On top of his father's beatings, Perry says he was sexually abused by four different adults, beginning when he was five or six. On one occasion, he was building a birdhouse with an adult male neighbor who proceeded to put his hands in Tyler's pants. "I felt my body betraying me," he says, "because I felt an erection at that age."

Later, Tyler said he was sexually molested by a male nurse and a man he knew from church. The man from church "used God and the Bible against me to justify a lot of the things that were going on. It was so horrible," he said. "And that was my first sexual experience – with this man performing oral sex on me as a boy."

When it all became unbearable, Perry says he slit his wrists and tried to commit suicide. "I thought, 'What is the point of living?'" he says.