I needed to write this

Because this is my space, I'm going to share this about someone who I had considered one of my best friends and they turned out to be something completely different.

I’m going to enter this piece with a warning.

This was difficult to write and it’ll likely be difficult to read. It’s raw and emotional, and it probably deserves a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever dealt with abuse or has been rocked by the extended impact of abuse.

I also need to tell you why I’m publishing this today and what this is.

On Monday night, while I was prepping for the game between the Dallas Stars and Detroit Red Wings at Little Caesars Arena, I made the mistake of scrolling through Instagram while eating dinner.

I came across a promoted post for a class-action, asking “were you or a loved one ever patient of Dr. Zvi Levran?”

That post brought up my own personal trauma, my heart started racing, and I needed to take a quick walk around the lower level of the arena to calm down.

A couple days later, this was still bothering me under the surface, it didn’t help that I’d come across news reports that Levran had plead no-contest to 28 sex assault charges and is set to be sentenced later this month.

That’s when I turned back to this piece, which I wrote a little more than a year ago. This piece, helped pull me out of some my own depression then, and reading it helped me a bit more today when I was dealing again with some of that re-introduced trauma.

I thought heavily about publishing this, letting anyone other than my wife read this.

In the end, I came to the decision to publish this because I want to be open about mental health and trauma, about difficult things. How when you are dealing with something, someone else is also going through it, too, and if you need to share your story, someone will listen.

Also, selfishly, I want this out there so I can heal a bit more publicly about it. I’m not looking for sympathy or anything. As you’ll read, I’m not one of the real victims here. But this is something that’s been weighing on me, and the readership here, whether you like it or not, have become a support group that’s proven time-and-time again that after I dealt with pretty bad job loss, I was worth your attention.

So, again, if you don’t want to or can’t read about something that relates to sexual assault, please stop reading now. I understand completely.

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The following was written about 14 months ago, it helped me do some healing. I decided to publish it today after some recent events.

I don’t get writer’s block. 

It’s one of the reasons I’ve made it in my life as a professional writer. There have been tough stories to write, sure, but I’ve never hit that full wall I couldn’t get over. 

It’s why I need to write this. I still haven’t decided when or where this will go, or if anyone other than my wife and I will see it, but I need to write this. 

I was supposed to have a vasectomy in October 2022. 

It was scheduled, Dr. Zvi Levran was going to do the procedure. As part of the prep, I had a physical at his home office on Oct. 19, 2022.

It was essentially what I expected and what he told me it would be. He was a urologist, he checked those particular areas, told me how the procedure would go and the procedure was officially scheduled for the following week. 

The following day he was arrested for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old, in the same home office. He has since been charged with more than 20 counts of sexual misconduct with more than 10 victims coming forward. 

I’m not one of those victims, I want to be clear on that. 

But Dr. Zvi Levran was one of my best friends. 

The shrapnel from the realization of what happened and what he did to others, it’s been continuously digging into me at unexpected times and places. It’s been a catalyst to some of the worst mental health of my life. It’s made me question my relationship with others, and made me prickly and distant at times to people who haven’t deserved it. 

For a while, I couldn’t go to a 7-11, it brought up too many memories. Hockey, the rink, the place that always felt safe to me, no longer did. I struggle to practice yoga, it opens old wounds and memories. There are memories from my formative years that have become tainted and broken, things that were once core memories that have come tumbling down and made me question a lot about myself and my own character. 

I met Dr. Levran when I was a freshman in high school, my family moved from New Jersey to Michigan, and he was a volunteer doctor for the high school hockey team. Everyone called him, “Doc,” and he was part of the fabric of the high school hockey community that I was joining. 

He hosted skates on Friday nights where he bought the ice slot, it only cost $10 for skaters (as a goalie I played for free), and afterwards took everyone who skated to 7-11 and paid for everything. 

From the time I was 15, Friday nights meant hockey with Doc. Before I could drive myself I would get a ride from him to the rink, talking about life and hockey as we went from the rink, then to 7-11, and then he dropped me off at my house. 

He also ran yoga sessions for the high school teams. And even before I made the varsity hockey team I would go to every yoga session, each week I’d go and as a goalie I was already naturally flexible. I took to it pretty well, got much stronger, and at one point in my life I could get my feet behind my head. 

Because of when I moved in my life and my position, I didn’t make many real friends playing hockey. I was the new kid and the goalie, I hit the perfect cross-section for a weirdo. On top of that, I didn’t make the high school varsity team – or the JV team – as a sophomore or a junior, so I played for random travel teams, but was still allowed to practice with the JV team. 

So in the hockey world, Doc became my best friend. Between Friday night skates and yoga, I was typically seeing him at least twice a week. We talked about life, he was like a second father figure to me, and I would talk to him about things I wouldn’t dare talk to my actual parents about. 

When I finally made the high school team as a senior, and won the starting job, Doc was one of my biggest cheerleaders. He praised how hard I worked, was legitimately proud of me, and I honestly never would have been as good as a goalie if not for the hundreds of additional hours I got to practice on Friday nights at the skate he ran. 

I left for college, we stayed close and would chat and text about life and hockey. He was at my wedding, when I struggled with something, he would be one of my first calls. Even during the time I lived in Texas we stayed close, in fact on two separate occasions he flew to Texas to visit and he and I went on hockey road trips across the state, seeing three games at three levels (NHL, NAHL, and AHL) each time. 

When I moved back to Michigan in 2021, we hung out more. We would golf frequently, we both had schedules that allowed us to play during the week, and I would still occasionally make an appearance at Friday night skates when they needed a goalie because one of the high-school aged kids had bailed. 

This was a person who I counted as one of my closest friends, I trusted them. I introduced others to him, and I even felt safe with him having met my children. 

And I was wrong. 

Dr. Zvi Levran is still technically innocent until proven guilty, but a quick google search will tell you how unlikely that is. 

And I’ve struggled greatly with that fact. That a person I trusted, saw as a father figure at times, and treated me so well, did something so utterly horrible to others. 

There’s immense self-hate and guilt that I’m trying to work through. I don’t know any of the victims, but I struggle with the thought that I was part of the group of people and community that vouched for him. That somehow my endorsement or inviting someone to a Friday night skate or yoga could have potentially put someone in harm's way. 

I’ve had therapists tell me it’s not my fault, that I can’t control the world. A terrible act by someone else isn’t my responsibility. And I know that none of this is my fault, but there are times it’s harder to believe yourself than it should be. 

The timing of all of this compounded with the trauma of losing my job on Sept. 29, 2022. Losing your job sucks, no matter how it happens, and when dealing with the depression that induced, Doc had been one of the people I turned to. 

We golfed soon after I lost my job, we talked about life, about how I was resilient and would figure out what’s next. It was a conversation that in the moment helped me think there was a future, that everything would be all right. 

Less than two weeks later I learned from a Facebook post he’d been arrested. 

I was already in a fragile state from losing my job, and the news about his arrest made me question a bit of everything in my life. I struggled to trust other people, even those that were close to me, because between the sudden job loss and learning about what he did, I felt like there had to be a trapdoor soon to be pulled out with all the other relationships in my life. 

If you spoke to me during that time, when people asked me how I was doing, I basically lied to you that I was doing well. I was struggling and have continued to struggle mightily, I’ve gone through four different therapists. I became more selfish and guarded, figuring it was the best coping mechanism from having another surprise broken relationship. 

And the reality is, that ruined some of the relationships in my life, that I don’t know if I can mend or not. People who were close to me, that I effectively pushed away with non-interest that bordered on rudeness – if I pushed them away, they wouldn’t be around to hurt me anymore. 

That was my flawed and desperate thinking. I went from an eternal optimist to a pessimist, internally finding ways to self-sabotage myself and looking for the negative instead of the positive, because I believed that looking for the positives had set me up to fail. 

I was able to hit a “work switch,” flipping it on so I could continue in my career, acting the best I could to put on the front of a happy go-lucky person. I did the same around my kids, they’ve always brought me true joy. But if I wasn’t working or in “dad mode,” I was typically miserable to be around. 

My wife, Christina, essentially saved me. She pushed me to be better, but the most important thing she did was remind me that even when I was broken and battered, I was still loved. She was there for me, I have two amazing kids. When I would lose sight of that, she would be there, and help me pick up the pieces. 

I’m not fixed, I’m still broken in many ways. 

But it’s taken me a long time to realize it’s OK to be broken. It’s OK to fail, bad things happen, and even after the most jarring things, there is a chance to pick up the pieces and do the next right thing. 

For me, writing this was the next right thing. It needed to be done, and whether anyone else reads this or not, I needed to actually sit down and write this. 

My last ever conversation with Doc happened on either Oct. 24 or 25th, 2022. It came from a New York line, I’m assuming it was his lawyer's phone, and he called me to simply say we’d need to re-schedule the vasectomy. 

I was dumbfounded to get a call from him, I’d seen the news story about his arrest, and asked him, “what was going on?” He told me everything was OK, that we’d talk soon enough. 

And that was it, that was the end. 

At some point he’ll have his judgment, other journalists have uncovered some pretty gory details that hit too close to home for me – the descriptions of how he would take victims back to his house after a skate or yoga, I was literally in those same spots, but was never actually a victim. 

I’m well aware that there are others that have had their lives destroyed much worse by this man. Those who are dealing with the unimaginable and their families as well. 

Me, I’m physically OK, but emotionally scarred. There are some elements I cope with better than others. 

I've worked on re-programming 7-11 into a happy place to get slurpees with my kids, but still struggle even trying a yoga pose. The rink feels safe again, my beer league team has done more than they’ll ever know, but I still am more reclusive and shy around others than I used to be – especially outside of “work mode.”

I’m still broken, but trying to find ways to get better. And one of the biggest things, which I’ve really struggled with, is finding ways to stop this from breaking me anymore. 

For me writing this, whatever this is, has actually brought more peace than I expected. 

For the first time in really 14 months, after actually taking the time to write this all down, I don’t feel like I’m carrying a bag full of emotional boulders that I have to hide.