(News investigators) A woman has opened up about the harrowing moment she discovered that the man she knew as her maternal grandfather was also her biological father, having raped his own daughter and gotten her pregnant.
Lakiesha Allen, 44, from Lansing, Michigan, endured a horrific childhood that saw her routinely abused by her mother – who, she later learned, was also her sister.
Now, in a gut-wrenching interview, LaKiesha has opened up about the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom, which left her ‘bleeding and bruised’, while also recalling the sexual assaults she faced from the son of her mom’s boyfriend.
The ‘darkness’ she faced throughout her childhood started before she was born – as she was conceived when her mother was raped by her father at age 13.
LaKiesha, who is now a motivational speaker and uses her story to try to help others, spoke out about the struggles she had to overcome during a recent interview with Unfiltered Stories.
She explained that her mother met her biological father for the first time at age 13 after she was sent to stay with him for the summer.
‘She had no idea that her father was a pedophile,’ she said. ‘When she came home from that summer, she was pregnant with me.
‘was born to a 13-year-old little girl. I was conceived in darkness – but what I was born into was just as traumatic. My entire childhood was one form of trauma after another.’
LaKiesha also shared how she was sexually abused from a young age by the son of a man her mother was dating.
‘He would babysit me and he would sexually molest me. He would use religion to do it,’ she said.
‘He would tell me that I would go to hell if I didn’t do it or that he’d molest my younger brother if I didn’t perform. And then he would bribe me with food as a prize for performing.’
LaKiesha said the sexual assault eventually came to light and her mother left that man, but she then started going ‘from one guy to another.’
LaKiesha recalled ‘being left alone for days at a time’ at age eight while trying to watch over her younger siblings.
‘I understand now that the age that [my mom] was, still a teenager herself, and the trauma that she endured – she was a young girl herself looking to be loved herself but looking in all the wrong places,’ she continued.
While she had children, she was still a child herself. Mothering the children she had given birth to was not something she was equipped to do.’
LaKiesha told the publication that she would be ‘penalized’ by her mother if ‘something was not right when she came home’ and suffered ‘relentless beatings.’
‘I endured beating, after beating, after beating, after beating,’ she said. ‘Tumultuous beatings.
‘Extension cords were her weapon of choice. She would beat me profusely to the point where my skin would be black, blue, and purple.
‘As I was getting older I started to think, “I can’t take this anymore.” I had a lot of anger in me.’
The Michigan native said that she had no idea who her father was for most of her childhood, and she would dream of him showing up and rescuing her.
When she eventually found out the truth from her mother, she was devastated.
‘My world was just shattered. Up until the truth was revealed there was not a night where I didn’t go to sleep just praying and wishing for my father to come and save me,’ she explained.
‘But with the truth of who my father was, that escape was no longer [possible]. My father was a pedophile. I was fathered by a pedophile.’
LaKiesha admitted that she attempted suicide soon after, at age 13, by downing a whole bottle of Tylenol while she was home alone.
But she started ‘vomiting profusely’ and most of the pills came ‘back up,’ which she now believes was God looking over her.
‘He didn’t let me die. Those pills should have killed me but they [didn’t], God took me back,’ she said.
She recalled one occasion when her mother got into a horrible fight with the new man she was seeing and tried to defend herself by pulling out a gun. Unfortunately, it backfired.
‘She tried to fight back. She pulled out a gun and she tried to shoot him with it. But he pulled the gun from her hands, beat her with it, and threw the gun away,’ she remembered.
The next morning, LaKiesha – who was around 14 or 15 years old at the time – said her mother hurt her worse than she ever had before, which left her in ‘searing pain.’
I was just done, my body was bleeding, I was bruised all over. Welts were forming up on my body,’ she told the outlet.
And that was the final straw for her. She recalled sitting on the bus that morning and thinking that when she got home from school later that day, she was going to ‘find the gun’ and use it to ‘kill’ her mom.
Instead, she decided to ask for help. She wrote a letter to her teacher describing her situation and stuck it under a book on her desk.
She was then brought into the principal’s office and CPS was called. She was put into foster care that day, but she experienced more ‘domestic violence’ in her new home.
A few days after she went to live with the family, she said she overheard her foster mother yell on the phone, ‘I’m sick and tired of my check coming late. I don’t work for free. You can have this girl back.’
She was told to pack her stuff up and was given a trash bag to hold all of her belongings. The foster family then left her outside of the CPS office.
‘I’m around 14 or 15 years old with my belongings in a trash bag sitting in the dark pretty much because the sun hadn’t fully come up yet,’ she said of the moment.
‘I’m waiting for my social worker to show up. I looked at the trash bag with my belongings in it and I thought, “I’m just trash. My life has no purpose.”‘
LaKiesha said her life started to improve after she was placed with a new foster family that was much better than her first.
She also got involved with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which ‘works with communities to create conditions for vulnerable children so they can realize their full potential in school, work, and life.’
She called joining the organization the ‘catalyst’ for getting on a good path. She soon became passionate about helping other foster kids and began sharing her story with the world.
‘I spent my 16th birthday speaking in front of a large crowd, and I will never forget it,’ she said.
Something erupted inside of me and this power came over me, like, this is where your freedom is. This is where you’re going to find your voice. I thought, “OK, I can do this.”‘
She also said going to church was monumental in her learning to ‘forgive’ what had happened to her.
‘Unforgiveness would have kept me chained to the trauma, bound to my past. I now recognize my traumas and triggers, I now have the power to control them before they overtake me,’ she shared.
‘I am not defined by what I come from. I am not defined by anything that happened to me. I am not defined by the natural DNA in my blood.
‘I am defined by my resilience and my faith in God. I am defined by my ability to say, “Yes, this happened to me but it’s also evidence of the mantle that God has called me to.” God has taken pain and turned it into purpose.’
She said she has now ‘forgiven’ her mother ‘for everything she has done,’ but she admitted that they still don’t have a ‘healthy relationship’ because her mom is still ‘stuck in her trauma.’
She is now a mother herself and is ‘focused on being the best mother that she could be.’
I spent so many years of my childhood seeking a natural father, not realizing that I would never have one,’ she concluded. ‘What I found instead is God, who has been my father my entire life.’
