Every time she was sexually assaulted, Kyrsten Shapiro made a mark in the closet of her Cranberry Township home.

Shapiro said she was 11 years old when Stephen Manning assaulted her the first time. Manning, now 76, did not plead guilty to the assaults until Shapiro came forward 20 years later, at the age of 31.

In February, Shapiro, now 39, saw Manning be sentenced again. He violated his Butler County parole by moving to Florida, where he later assaulted another girl in May 2023.

“Why did it have to happen to another victim in order to get here? The (first) case was to prevent this,” she said. “How can this be? How can someone who assaults a child 30 times be allowed to see daylight again?”

Shapiro now lives in North Carolina, far from the place of her assault and where Manning now sits.

Through her experiences on the road to justice, she said she has learned much about herself by standing up in court against Manning for her own case and the 2023 case in Florida.

As a rule, the Butler Eagle does not name the victims of sexual assault or connect them to their abusers. Shapiro reached out to the Eagle in February, when Manning was scheduled to be sentenced in Florida.

While she still has her share of struggles, she said she feels it is important to share her story.

“I encourage anyone who has endured such traumas to speak up, and if you can’t find someone that will, I am here for every one of you and will advocate for you until my last breath,” she said. “This is my life’s purpose.”

The abuse

Shapiro said her mother and father separated when she was young, and Manning entered the picture when she was only 3 or 4 years old. Her biological father died when she was 7 years old.

Shapiro, her mother and Manning then moved from their home in New York to Cranberry Township in 1994, she said.

“I was 9 when we moved,” she said. “After we moved, in retrospect, I can see where the grooming began when I was really young. I was around 10 when the grooming started.”

Shapiro said Manning would stop her on the stairs and make her flash him to get past, or peek over the curtain while she was taking a shower.

The first assault was in October 1996, when Shapiro was 11 years old. She said she remembers Manning touching her inappropriately while she was asleep. The assault woke her up, and he left the room.

Shapiro said when she told her mother what happened the next day, she “seemed surprised.”

“(Manning) told her he thought I was my mother … bull (expletive),” Shapiro said. “After that, it never stopped happening.”

Shapiro said she was assaulted more than 30 times by Manning.

“I made tick marks in my closet every time (an assault) would happen,” she said. “I would pretend to be sleeping while it was happening.”

Since nothing changed the first time she told someone about Manning’s behavior, Shapiro said she stopped bringing it up.

Manning was also physically abusive, according to a letter Shapiro sent to the girl Manning assaulted in Florida. She recalled an instance where Manning threw her to the floor after she accidentally dropped a towel on a cactus.

“I fought as hard as I could and screamed for my mom,” Shapiro later wrote in the letter. “She came and got him off of me. Again, nothing happened.”

At one point, Shapiro said she tried sleeping in her mother’s bed to stop the sexual abuse, but Manning “didn’t relent.”

Shapiro then tried staying in the guest bedroom, locking the door and staying awake the whole night.

She said she kept silent about the assaults until May 9, 1997. Before leaving for school one day, she left a note in her room for her mom to find when she cleaned.

She said the note read something along the lines of “What would you do if you knew someone was being abused?”

After the note was found, Shapiro said her mother sat her down and asked about it, thinking it pertained to one of her daughter’s friends. When Shapiro said it was her, she recalled her mother “wondering how this could happen.”

“There was a report made. He was advised to turn himself in to ChildLine and the police … and that made him look good,” she said.

ChildLine is a toll-free, 24-hour hotline (1-800-932-0313) for reporting child abuse in Pennsylvania.

Manning made the ChildLine report about the assaults on May 20, 1997, according to court documents filed in July 2016.

Shapiro said she was pulled out of her sixth-grade class in Evans City Elementary School by representatives from Butler County Children & Youth Services who interviewed her about what happened.

Court documents showed Manning also was interviewed by Cranberry Township police in June 1997 and disclosed the assaults had occurred.

After that, Shapiro said her mother did not want charges filed against Manning. She told her child that her extracurricular sports activities, the family’s home, and damage to the family name were all things that “couldn’t be afforded.”

The 2016 affidavit indicated prosecution did not proceed in 1997 because Shapiro’s mother “declined to cooperate further.”

“How can this be? How can someone take a child’s voice away like that when the very people charged with protecting them are not doing their job?” she said. “All of those government entities are there to protect and serve, and they did not do that.”

Moving out, speaking up

Counseling began. Shapiro, her mother and Manning visited with the same counselor. Then they attended together.

Manning eventually moved back into the home with Shapiro and her mother.

“I had to sleep with an alarm on my door in my own home,” Shapiro said, explaining that this was the counselor’s solution for the family to cohabitate safely.

Once Shapiro moved out and went off to college at Western Carolina University in North Carolina, she started to deal with the trauma.

“I was angry at everything,” she said. “A lot of it started coming out in not the healthiest of ways: outbursts, breakdowns … It took me all of my 20s to actually process it.”

Early in her college career, Shapiro met her husband at a party. She said the two of them have been inseparable ever since.

Her relationship with him and his family helped her through the healing process, she said.

“I don’t know if I would’ve gotten as far as I did in my story if not for him,” she said. “(His family) stuck with me through a lot.”

Manning gave her away at her wedding, Shapiro said.

“I was trying to be strong and brave,” she explained. “But any time I’d spend with him, I’d just completely break.”

In 2011, Shapiro gave birth to her daughter and it changed her world forever.

“When I looked at her, I thought, how could (someone) let this happen to another person?” she said.

On Independence Day in 2016, Shapiro said there was an argument that ensued within her family about Manning.

That argument prompted her to contact Cranberry Township police about filing charges against him for what occurred in 1997, though she was miles away and years removed from the assaults.

The police still had the report from when she was 12 years old, she said, making the process easier.

“Because there was an admission of guilt (from Manning), there was no pushback at all,” she said.

Manning pled guilty in July 2017 to two felony counts of aggravated indecent assault of a person less than 13 years old, court documents show. Shapiro said she gave a victim impact statement during proceedings in Butler County Common Pleas Court.

“I was wanting to do it, totally, but I was very scared, very nervous just because I had never been in a courtroom before,” she said.

In January 2018, Shapiro and her husband attended Manning’s sentencing in Butler. According to a Butler Eagle article, he was sentenced to serve 8 to 16 months in Butler County Prison, register as a sex offender and serve five years of county probation.

“It was just me and my husband versus the world is what it felt like,” Shapiro said. “The judge only gave him eight months … said he was ‘an old man.’”

Though the court process was completed, Shapiro said she was left wanting more.

“I wish the judge would have agreed to a state sentence instead of the county sentence and been harsher on his punishment,” she said. “Assaulting a child one time, let alone 20 to 30, warrants way more than a slap on the wrist. It was insulting to me.”

Despite the disappointment she felt, Shapiro said her self-confidence and sense of self-worth grew from the experience.

“I became more self-assured in telling my story and felt a great sense of pride in my resolve,” she said. “I was proud to stand up for myself, stop the silence and bring awareness.”

The Florida case

In March 2022, Manning filed to have the final two years of his probation terminated to allow him to move to Sarasota, Fla. Judge Kelley Streib denied the motion after a brief hearing, documents show.

Despite this, Manning moved anyway.

Shapiro said she caught wind of Manning’s move through a conversation with a family member.

“When he violated his probation in Pennsylvania to go back to Florida, how was he not immediately tracked down? Why wasn’t Florida notified?” Shapiro said.

Then, in May 2023, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s office called her and asked her to serve as a character witness in the new case against Manning.

The new charges were filed May 9, 2023, after a girl reported a series of assaults to a school official. Documents show the girl disclosed she “couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t happening.”

At the time charges were filed, Manning was not permitted to be outside of Butler County, as he was still serving probation from the 2018 sentence. Documents recorded Manning’s probation violation in Butler County on May 10, 2023.

Manning plead guilty again in January on the Florida case for felony charges of sexual assault and molestation.

“The state needed me to get the sentencing,” Shapiro said.

When she was called to speak, Shapiro said she had a whole different mindset.

“When I sat in that courtroom, I felt no more pain, shame or reluctance. It was business at that point,” she said. “I felt bad for no one, except for the second victim. It was finally happening and I helped get this case, this monster, to where he deserved to go.”

On Feb. 26, 2024, Manning was sentenced to 40 years in a Florida prison.

“Prior to all of this, I tried to get others to do the right thing to stand up for me, to stand up for the other victim. At the end of the day, I learned that you have to advocate for yourself if you want something done,” she said.

The two courtroom experiences made her appreciative and reflective.

“There are a lot of great people who work endless hours to fight for children of abuse, but there are not enough of them and too many children who never received the help they need,” she said. “Being harsher on these offenders will help the children not fall into the hands of their abuser again.”

Moving forward

Certain behaviors or physical traits will bring Shapiro’s mind back to the assaults: a tongue click or stinky breath, a crew cut or short nail beds.

These triggers have made certain relationships difficult at times, she said.

“My triggers are my responsibility now,” she said. “When you’re aware of something and the person doing it is not the one who hurt you, it’s not them. It’s on me.”

Triggers can be like scars, according to Shapiro, and she said it’s often frustrating to navigate them.

“I get mad at myself at this point,” she said. “You’re like, ‘Why is this happening?’”

While she continues to pursue healing through counseling, Shapiro said it was only recently that she realized there was a lot of trauma left to process.

“Humbling yourself to yourself, as cliché as that may sound, is the only way to achieve true growth,” she said. “I had to grow up fast because of everything that I went through, which does not mean emotional maturity. I feel like I have finally arrived and am very self-aware.”

The journey meant giving up certain relationships, but led her to loving herself, her children and husband even more.

“This journey from 2016 to present has taught me a great deal of self-respect,” she said. “It has given me the courage to speak up, to share my story in hopes it will help someone else.”

While life experience caused Shapiro to grow significantly, she said it also causes her to trust less.

“You just never know who you are dealing with, especially when the statistic of 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys are sexually abused is rolling around in the back of your head,” she said. “My kids have friends, my kids play sports, and to know that some of these children we interact with daily are going through hell with no voice is heart-wrenching.”

Victims of sexual assault will always have her as an advocate, Shapiro said.

“When I share my story … It’s amazing to me how many people have the same story,” she said.