Warning, disturbing content: An American woman says she is rebuilding her life with the help of therapy after years of abuse at the hands of her father.
Woman turns to therapy after years of abuse
The woman asserts that her father horrifically raped her and later fathered his child, but her own family shunned her. Speaking anonymously on the Other People’s Lives podcast, the 22-year-old started by saying she believed she had a “good relationship” with her father during her childhood before realising his behaviour was far from normal.
She recalled repeatedly exposing him to sexual material on adult websites and television, walking around naked, and buying cannabis for him as a teenager.
Asked when she first realised something was wrong, she said it was around age 13 when she heard him make sexist comments about her friends. “I remember being in the car and he mentioned a friend of mine and said she was a ‘fat lady’,” she recalled. “It made me really uncomfortable.”
Shortly after, she said he would comment about her body and how she was turning into a woman. “She said it like it was my job to make her happy,” he said. From that time, she remembered that her father would ask her to give him massages late at night, when her mother and two younger siblings slept. “He would ask me to massage his back, then his legs, and it would slowly move closer to his genitals,” she told podcast hosts Joe Santagato and Greg Dybek.
“He told me to start massaging that area more.” Recalling a time when the abuse became more physical, the woman said her,
The father called her into the kitchen one night and raped her.
The woman shared her story with podcast hosts Joe Santagetto and Greg Dybek
“I couldn’t say much at that time,” she said. Later, he asked her to keep it a secret and warned that if she spoke, their family would be torn apart and they could become homeless. “I took keeping it a secret seriously because of the way she described those results,” he said. According to the podcast listener, the abuse continued weekly for approximately three years, mostly in the basement of the family home. In a further revelation, she expressed her belief that her mother was aware of the abuse but chose to remain silent. “He said, ‘I’m going to find out what’s going on between you two,’ and never said anything after that,” she recalled. “I feel like she deliberately ignored it and allowed it to happen,” before adding that her mother was “barely present emotionally and physically” due to her work commitments. The woman, aged 16, claimed she “knew there was something seriously wrong with what her father did to her”. At this time, she began dating her first boyfriend and she realised that this was not the way her family treated her. After leaving the family home for two months and blocking both her parents’ numbers, the woman recalled getting drunk at a party and telling her everything about the abuse she suffered. “I’m glad I did because it’s really hard to keep a secret for so long,” she shared.
She then mustered up the courage to tell her mother but received a “heartbreaking” response. “I’m thinking that she’s receptive, that she’s listening to me, that she’s hearing what’s going on with me; and she’s going to do something about it,” she shared.
The anonymous caller said she was pregnant with her father’s child
“Then she gets angry when I tell her everything that’s happening. She starts blaming me and saying, “Her husband would never do that, that I’m lying, and that I’ve always been a bad child.” The podcast caller alleged that his mother called the police in an attempt to get him arrested and later became physically violent toward him.
After managing to share her story with a police officer, the American said her father was kept away from the family home while the case was investigated, although during this time, his family still visited him.
After the charges landed him in jail, he asserted that he even gathered funds to secure his bail. She entered foster care at this point and found out she was pregnant, already in the second trimester.
After giving birth to a baby girl, DNA results confirmed that it was her father’s child, which contributed to her testimony in the criminal case. Describing herself as “devastated” at the time, she decided to put her child up for adoption, telling the hosts, “As much as I had the best intentions for this child, I couldn’t be his mother. I kept seeing this child and his father.
As for her father, she said he managed to get bail again before cutting off his ankle monitor and fleeing to Africa. After being told that they could not locate him, they were urged to drop the case.
Concluding her story, she said that she is no longer in contact with the family members who supported her father and has since been receiving treatment for her trauma as she tries to rebuild her life.
