Angela Shelton left North Carolina as a child, fleeing a past she didn't want to talk about. This weekend she will return to air a family history sure to make many cringe: Shelton says she endured five years of sexual abuse by her father, beginning when she was 3 years old.

Now 35, Shelton has made a career of talking about the horrors of her childhood in North Carolina, often in vivid detail.

She made a film in 2004 in which she confronted her father on camera, and this month, she published a book about her struggle to overcome the emotional ravages of abuse. She travels the country promoting her products and encouraging women to overcome the self-loathing that often comes with sexual violation, sometimes inspiring public confessions and wild, rage-venting sessions.

On Saturday, she will take the stage at UNC-Chapel Hill.

She likely will be greeted by a mob of supporters. In speaking about a topic that many keep fiercely private, Shelton has become a sort of cult hero among abuse survivors.

"She was the first person who said to me, you can stand up for yourself and be loud about it, because it was wrong," said Sarah Stauffer of Cary. "Angela Shelton was the first person, other than my therapist, to be outraged on my behalf."

Stauffer, 28, has accused a family member of sexually abusing her as a child. He was never prosecuted, and her family blamed the man's actions on marijuana use and encouraged Stauffer not to talk about the abuse.

Stauffer began corresponding by e-mail with Shelton in 2004 at the recommendation of her therapist, who had seen Shelton on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." With Shelton's encouragement, Stauffer said, she filed a rape report in Louisiana against her alleged abuser and cut off contact with her family. She said that action has changed her life.

For Stauffer and many other victims, Shelton has broken through the shame that keeps them silent. Shelton tells women to confront their abusers, to tell their stories publicly and to ignore those who are uncomfortable.

"What the silence causes is all this horrible self-abuse," Shelton said this week from her home in Los Angeles. "I talked to a woman whose father used to tell her, 'You're lower than a dog.' And that's what she went through life thinking."

'Epidemic of abuse'

Shelton said she didn't plan to bare her family's story. When she started her 2004 film, "Searching for Angela Shelton," she was a television writer in Hollywood who had gained some notice by co-writing the 1999 film "Tumbleweeds."

She intended to do a lighthearted documentary in which she talked to every woman in America with the name Angela Shelton. She envisioned a comedy.

Instead, she found herself collecting story after story of women who had been molested, raped or victimized by domestic violence. Twenty-four of 40 women she interviewed for the film admitted they were abuse survivors, and none of their abusers had been prosecuted, Shelton says. After the film was released, she said, four more of the women told her their stories of abuse.

Shelton says the stories opened her eyes to what she calls a "silent epidemic of abuse."

The film quickly morphed into an exploration of her own past -- one she has now told hundreds of times and recorded in her new book, "Finding Angela Shelton."

Shelton lived in Asheville until she was 3, when her parents divorced. Her father, a well-known church-going salesman with financial resources, won full custody. She moved with him to the Charlotte suburbs, and he remarried, to a woman with two children of her own.

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