The anonymous caller said she fell pregnant with her dad’s baby (Image: GETTY)
A woman has said she was raped by her own father over a horrific three-year ordeal and subsequently gave birth to his child. Speaking under anonymity on the Other People’s Lives podcast, the 22-year-old recalled once believing she had a « good relationship » with her father, only to later realise that his behaviour was far from normal.
She remembered him regularly exposing her to explicit content on adult websites and television, parading around naked, and even supplying her with cannabis as a teenager.
When asked when she first sensed something was wrong, she pinpointed it to around the age of 13 when he began making sexual comments about her friends. « I remember being in the car and he mentioned one of my friends and said she had a ‘fat a**e’. It made me really uncomfortable, » she recollected.
Soon after, she said he started making comments about her body and her transition into womanhood. « He phrased it as if it was my job to please him, » she revealed.
From then on, she remembered her father requesting massages late at night while her mother and two younger siblings were asleep. « He would ask me to massage his back, then his legs, and it slowly moved closer to his genitals, » she confided to podcast hosts Joe Santagato and Greg Dybec.
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Podcast hosts Joe Santagato and Greg Dybec (Image: YOUTUBE/OTHERPEOPLESLIVES)
« He asked me to start doing more massages in that area. » Recounting when the abuse escalated, the woman said her father summoned her into the kitchen one night and raped her.
« There wasn’t much I could say at the time, » she admitted. Following the incident, he instructed her to remain silent, cautioning that if she disclosed the truth, their family would split and could end up homeless.
« I took keeping it a secret seriously because of the way he laid out those consequences, » she elaborated. According to the podcast listener, the abuse persisted on a weekly basis for approximately three years, predominantly in the basement of their family home.
In a further shocking revelation, she expressed belief that her mother was aware of the ongoing abuse but chose to ignore it. « She said, ‘I’m going to find out what is going on between you two’ and never said anything after that, » she recollected.
« I feel like she purposely ignored it and just allowed it to happen, » before adding that her mother was « hardly emotionally and physically present » due to her work obligations. It was at the age of 16 when the woman realised there was something profoundly wrong with her father’s actions towards her.
The woman turned to therapy after many years of abuse (Image: GETTY)
This realisation dawned upon her when she started dating her first boyfriend and noticed that such behaviour was absent in his family. After moving out of the family home for two months and blocking her parents’ numbers, the woman remembered getting drunk at a party and revealing all about the abuse she had endured.
« I was glad that I did because keeping a secret like that for so long is really hard, like to function, » she confessed.
She eventually mustered the courage to confide in her mother, only to be met with a « heartbreaking » response. « I’m thinking that she’s being receptive, that she’s listening to me, that she’s hearing what’s been happening to me and that she’s going to do something about it, » she revealed.
« She then gets angry when I tell her everything that has been happening. She starts to accuse me and say that her husband would never do that, that I’m lying and that I’ve always been a bad child. »
The podcast caller claimed that her mother even called the police in an attempt to have her arrested, and subsequently became physically abusive towards her.
After sharing her ordeal with a police officer, the American woman said her father was barred from their family home during the investigation, although her family continued to visit him.
Once he was incarcerated following charges against him, she alleged that they also fundraised for his bail. During this period, she entered foster care and discovered she was pregnant and already in her second trimester.
After giving birth to a baby girl, subsequent DNA tests confirmed her father as the biological parent, which bolstered her evidence in the criminal case. Describing herself as « broken » at the time, she decided to give her child up for adoption, telling the hosts: « As much as I did have good intentions for this child, I couldn’t be her mother. I couldn’t stop looking at this child and not see my father. »
Regarding her father, she revealed he secured bail once more before removing his ankle monitor and fleeing to Africa. After being informed that authorities were unable to trace him, she was encouraged to abandon the case.
Bringing her account to a close, she explained she has cut contact with the relatives who backed her father, and has subsequently received therapy for her trauma while attempting to reconstruct her life.
