him A Better Criminal
Mr. Thénardier later spoke about the jail sentence almost boastfully.
Rather than describing incarceration as something that had frightened him away from crime, he said it had made him a better criminal.
He told Victoria that jail was a place where criminals met one another, exchanged information, and learned how to become smarter about what they were doing.
According to him, the only real effect of the sentence was that he came out knowing more than he had when he went in.
He liked to describe himself as “smarter than the average bear,” borrowing the catchphrase from Yogi Bear, whose voice and mannerisms he sometimes imitated.
It was characteristic of the way Mr. Thénardier presented himself:
part humor,
part bravado,
and part genuine pride in believing that he knew how to outsmart the systems around him.
The conviction had interrupted his life.
It had sent him to jail.
It had followed him for years.
But by his own telling, it had not reformed him.
He believed it had educated him.
By 2016, when Victoria was again brought into the Thénardier environment during the events that culminated in the trunk-of-the-car incident, the respectable image Mr. Thénardier had maintained publicly collapsed.
The earlier conviction had temporarily removed him from the household.
It had affected his employment for years.
But Victoria does not understand it to have ended his connection to the criminal world surrounding the family.
Éponine One Did Not Survive The Violence Around That World
Éponine One had already survived being taken from her original family.
She had survived trafficking.
She had survived years inside the Thénardier household.
She had survived being groomed for prostitution.
She had survived rape by Mr. Thénardier and the pregnancy that followed.
She had been removed, returned, and repeatedly pulled back toward the household.
Then, during the crisis surrounding Mr. Thénardier’s arrest and removal, violence from the criminal world around him entered the house again.
Éponine One did not survive it.
She died after the gang rape.
Years later, other women would attempt to claim that Éponine One had survived and attach themselves to her identity.
Those later claims created considerable confusion.
But they belonged to a later chapter of the Thénardier world.
The first Éponine was the girl Victoria had actually known.
And according to the surveillance account Joseph later reviewed, her life ended in the same world of violence and exploitation that had shaped so much of her childhood.
Éponine Two — The Daughter Who Tried To Escape
After the death of Éponine One, another trafficked child entered the daughter-role.
She became Éponine Two.
Her story was profoundly different from that of Éponine One.
Éponine One had grown up knowing something of the criminal world surrounding the Thénardiers and gradually began to imitate the household that had shaped her.
Éponine Two was raised differently.
By the time she entered the family, the Thénardiers had apparently learned the danger of allowing a child to understand too much.
They kept Éponine Two largely oblivious to the trafficking and criminal activity surrounding them.
She did not understand herself to be living inside a trafficking organization.
She believed she had been adopted into an abusive and dysfunctional family.
And for much of her life, that was the framework through which she understood what was happening to her.
Another Trafficked Child
Éponine Two had been trafficked from somewhere within the Russian or former Soviet world.
She grew up believing that she had been adopted and that the identity given to her through that adoption genuinely belonged to her.
But the identity had originated with Victoria.
During the illegal transaction through which Victoria had previously been placed with the Thénardiers, Victoria’s own birth documentation had been altered.
The parents listed on the record were changed.
The place of birth was changed.
And that altered version of Victoria’s identity became the documentation used within what was presented as an adoption.
When Victoria was rescued, the problem did not simply disappear.
Joseph attempted to untangle what had happened and restore Victoria’s identity.
That became extraordinarily complicated because another trafficked child was already living under the altered identity.
That child was Éponine Two.
From what Joseph later learned, Éponine Two did not understand that she was living under the identity of another trafficking victim.
She believed the identity was hers.
She believed she had been adopted.
She had built her life around documentation she had been given as a child.
For Joseph to challenge that identity legally meant proving far more than Victoria understood at the time.
He had to establish what had happened to Victoria’s original records, how they had been altered, how the altered identity had remained in circulation, and how another child had subsequently been placed inside it.
There were legal and human complications Victoria did not begin to understand until much later.
Éponine Two was not knowingly trying to steal another woman’s life.
She had been handed another trafficking victim’s altered identity and taught that it was her own.
A Childhood She Could Not Remember
Information Joseph later recovered from school counseling records revealed another disturbing part of Éponine Two’s history.
Éponine Two reportedly could not remember much of her childhood.
She described being unable to remember anything clearly from before approximately eighth grade.
Mrs. Thénardier gave her an explanation for those missing years.
Éponine Two was told that she had been involved in a terrible automobile accident.
She was shown family photos and home videos of Éponine One.
Mrs. Thénardier told her she was the girl in the photos and videos, as if Éponine One never existed.
Mrs. Thénardier told her the reason she wasn’t able to remember her own memories was because the car accident gave her amnesia.
She was also told that she had undergone plastic surgery, which is why she looked a little different than she did in the childhood photos.
Later counseling records recovered by Joseph Cameron reportedly contained fragmented memories from Éponine Two of an earlier childhood in Moscow, including ballet, modeling ambitions, and a journey to America with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to attend an alleged modeling summer camp right before she entered the Thénardier household.
Those memories also included being pushed from a moving vehicle by the Thénardiers, suffering injuries serious enough to require hospitalization, and a period she later understood may have involved a coma or prolonged unconsciousness.
She Thought She Had An Abusive Family
Éponine Two did not know the Thénardiers as Victoria had known them.
She did not understand the full trafficking operation surrounding the household.
She understood them primarily as an abusive and profoundly dysfunctional family.
They shouted at her.
They said cruel things to her.
They emotionally damaged her.
They attempted to control her.
But Éponine Two was not, to Victoria’s knowledge, sexually abused by the Thénardiers.
Instead, the abuse eventually became intolerable enough that Éponine Two wanted one thing above everything else:
distance.
She became a Christian.
She sought counseling.
She established an independent life.
And she separated herself from the family.
She did not want to return for holidays.
She did not want repeated telephone calls.
She did not want to spend her life thinking about the Thénardiers.
When Mrs. Thénardier continued attempting to pull her back into the family relationship, their telephone conversations could become explosive.
Éponine Two wanted her own life.
She wanted the Thénardiers left behind.
Her Estrangement Created A Problem
Éponine Two had not been rescued in the dramatic way Victoria had been.
She simply grew up and walked away.
But that created a public and relational problem for the Thénardiers.
The daughter they had partially raised wanted almost nothing to do with them.
She avoided holidays.
She sought counseling for childhood abuse.
She resisted contact.
She would not perform the role of the loving daughter returning home to her family.
And so the daughter-position itself began to become something other women could compete to occupy.
Victoria knows of at least three:
Chris. Christina. And Holly Laveda.
There may have been others.
These women appeared much later in the story, at a time when Éponine One would have been an adult in roughly her twenties or thirties had she survived.
They were three completely different women.
And they pursued the daughter-role in different ways.
Chris Tried To Become Éponine One
Chris was an obese woman with short brown hair.
Victoria experienced her as hostile, sexually crude, jealous, mocking, highly manipulative, and vicious.
Chris attempted to attach herself to the history of Éponine One.
She promoted a story in which Éponine One had not died after the later gang rape, but had instead survived, entered foster care, grown up elsewhere, and eventually returned.
Chris then attempted to establish herself as that surviving Éponine.
That claim could potentially give her something more valuable than a name.
It gave her seniority within the Thénardier family.
History.
A daughter-position supposedly reaching back decades.
The actual documentary identity of Éponine One remains unclear to Victoria.
After the child rape, intervention by the grandparents, and later foster-care involvement, the identity associated with Éponine One appears to have become disconnected from the Thénardier family.
Victoria does not know whether Éponine One was subsequently adopted under another identity when she was removed from the house after the pregnancy, whether records were changed, or exactly what happened to the documentation after her removal.
What Victoria does understand is that Éponine One later died.
Chris was not Éponine One.
Chris Entered The Christian Prophetic World
Chris also became important to the story of Éponine Two.
She inserted herself into Christian prophetic environments.
And she became one of the principal people facilitating the prophetic messages given to Éponine Two that Colin was supposed to become her husband. Those giving the words claimed that God had revealed this to them during prayer.
Chris was not the only person involved.
Other Christians also delivered similar prophetic words to Éponine Two, claiming that they, too, were hearing from God.
But Chris played a major role in creating, facilitating, and reinforcing the prophetic narrative surrounding Colin.
Éponine Two did not understand the situation as an attempt to pursue another woman’s husband.
She did not know Colin was married.
Colin had presented himself within Christian and pastoral environments as a single man.
Éponine Two knew him as someone associated with ministry.
He had long expressed interests in youth ministry, youth camps, worship ministry, and pastoral work.
That was the man Éponine Two believed she was hearing about through prophecy:
a single Christian man involved in ministry whom God supposedly intended to become her husband.
Had Éponine Two known that Colin already had a wife, Victoria believes she would have rejected the prophetic messages entirely.
She would not have interpreted them as permission to pursue a married man.
She would have regarded them as false.
Christina Tried To Claim Éponine One Too
Christina was an entirely different woman.
She was tall, thin, and blonde, and a single mother of a young boy.
She also attempted to establish herself as the surviving Éponine One.
According to what Victoria later learned, Mrs. Thénardier rejected Christina’s effort in part because Christina did not look sufficiently like the daughter whose identity she was attempting to claim.
Christina also attempted to obtain and use Victoria’s identity.
Victoria was later told that Christina attempted to enroll in an associate-degree program using that identity.
According to the account given to Victoria, problems arose because the academic history associated with Victoria’s actual identity already included a BFA. Authorities questioned Christina’s college application, asking why a person who already held a BFA would enroll in a local community college to pursue an associate degree in the same field.
Victoria does not know exactly what authorities subsequently determined, whether charges resulted, what explanation Christina gave, or what ultimately happened to Christina.
Afterward, Christina largely disappeared from Victoria’s own awareness.
Her final circumstances remain unknown.
Then There Was Holly Laveda
Holly Laveda pursued something different.
Holly Laveda did not primarily need to convince people that she was Éponine One.
She wanted the daughter-position itself — and she also wanted Victoria’s identity for an entirely different purpose.
Victoria remembers Holly Laveda as fair-skinned, with long blonde hair.
She tanned heavily.
She repeatedly used extensions to make her hair appear considerably thicker.
Holly Laveda told Victoria that she had undergone liposuction and received breast implants.
She continually emphasized or altered her appearance in ways Victoria understood as part of a deliberately cultivated sexual image.
Within Scotland’s Les Misérables, Holly Laveda belongs among The Lovely Ladies— the women connected in different ways to the escort world surrounding the trafficking system.
Exactly when Holly Laveda entered that world remains uncertain.
Holly Laveda And Colin
Victoria came to understand that Colin and Holly Laveda may have appeared to connect through an adult-entertainment environment in Switzerland.
Information that emerged later suggested that their reported relationship may have begun much earlier. At the time the information was received, Victoria and her family understood it as an attempt to discredit Colin and undermine the marriage that had become an important legal and personal shield protecting her from the people who had trafficked her.
Victoria still cannot establish exactly when Holly Laveda became connected to the larger escort network.
People close to Victoria who later examined the history came to believe that Holly Laveda may have been connected to that world from much earlier.
What eventually became clear to Victoria was that Holly Laveda was operating within the same broader escort environment represented by The Lovely Ladies.
The Mother Found Another Daughter
Holly Laveda also developed a close relationship with Mrs. Thénardier.
At one point, Holly Laveda told Victoria that she had lived in the Thénardiers’ house “as their daughter.”
Victoria experienced the statement as mocking and menacing.
Holly Laveda was not merely explaining where she had lived.
She appeared to be announcing the position she had acquired.
Holly Laveda also bragged to Victoria about the resources and advantages she received through that relationship.
That helped Victoria understand why the daughter-role had become something women competed over.
It could mean access.
Resources.
Influence.
Protection.
And proximity to the family.
Éponine Two had walked away from that position.
Chris attempted to inherit the identity of Éponine One.
Christina attempted to do the same.
Holly Laveda cultivated the daughter-role directly.
Holly Laveda Wanted Victoria’s Identity
Holly Laveda’s pursuit of Victoria’s identity was more deliberate.
She understood that the identity Éponine Two believed belonged to her had originated with Victoria.
And Holly Laveda wanted control of it.
According to Victoria’s understanding of Holly Laveda’s plan, obtaining control of the birth certificate and associated identity would allow Holly Laveda to remove Victoria from the picture and then present herself to people in Colin’s life as Victoria.
Holly Laveda did not closely resemble Victoria.
But Victoria understood that Holly Laveda believed the difference could be explained away through changes in appearance — hair, weight, cosmetic alterations, aging, or simply the passage of time. She wanted others to believe that Victoria had simply turned into her.
The people most vulnerable to such a deception would be those who had never met Victoria personally or had not seen her in many years.
Holly Laveda did not merely want access to a document.
She wanted control of the identity behind it.
She wanted to enter Colin’s life and have other people accept her in place of Victoria or as if Victoria had never existed, and she herself had been his wife all along.
That is why the altered identity being used by Éponine Two became so valuable.
Éponine Two believed it was hers.
Holly Laveda knew it had originated with Victoria.
And Holly Laveda attempted to reach Victoria’s identity through Éponine Two.
Éponine Two And The Prophetic Words
Éponine Two’s relationship to Colin must therefore be understood separately from Holly Laveda’s.
Éponine Two was not trying to replace a wife she knew existed.
She did not know there was a wife.
She believed Colin was single.
She understood him as a Christian man connected to ministry.
And she came to believe through repeated prophetic messages that God intended him to become her husband.
Chris was one of the principal people facilitating those messages.
Other people participated as well, asserting that they had also heard from God about this prophetic word.
Éponine Two did not understand that at least some of the people around the prophetic process were connected to the larger world surrounding the Thénardiers and Victoria’s trafficking.
To Éponine Two, they looked like Christians.
They attended churches.
They spoke the language of prophecy.
They seemed spiritually credible.
And they told her that Colin was her future husband.
Had Éponine Two known he was married, the entire structure would have collapsed.
But she did not know.
And then came another prophetic word: Colin was going to be involved in the Christian prophetic community in Dallas, and God wanted Éponine Two to move to Dallas to position herself to encounter him and marry him. God wanted her to put a home together in Dallas to have faith for the marriage to happen, and believe that he would provide all of the resources she needed.
And Then Came Dallas
On July 29, 2018, Éponine Two went to a church gathering in Dallas, TX, that became the site of the Dallas church massacre — the real-life event represented in Scotland’s Les Misérables as The Barricade.
She went because she believed Colin would be there.
She had already spent time around that church community waiting for the man she believed God had promised her.
The prophetic messages had convinced her that the single Christian minister she believed was destined to become her husband would soon appear in her community and subsequently pursue her.
So Éponine Two went looking for him.
During the massacre, Victoria was positioned across the sanctuary near one of the doors, helping keep the doorway open enough for survivors to get through.
From across the room, Victoria saw a woman who looked strikingly like her being shot.
She saw the woman go down.
In the chaos of that moment, Victoria did not understand who she had just seen.
She was later told that survivor cell-phone video from inside the sanctuary had been reviewed and that the woman who had been shot and fallen was Éponine Two.
Éponine Two died in the sanctuary.
Victoria was also later told that the people responsible believed they were shooting Victoria.
The years of identity manipulation surrounding the two women had apparently become so extensive that Éponine Two was mistaken for the woman whose identity she had been given.
The tragedy of Éponine Two’s life had come full circle.
She had been trafficked as a child.
She had been given another trafficking victim’s identity and taught that it belonged to her.
She had almost no accessible memory of the childhood that preceded the identity she was given.
She had been told that an automobile accident and plastic surgery explained the missing years and changes in her life.
She had believed she was living not inside a trafficking system, but inside an abusive and dysfunctional family.
She had become a Christian.
She had sought counseling.
She had separated herself from the Thénardiers.
She had tried to construct an independent life.
Then people operating within a Christian prophetic environment convinced her that a man she believed was single had been divinely appointed to become her husband.
And a prophetic word led her to Dallas looking for him.
In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Éponine’s love for Marius draws her into the violence surrounding the barricade, where she is shot and dies.
In Scotland’s Les Misérables, Éponine Two’s love for Colin also draws her into the violence surrounding the barricade, where she is shot and dies.
She Went Looking For The Man She Had Been Told Was Supposed To Be Her Husband — And Died At The Massacre.
That is the tragedy of Éponine Two.
Not that she became one of the Thénardiers.
She did not.
She tried to leave them behind.
But even after separating herself from the household, the world that had manipulated her childhood, her identity, her faith, and her understanding of her own future still found a way to follow her.
Two Éponines — Two Different Tragedies
Éponine One and Éponine Two occupied the same daughter-role at different points in the history of the Thénardier household.
But they responded to that world very differently.
Éponine One had been taken from another family and raised so deeply inside the Thénardier world that the corruption surrounding her gradually became part of who she was.
Éponine Two was given another trafficking victim’s identity, kept largely unaware and oblivious of the criminal system surrounding the family, and eventually came to understand the Thénardiers primarily as an abusive and dysfunctional household from which she wanted to escape.
Éponine One became increasingly shaped by the world that had consumed her.
Éponine Two separated herself from it.
Both began as trafficked children.
Both were placed into the daughter-role surrounding the Thénardiers.
And both demonstrate different ways in which exploitation can continue shaping a human life long after the first act of trafficking has occurred.
Éponine One became the daughter the household reproduced through corruption.
Éponine Two became the daughter who tried to escape.
And even after Éponine Two walked away, other women were waiting to fill the vacancy she had left inside the Thénardier family.
