What Does Sadie’s Clothespin Line in ‘11.22.63’ Mean? Explaining the Graphic Backstory in Stephen King Miniseries

Nearly a decade after its Hulu premiere, 11.22.63 has moved to Netflix, introducing the critically acclaimed miniseries to a brand-new audience.

The 2016 sci-fi thriller is based on Stephen King‘s bestselling 2011 novel, 11/22/63. It follows a recently divorced high school English teacher from Maine, Jake Epping (played by James Franco), who travels back in time in an attempt to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

In the fourth episode, titled “The Eyes of Texas,” Jake begins a romance with a librarian, Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon), who confides in him that her ex-husband, Johnny Clayton (T. R. Knight), had been abusive throughout their marriage.

“When I met Johnny, I thought he was the most charming man I’d ever met,” she says. “We’d never done much physically. I just thought he was old-fashioned.”

With tears in her eyes, Sadie then tells Jake that she is still traumatized by her and Johnny’s wedding night.

“He got real tense. Didn’t want to kiss me. He just asked me to close my eyes, so I did,” she recalls. “And then he took my hand and put it on himself, and I screamed because he had a clothespin on him. I didn’t know what to say, so I laughed, and then he hit me, so I started crying, and he hit me again.”

Sadie does not elaborate on her “clothespin” line in the scene, which has led many viewers to become confused about its graphic backstory.

Prior to the sexual revolution in the ’60s, some conservative mothers put clothespins on their sons’ penises to discourage masturbation. However, in 11.22.63, the painful practice from Johnny’s youth ultimately becomes a fetish for him.

“Clearly this is someone who’s got some stuff to work through. He’s got some issues,” Knight, 52, told TV Guide in 2016. “There was a lot of repression and a lot of oppression going on, clearly, at that time. And sadly, some of it still exists. But I think he’s on a different level. … Clearly he’s so severely damaged that he’s seemingly beyond help. He’s got his own idea of these rules to justify the way his brain works, which is just not accurate. It’s not right.”

King, 78, also included the clothespin conversation in the 11/22/63 book. The famed horror author has suggested that he got the idea from reading about notorious serial killer Ted Bundy‘s troubled childhood.

“I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or whether it all comes from inside and that it’s all part of genetics and environment,” King told Rolling Stone in 2014.

He continued, “When you find somebody like, let’s say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes went back and had sex with the dead bodies, I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, ‘Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his d*** when he was 4.’ That behavior was hard-wired. Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll f***ing kill ourselves.”

11.22.63 is now streaming on Netflix.