Forgiveness is usually described as something a survivor gives and then receives back as relief. Grace Spulak’s essay in The Cut is an account of the years she spent trying to reach it and failing, and of what she arrived at instead. The demand to forgive — pressed on her by former colleagues, by legislators, by her own memory of the person she had been — functioned less as healing than as a way to stop talking about what had been done to her.
Spulak was an attorney in New Mexico representing children and young people when she became a foster parent. The reason was professional as much as personal: she had watched teenagers she represented get hurt by adults who had promised to care for them, and thought what they needed was not another lawyer but a home. She took the training, passed the inspection, and eventually took in a 17-year-old she calls Clayton — three garbage bags of belongings, shoulders hunched, lying constantly about small things, and, she decided, not yet a sign of danger.
Eight months later he ran away without warning, leaving a note about finding his father in Texas. Three months after that, someone dismantled the spare bedroom window in the middle of the night. Her mother found her unconscious on the bedroom floor, face wrapped in duct tape, after she failed to show up for work.
The damage was diffuse. Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, from a brain starved of oxygen: the basal ganglia, the caudate nuclei, the structures governing balance, speech and movement. Doctors told her family they could not say whether she would recover. She spent months in hospitals and physical rehab, learning her hands and feet again through exercises that left her nauseous — digging beads out of putty, spinning nuts onto screws, flicking cotton balls across tabletops. Her speech came back garbled and then mostly clear. She walked again, played her cello again, moved in with a new partner. Her memory of that night never returned.
The evidence, and what she decided to do with it
Nearly a year later, a detective asked her to come to his office. He unwrapped a burgundy T-shirt from brown paper — the kind of shirt Clayton wore, stained with grass and marked by dark blotches, DNA-matched to him. It had been wrapped around her kitchen knife, left in the middle of her living-room floor. There was more DNA, in her bedroom. Her reaction, she writes, was not rage but confusion. Until that moment she had not really believed he had done it.
She had spent six years representing children by then, having gone to law school specifically for that purpose, and forgiveness was a word she had used carelessly on behalf of clients. She had argued that systems should not condemn young people forever, that harm could be overcome. She writes plainly that she would have made the same argument for Clayton — and that she did not want to meet violence with violence, but she wanted him in prison. It was the only mechanism available for keeping him away from her, so she let the prosecution proceed and encouraged it.
The trial ran five days. Clayton testified for hours that gang members with a gun had forced him into the house; the jury took 45 minutes. He was sentenced to 27 years. Spulak is candid about the parts of this that do not flatter her: she had friends and family seated behind the prosecution table, and no one came for him, and she felt guilty about it — “not guilty enough to tell people not to come.” In the 45 minutes the jury deliberated she sat in a Xanax haze. She considered asking for a restorative-justice proceeding before sentencing and concluded she had nothing left to offer: no compassion, no forgiveness, and no appetite for another story about how it was not his fault.
The word everyone used
In 2021 she learned of a juvenile-justice reform bill pending in the New Mexico legislature that would make Clayton eligible for parole in five years instead of sixteen. She grew sick with panic and lost days of work. Many of the people advocating for the bill were people she had worked with, had come to her hospital room, had sat through the trial. They did not return her calls when she said the bill felt unfair and had made her physically ill.
“You should look into forgiveness,” one of the few legislators who called her back told her. The word recurred through the hearings she livestreamed from bed, migraines knotting her body. She read restorative-justice manuals and prison abolitionists and first-person essays by people who had forgiven the person who nearly killed them or killed their family, and Googled “crime violence forgiveness” obsessively. The stories, she writes, had little relationship to what she felt.
Her reading of the demand is that it displaced responsibility onto her. It told her that what happened did not matter, or at least that no one wanted to hear it — that Clayton had wrapped her head in duct tape and left her in her own shit and vomit, and that everyone preferred to believe in transformation and in forgiveness as the magic word that caused it, after which past violence would be somehow erased. “Forgiveness in this context felt like an evasion,” she writes, “a way to shift the blame away from our society that could not figure out how to deal with violence.” She is honest that this may be projection, born of guilt over how quickly she abandoned her own principles when her life was at stake.
What she can say instead
The legislation passed in 2023. Spulak still cannot say she forgave Clayton, and does not want the apology or the explanation that forgiveness is supposed to produce; she suspects any story he told her would be another version of the one he told at trial, and that the gray void of her missing memory is closer to the truth. She is careful on one point: she does not begrudge him the opportunity to change. That change would simply not undo what he did.
What she can give herself, she writes, is not forgiveness but something closer to acceptance — that these things happened, that there is no explanation and no ending, and that she can go on anyway. “I will never fully move on,” she writes, and “Clayton will always be an opaque place in my life that I cannot move around.”
Two things are worth separating here. This is one person’s testimony about her own case, not evidence about how juvenile sentencing or parole reform works, and the account is hers alone. But it is a precise description of what the forgiveness demand looks like from the receiving end — and it does not argue that forgiveness is wrong for other people, only that it was never available to her, and that a culture which treats it as the required ending has found a way to stop listening.
Read the full story at The Cut.