Dawn Schiller is a Gender Studies Minor at EOU graduating in 2012. This year she has published her memoir titled, The Road Through Wonderland. Her biography and a description of the book are below. Dawn's contribution to our program has been outstanding and her book demonstrates her commitment to ending violence against women and children.
Dawn Schiller (second from the left)
receiving the Woman of Courage
and
Vision in 2010 at EOU
Los Angeles Magazine Hot Topic List
Dawn Schiller was 15 years old in 1976, when she met 32-yearold porn star John Holmes. After courting Schiller, Holmes began a sexual relationship with her, manipulating her with drugs and alcohol and physically and emotionally abusing her for several years. After the famed Wonderland murders in 1981, Holmes and Schiller fled to Florida, where she ultimately broke free and turned him over to the police.
Schiller eventually relocated to Northern California and finally to the Pacific Northwest, where she now resides with her daughter. In addition to being a devoted mother, Schiller has worked as an Associate Producer and consultant on the movie “Wonderland,” where she was portrayed by famed actress Kate Bosworth. John Holmes was played by renowned actor Val Kilmer.
A national advocate for preventing teen victimization, Schiller started ”Our Throwaway Teens—Who Are They and How Can We Help?,” a national platform that seeks to raise awareness of the vulnerabilities to a teen that grows up in an abusive and neglected environment. Schiller routinely speaks to audiences about several vital issues related to teen victimization: what happens emotionally to a teen targeted and groomed by a predator, how to identify a young victim in trouble, pedophile seduction techniques and the use of addictive drugs to manipulate and trap a victim. Giving an insider’s view of what it’s like to be a ”throwaway teen,” Schiller hopes to encourage communities to better shelter their teen population through outreach programs and education. Schiller is also the founder of E.S.T.E.A.M. (Empowering Successful Teens through Education, Awareness and Mentoring), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting teens who are struggling to find a safe and successful path to adulthood.
Schiller is a member of the Education Committee and is an Advisory Board member for the National Center of Victims of Crime in Washington D.C. as well as for The Americans Overseas Domestic Violence Crisis Center and Voices Set Free. Schiller has been awarded the Woman of Vision and Courage Award from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Her memoir, The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes will be published this August 2010 by Medallion Press. Schiller has been abstinent from drugs and alcohol for many years.
Dawn Schiller was an associate producer and consultant on the 2003 movie Wonderland, which depicted the life of John Holmes in and around 1981. She is a member of a variety of committees—including the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and the National Center of Victims of Crime—and she has developed a program called Throwaway Teens: Who Are They and How Can We Help?, which brings awareness to the experiences of kids targeted and groomed by predators. Schiller is also the founder of E.S.T.E.A.M. (Empowering Successful Teens through Education, Awareness and Mentoring), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting teens who are struggling to find a safe and successful path to adulthood.
For more information on Dawn Schiller, please visit: www.dawn-schiller.com
To book an interview with Dawn Schiller or for more information about her memoir, The Road Through Wonderland, please contact Jen Wisnowski, Publicity Manager, Independent Publishers Group, (312) 337-0747 ext. 227 or jen@ipgbook.com
CHICAGO: By age 20, Dawn Schiller had been prostituted, raped and nearly kidnapped; linked to the 1981 gruesome Wonderland murders; and chased cross country by federal officials and drug lords. She had also been the girlfriend of the legendary porn star John Holmes for nearly five years—a disturbing relationship centered on her yearning for love and eventual fear, and his desire for power and drugs.
In her disquieting memoir, The Road Through Wonderland:
Surviving John Holmes (Medallion Press, August 2010) with forewords by Val Kilmer and Kate Bosworth, Schiller offers a candid and shocking account of the troubling childhood that led her to Holmes and how her fragile emotions and his addictive persona thrust her into an unsettling and brutal world of abuse, cocaine, prostitution and murder.
A child of the ‘70s, Schiller recalls her youth spent in a broken home in a rough neighborhood of Carol City, Florida, “listening to heavy metal, getting high and hating life.” With the return of her hippie-pot-smoking father, 15-year-old Schiller hoped for a better life and followed her father to Southern California—an ensuing marijuana-fueled journey that ultimately ended at a home managed by the “king of porn,” John Holmes.
As Schiller recalls in The Road to Wonderland, Holmes—then a 32-year-old married man who, as Schiller embarrassingly remembers, was immediately disappointed in her young age—quickly became an odd but caring father figure to her. Writing with a blend of adolescent perspective and regretful hindsight, Schiller describes
how her feelings for Holmes shifted from a protective friend—initially helping him and his wife with their garden for extra money—to a dominant lover, recalling their first sexual encounter in which she “remained deathly still, pinned immobile under John’s strength.”
In The Road Through Wonderland, Schiller heartbreakingly reveals how John’s “presence, words, and actions filled every lonely, dejected void [she] harbored inside,” ultimately leading her down a path of seedy motels, the drug underworld and perpetual fear. With heartrending and frightening detail, she exposes how John’s raging temper and addiction to freebase cocaine transformed him into a paranoid maniac, who—after beating her up and forcing her to prostitute herself—would viciously scrub her clean in the bathtub while sobbing with apologies.
By turns salacious, by turns tender, this honest account also lends insight to the dynamic of Schiller’s bizarre but touching relationship with Holmes’ wife, candidly detailing their Christmases spent together and how she taught Schiller how to cook John’s favorite meals and fold his clothes to his preferences. The Road Through Wonderland also traces Schiller’s time on the run after the famed Wonderland Murders and her journey to self-acceptance, forgiveness and clarity that birthed Throwaway Teens, a program that brings awareness to kids who are targeted and influenced by predators, and E.S.T.E.A.M, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting teens who are struggling to find a safe and successful path to adulthood.
A harrowing and surrealistic story of power, control, love and false hope, The Road Through Wonderland lends startling insight into the mind of a teenage girl whose desire for affection, meaning and love fueled her trust in a man that would haunt and scar her life forever.
Title: The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes
Author: Dawn Schiller; Forewords by Val Kilmer and Kate Bosworth
Publisher: Medallion Press, Distributed by Independent Publishers Group
Publication: August 2010, 5 x 8, $19.95, Trade Paper, ISBN: 978160542083
Biography, 474 pages, 4 Color Photos, 4 B/W Photos
Available at bookstores everywhere and through Independent Publishers Group,
814 N. Franklin St., Chicago, IL 60610. Toll-free number for orders only:
1-800-888-4741. Visit us online at www.ipgbook.com.
“Dawn has survived. This book is a testimony to her will to overcome. As we wrote, shot and cut Wonderland, she allowed us
absolute transparency on a darkness few ever experience. She understood hers was a story that had to be told, not just as a
cautionary tale against the horrors of violence and abuse, but as a beacon leading others in her predicament out of peril. This book is her triumph, but the narrative weaved within these pages is a true nightmare that will haunt you, as it did me,
for years.” —James Cox, director and cowriter of Wonderland
“When I got an advance copy of The Road Through Wonderland, I thought I already knew the story. The power of Dawn Schiller’s writing is that within a few pages, you are so drawn into her harrowing, roller-coaster life with her fractured family and then with porn star John Holmes, that you almost become her while reading it. There is not much separation from writer and reader. Schiller draws an unforgettable portrait of a lost, drug-addled corner of late 1970s Los Angeles and what it was like to be a lonely girl targeted by a predator in that world. The whole book is one long, chilling money shot … The most mesmerizing memoir since Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle.” —Dana Kennedy, AOL News
“Dawn Schiller’s chilling account of her youth as the underage mistress of legendary porn star John Holmes is infused with the
goodness and humanity that ultimately delivered her from her abusive ordeals. A classic story of an innocent young
woman’s descent and self-redemption, The Road Through Wonderland is gritty and starkly honest; it is at once a
horror tale and a story of triumph.” —Mike Sager, writer-at-large at Esquire and author of Scary Monsters and Super Freaks
“Curiously enough for a book concerned with notorious pornographic film star John Holmes, there is very little emphasis on sex
here. Instead, Schiller, who met Holmes in 1976 when she was just 15, details their five-year love affair, the stability he provided
in the wake of her troubled childhood and the deterioration of their relationship after Holmes became addicted to cocaine and was ultimately arrested.” —Booklist
“Courageous. Not only will Schiller’s haunting story stay with you, but her beautifully descriptive writing will as well. This
book is for anyone who has ever wondered why and how adults—or for that matter, society—could turn their back on abused children. Schiller’s painful insights help us begin to understand how these horrible things might happen . . . I find it amazing that Dawn Schiller manages to write so beautifully about something so shatteringly repulsive.
Her picturesque descriptions belie her ability to somehow connect with the beauty of the natural world while being neglected,
exploited, and abused by the human world. The thing to take away from The Road through Wonderland is not that it is a bizarre or extreme story, but that is a girl’s true story and gives us a rare and haunting look into what surviving takes. This important book illustrates the complexity of the victimization of children, for too many youth, victimization is not a single event, but a process or even a state of being. —Mitru Ciarlante, Youth Initiative Director at the National Center for Victims of Crime
“A cautionary tale in workmanlike prose.” —Publishers Weekly
“The emotions are strong throughout this well-written book and lead the reader into a world few travel and survive. I was unable
to put the book down!” —Susan Murphy Milano, violence expert and author of Time’s Up
“Dawn Schiller’s courageous and intimately detailed memoir has given us a rare backstage glimpse at the tragic life of one man
whom the porn industry used to sustain its myth-making machinery—and the havoc he wreaked in the life of a vulnerable young
woman.” —Dr. Jackson Katz, author of The Macho Paradox
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