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'I Was Raped... Does Anyone Care?' This Military Veteran Shares His Story Of Being Raped By A Woman, And How Nobody Took Him Seriously.

It's still seen as taboo for victims of sexual assault to come forward with their stories especially if the victim is male and the perpetrator female. This man describes his struggle with sexual assault at the hands of a woman, and what little validation and support he received as a result.

Many thanks to reddit user Br0kenMan for sharing your story and bring awareness to such an important issue.




I am not sure what I am hoping to accomplish by writing this post. Normally, I just don't think about what happened, I gave up trying to explain it to people I actually know years ago. And even here on Reddit, there's no place that is actually right for this post, where-ever I put it I am either going to be dismissed as a troll, held up as some kind of symbol, or... I don't know.

Maybe just typing it will be enough. I don't have to actually hit 'post'.

I've tried to talk to people about this, but it has gotten me nowhere. The only place I got any acceptance and support at all was a support group for victims of male on male rape, and even there, most of them laughed and/or told me to quit whining. I tried telling my ex-wife, once, shortly after we were married.... It didn't go well, I wound up telling her it was a joke, I made it up, boy I sure had her going....

She didn't think it was funny. It's not.

I keep dancing around it, even anonymously I don't want to say it outright. I'm a man, and about 25 years ago, I was raped by a woman.

Before that, when I was a young child I was the victim of physical child abuse with a sexual component. I don't think it could strictly be termed rape, she was spanking me with a hairbrush and decided that since I wouldn't cry and scream from that anymore, she was going to sodomize me with it.

I don't even know which one is actually bothering me right now, they're all kind of mixed up together, you know?

I don't think the bit with the hairbrush is really my problem, though. It was horrible, and I still have some medical problems from it, but I think it's easier for me to process. There's no ambiguity, no sense that somehow what happened to me wasn't really a bad thing, or that it was somehow my fault, or that I'm just not understanding it.... I understand it; She was a horrible person, she hated my father at that moment, and since she couldn't get at him she took it out on me. Maybe somebody did something like it to her when she was a child, that whole 'cycle of abuse' thing. Anyway, it's a bucket of suck, but it doesn't really gnaw at me.

Continue...

The other is harder. I was an adult. Not just an adult man, a pretty big and strong one. I was in probably the best shape of my life, actively training in martial arts, I could crush a beer can in my hands, without opening it first (great party trick, when you're in your 20's and somewhere you don't mind spraying beer all over the place).

You could break a two by four over nearly any part of my body at that point, and I'd have shrugged it off.

I was in the military, and like a lot of young guys in the military I did a lot of drinking. If I wasn't on duty for a Friday or Saturday night, I was going to be somewhere getting at least slightly sloshed, if not totally loaded. Things weren't as freewheeling back then as I guess they are these days, but there was still plenty of one night stands and I probably had more than my share. It was pretty much the height of the AIDS panic, the sexual revolution came to a crashing halt just before I got to join the fun. But I was decent looking, and even in an environment that was about 90% male, I managed to get 'action'. And then I got engaged, and although I kept partying, I quit hitting on girls and I probably didn't drink as much or as often.

But one night there was sort of a spontaneous party in my dorm, there were girls there from the military, girls and women from the married housing, and some civilians too. Just one of those things that happen when the random shuffle of "I heard there's a party over there" brings a lot of people to the same place.

So I open my door and invite people to raid my stash of booze (always amazed me that the military would talk about what a terrible alcohol abuse problem they had, then sell us booze for less than half what it cost off-base. We couldn't afford to drink at a bar more than once a week, but we could get hammered every night out of loose change, on the good imported stuff that cost a fortune in civilian markets).

People shuffle in, people shuffle out, the booze on hand starts to run out and groups start saying "I heard they're doing something near the west gate" or whatever, and heading out (nobody had cell phones back then, this kind of whispers game was how it worked). I'm mildly sloshed and not wanting to drive, and not really wanting to be depending on getting a ride back from where-ever, so I just let them go off and head for bed (it's like 11pm or midnight, and I was on duty the next day, which didn't always stop me but I was trying to be more responsible).

I wake up to my penis being stroked.

Continue...

My fiance had a key to my room (we weren't supposed to make copies, but a lot of us did and we had made them for each other) and sometimes liked to surprise me. I'm still mostly asleep and I just sort of go with it.

But at some point, it dawns on me. The hands I'm feeling are feminine, but they don't move like my fiance's. Her hair's wrong, straight instead of curly. She doesn't smell right. What the hell, my fiance is on temporary assignment on the other side of the country and not going to be back for weeks.

I freak the hell out and scramble out of bed (I wouldn't notice until later, but she grabbed onto me and left fingernail scratches on my penis and upper thigh, it actually bled quite a bit and I noticed the blood before I felt them). I turn on the lights, and some woman I vaguely recognize from earlier (she was checking me out and maybe flirting a bit) is sitting on my bed. Mid-30's, blond, pretty decent looking, what they call a 'MILF' now.

And she's really not understanding that I'm not interested in cheating on my fiance.

I don't remember the exact words of the conversation, but it was generally her saying "come on, let's f*ck" and me saying "no, get out of my room".

Finally, I've had enough, I grab her by a forearm, pull her off the bed, and push her out the door. She spends a couple of minutes pounding on my door and yelling things like "Who the f*ck do you think you are, you can't do this to me!", then she leaves.

I'm done sleeping for the night, I wind up getting dressed and going to work so I can use the computers at the office (my job was essentially just to be there if someone actually needed something, and back then PC's were really expensive and not something I could afford). To be honest, I was playing Minesweeper and Solitaire. I would have been in trouble if I got caught (and it wouldn't have been the first time) but it had been months since the commander had come in on a weekend, and I was the person who would be calling him. Nobody else was going to be in there unless things went sideways in a way they thought needed to be reported up the chain right away (and they'd drop it in my lap, so I could decide if it was worth calling in the commander). Working the weekend earned me brownie points, and I kind of needed them (I mentioned I was trying to be more responsible, well that was because I hadn't always been).

I'm stalling. I don't want to write this next part.

Continue...

I don't really see anybody all day, nobody comes into the office, couple of phone calls telling me to log that they are reporting that they have filled out their logs and will be sending them in to be filed, typical military Mickey Mouse pencil-whipping crap.

I go off-base to grab some fast food, then head back to my room. I'm hoping my fiance will call, she generally did at least once every weekend (again, this is back in the days of by-the-minute long distance charges, and using the government phones for personal calls was Not Authorized, so we couldn't spend much time actually talking).

Shit, I'm still stalling, trying to fill this space with minutiae so I don't have to get to the point.

The "MILF" shows up knocking at my door. She tells me that if I don't let her in, she's going to have the SP's come and drag me out. I open the door, ask her "for what?"

She's going to report me for trying to rape her. She's told one of her friends that I had tried to keep her in my room so I could, and she's got little baggies with my skin from under her nails to prove it, and she can tell them I'm not circumcised, and that I have scratches on my groin from when she fought me off, and big finger-shaped bruises on her arm from where I restrained her. She's got physical evidence, she's got a believable story, and I have not always been the best example of military discipline and it won't be hard for her to convince her best friend's husband, the head of base security, that I need to get the full-on Leavenworth and Dishonorable Discharge treatment. Oh, and just to make it perfectly clear how screwed I am, her husband works for the JAG office, the office that would both prosecute and defend me in a court-martial.

At some point in this I've gone sort of numb and dizzy, sat down, and she's walked in and closed the door.

This was right after the military first started taking sexual assault seriously, they'd set up a special office on nearly every base to investigate and pursue it, and they were collecting scalps all over the place to show they were serious. Hadn't been any on ours yet, but we'd heard rumors and read news stories, guys were getting rushed into and through a General court martial within days of being reported (normally they took weeks just to convene). I was practically a perfect one I looked kind of big and scary, I was an extremely junior officer with no political connections and a spotty record (not bad enough to screw my career prospects completely, but enough that nobody would consider me worth trying to save even if they believed me).

Continue...

Her husband was connected, several grades up from me and considered a good prospect for promotion, and she was wired into the informal shadow hierarchy officer's wives have, everybody who mattered on that base was married to one of her friends, she had other friends married into higher commands, the Pentagon.

I was so completely at her mercy, I would be asking permission to speak within days at most (military prisoners have to ask permission to speak, to change their clothes, pretty much every damned thing probably including asking to be permitted to wipe after using the toilet) if she did what she was threatening. A few years of that hell in Leavenworth, then a Dishonorable Discharge and a lifetime of being even lower than the typical ex-convict (just for the Dishonorable, they didn't really have Sex Offender registries back then, I think).

You can probably guess what came next, and I don't really want to talk about the details.

She used me for her personal sex-toy for the rest of the time I was in the military. She'd get bored of me, or her husband would be paying attention, or I'd be on temporary duty elsewhere (and I volunteered for every one of them I could get), and I'd get a few weeks respite. But she'd get drunk and strike out at the clubs, or her husband would piss her off, or she'd just randomly feel like it, and I'd have to do what she wanted.

After a while, it wasn't even the fear of a rape charge, I just couldn't imagine trying to explain myself.

My fiance broke up with me, she thought I was having an affair and I couldn't bring myself to explain what was actually going on. It was almost a relief, at least I didn't have to lie to her anymore, didn't have to fear what she would think of me if she knew.

I was really lucky that this was the period of the "Peace Dividend", and the military was paring down by hundreds of thousands. A junior officer that didn't want any part of a military career anymore could get released early and still get an Honorable. I managed to keep her from knowing it was coming until after I was on 'terminal leave', or she probably would have tried to block it.

I probably would have been transferred soon anyway, or her husband would have, but I just couldn't take it anymore.

Continue...

I'd gotten lazy and sloppy (I was probably depressed, but officers weren't allowed to get mental illness or ask for counselling, and what the hell would I have said, anyway), pulled a bunch more minor write-ups in my file, I would have had a hard time making Captain and no chance at all of getting higher, anyway. There was no real attraction to a military life for me.

I got out. I moved on.

I tried counseling, I tried support groups (god, what a joke, I got called a liar and nearly thrown out of the first one I tried, only one that would even hear me out was the man-on-man victims, and half of those were gay and tried to hit on me). I tried to drink it away, I tried to fuck it away, I got married, I got divorced. I considered turning gay (turns out it's not a choice, guys don't get me to stand at attention).

I considered suicide.

No matter who I talked to, I get the same reactions.

They don't believe me, or they can't understand how it's even possible for a man to be raped by a woman (news flash, in your 20's a breeze blowing across it can get you hard, even (or especially) if it's the last thing you want). They ask if I had orgasms, they hint or outright say that I must have liked it. Counsellors want to talk about my self-emasculating masochistic sexual impulses, probably a result of my childhood abuse, a really high-brow way of saying I must have liked it and I'm lying to myself because I don't want to admit it.

I didn't like it. I didn't want it.

I'm not able to let myself be actually vulnerable with any woman, which destroyed my marriage and more relationships than I care to count. No matter how hard I try, I never can really trust them with my secrets, and the few times I've tried have made it really clear that is not an irrational fear.

Exactly one woman sat through the whole story, then she never spoke to me again. Through mutual friends I found out that she 'just couldn't respect' me, she wouldn't tell them why.

I put on 50 pounds and quit working out even before I got out of the service, and even though I know why I am self-sabotaging that way, when I diet and start exercising, all it takes is seeing some blond MILF checking me out while pretending not to and I'm in a panic to get to Burger King and binge-eat Double Whoppers and milkshakes, back to safety.

I'm a male victim of a female rapist.

And that is the most pathetic, least respectable, completely unworthy thing to be. And the only advice I have ever gotten about it is boils down to either 'shaking it off', or admitting to myself that I must really like being used and abused, or I wouldn't have 'let it happen'.

Continue...

So, there's my story.

I'll admit right now I fudged some of the details to make it nearly impossible to identify me, even if my ex-wife or someone else I've told parts of it to happens to see this, they won't be sure. I'm using proxies and a throw-away account, and various other measures that should keep it from being traced. And if "she" sees it...screw her, she's not going to control me with fear anymore, maybe she'll even feel shame. I actually do feel better for putting it out there. And I'm going to go ahead and post it, even if it gets deleted right away, that will be closure of a sort. I'll know once and for all, there really isn't anyone, anywhere, that wants to hear it.

A final thought on the preconception of 'rapist' as being somehow tied up with being male. It suggests that there's something more male about the men who rape. If rape is about power, then men who rape must be more powerful, and if rape is defined by gender than they must be more manly. And the most powerful and manly of all must be the men who rape other men. Who is the 'Big Bad', the embodiment of both power and evil, in a prison movie?

It mythologizes rapists, makes them into these god-like figures, demons of lust, twisted paragons of masculinity.

It almost makes them admirable.

I can't imagine how anything could be more insulting to victims than to elevate the attackers like that. Or how anything could be more "reinforcing of rape culture". That it defines men like me, victims that happen to not fit into the mythology, out of existence? That just makes it worse.

There's something distinctly sick and wrong about that.

People Reveal The Worst Financial Decisions They've Ever Seen Someone Make

Reddit user BasalTripod9684 asked: 'What's the worst financial decision you've seen someone make?'

No two people have the same relationship with money.

There are those who grew up learning the true value of money, saving every penny whenever possible, and spending as little as they possibly can and need to.

Then there are those who see money as no object and spend large amounts without a second thought... even if they aren't nearly as good at making money as they are at spending it.

As a result, these people often find themselves looking back at some past, ill-thought financial decisions with nothing but regret, wishing they listened to the warnings of their concerned friends and family members.

Keep reading...Show less

We’ve all got a skeleton or two buried in our closets, but some families are hiding a whole graveyard in there. These dark family secrets were so disturbing, they destroyed everything from relationships to entire generations—but as we all know, the truth will out. Take a seat and read on for these dark family secrets exposed.

1. I Gotta Get Away

My step-grandfather had a completely hidden life in Australia before he met my grandmother. He had a family and kids in Australia, and then faked his own end by driving his car off a cliff then moving to America. His kids thought he was long gone until my grandmother found out about them and reached out years later.

His son actually became a famous comedian over there, and from what I know has a joke he does at his shows about his father faking his end to disconnect from them.

ivydragons

2. The Man In The Mirror

This happened around 2013—Instagram wasn’t totally new but it was still a much smaller platform and centered a lot around visual artists. Through Instagram, a friend of mine found a profile that was my gosh darn doppelganger. Like, this guy looked so much like me that I sent multiple photos of him to my mom and she was convinced it was me even after I told her it wasn’t.

Now, for the purpose of the story I’ll just say I am incredibly unique looking. Dark brown hair, fiery red beard, almost a full bodysuit of tattoos. Same for this guy. The brands of clothes I wore, even down to the gold and black Ray-Ban Clubmasters. I am a professional tattoo artist and he is a painter who owns an art gallery.

So, in keeping with how the internet worked back then, we said hey and joked about meeting and occasionally would call or FaceTime the other to prove a point. Then, I got an opportunity to travel to NYC for work. This guy lived in NYC as well, so we made plans to meet up! I bought plane tickets, made arrangements, and we even talked about how funny it would be to get a photo together.

Then we started talking about how funny it would be if we really were long lost brothers, and he goes: “That’s entirely possible! My dad was never in the picture. He was a traveling biker who just hooked up with my mom one night.” A chill ran through my body. This was REALLY weird because my dad was a tattoo artist and notorious biker who traveled in the area this guy lived when he was growing up.

I thought it was a long shot but I said, “Hey! Ask your mom if his name is James Jobin! Wouldn’t that be crazy if we are brothers?!” He laughed and agreed that would be funny, and said he’d ask his mom the next morning before I got into town. Then he blocked me on everything. Instagram, Facebook, text. Absolute radio silence.

I’ve made other accounts to check up on him and see how he’s doing, but I’ve never reached back out. The thought that I could really have a brother is bittersweet for me—I respect his right to have contact with me or not, but it does break my heart a little every time I think about him. Plus, I just don’t have a closure on what the truth really is.

jgorbeytattoos

3. Ancient History

group of people standing near white buildingPhoto by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash

One of my aunts raised another aunt’s baby as her own. My mom had four sisters and a brother, all of whom got married and had kids, so I have around 20 cousins. Unfortunately, three of my aunts got breast cancer in their 30s. All three recovered, but years later the youngest, Maria, got it again and it got worse. Maria needed a bone marrow transplant.

All her sisters and children got tested, but no one matched. The family then revealed the truth. Maria had had a teenage pregnancy, and her first child was actually my cousin John, who had been adopted and raised by my oldest aunt as her second child. None of the cousins knew about this, including John and his revealed-to-be adoptive siblings.

As a result, the family asked John to get tested and he was a match, so he agreed to donate bone marrow to his birth mom, Maria. John was in his late 20s at the time and had had very little contact with Maria over his life. The transplant took, but Maria eventually succumbed a year or so later. Luckily, none of my female (or male) cousins have gotten breast cancer since. We are all still vigilant and self-check ourselves regularly.

dring157

4. The Brotherhood

My brother Russell was 12 years older than me, and I cannot remember a day of my childhood without thinking of him. My earliest memories are of him and me at a park. We shared a room together and I remember the fun we used to have late at night playing pillow forts and telling stories. I loved Russell and still do. When I was seven, he perished in a car accident.

At his funeral, I found out that Russell was not my brother, but someone my parents took in because he had a bad home life. It messed my head up trying to grasp this, but I am happy that my parents had the compassion to take care of him and treat him as their own and that he was such a big part of my life. To this day, I still consider him my brother and miss him every day. I love you, Russell.

Mynameisinuse

5. A Real Hero

My dad was born in rural Texas in 1915. He was the youngest of 10 kids, all a year apart, so his oldest sibling, Henry, was about 11 years older than him. My dad’s father passed in an accident not long after he was born, so Henry became the “man of the house” at about age 11. When my dad was about nine years old, in 1924, disaster struck.

A gang of men came through their small town, kidnapping children to work picking cotton about 400 miles away. Apparently this was not an unusual occurrence at the time. My dad and two of his siblings were taken. Henry, who was now 18, came home from working on a cattle drive about a week later, and found his mother in pieces about the kidnapping of three of her children.

Being the man of the house, Henry strapped on his father’s six guns—dual holsters, one on each hip—and set out to get his three siblings back. He gathered clues about the gang from other townsfolk who also had children who were taken. He headed east to where he was pretty certain the kids were taken, riding in empty train boxcars and even on the roofs of moving trains.

It took him several weeks, but through talking to locals along the way who heard rumors of child abductions, he finally narrowed it down to a few cotton farms where he thought the kids were. My dad had tears in his eyes when he told me this part of the story. He and two of his brothers, along with about a dozen other kidnapped kids, had been held captive on this cotton ranch for over two months.

They had given up ever seeing home or the rest of their family again. They were kept locked in a barn, fed scraps, and forced to pick cotton in the hot Texas sun. They were beaten if they cried or refused to work. One day, working in the fields, they heard a miraculous sound. It was Henry’s voice calling their names. They looked up and saw my uncle Henry walking towards them.

They started running toward him when one of their captors rode up on a horse and started yelling. Henry pulled one of his pistols and shot the man. My dad wasn’t even sure if the man had a weapon, and it didn’t matter. The shot drew a couple more of the rancher/captors over, and Henry shot them both as well. My dad ran up and hugged my uncle, and he told them “let’s go home.”

My dad tells me they rode on and in train boxcars all the way back west to their little Texas town, along with a couple other kids who were taken from the town. When they got back to their small farm, my dad said his mom fainted when she saw them. He said Henry put the six guns away, and never touched them again. Not ever.

There was no law enforcement, no investigation about what had happened, no mention in town that my uncle had taken the lives of three men to get his siblings back. It was basically still the “Wild West” in Texas in the 1920s. The boys eventually all served and survived WWII. My dad didn’t tell me this story until after Henry had passed.

I had always known my uncle Henry as a sweet, soft-spoken, diminutive (he was about five foot four, and maybe 100 pounds) man who went on to own a printing shop. I would never have imagined him capable of the feats of heroics he performed, at age 18, to bring his family back together. Obviously, I'm so grateful he found it in himself.

EBone12355

6. Friends In High Places

File:Chingford Mount Cemetery 08.JPG - Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org

My biological grandfather threatened to kill my grandmother while she was very young and pregnant with my uncle. Long story short, my grandfather was engaged to someone else at the time. My grandmother became a nervous wreck while pregnant and wouldn’t leave the house, and my grandfather used to throw bricks through her window.

Eventually, she told some of her friends about what he’d threatened to do to her. Shortly after that he went missing, never to be seen or heard from again. We always kind of laughed and joked that one of her friends must have threatened him or “ran him out of town.” We would even go as far as to say someone might have offed him for her.

It wasn’t until we were going through her boxes of photos and “love letters” that we realized she was actually friends with the infamous British mobsters the Kray twins...

blxndeandblue

7. Sibling Rivalry

My uncle tells the story that when he was a kid, his older brother wanted him to go out hunting with him in the woods near their house. They woke up really early and started walking much deeper into the woods than they usually did, and way off the normal trails they used. Then my uncle realized his brother was letting him get further and further ahead.

He stopped, turned around, and witnessed a horrific sight. He saw his brother starting to bring the shotgun up in his direction. He asked him what the heck was he doing, and his brother said, "Oh, I thought I saw something." My uncle decided to go back at that point. Later that week, he went back and found a pit that someone had dug a bit further off the trail.

He never went anywhere with his brother alone again. Both of them are my mother’s brothers, and the wannabe Cain was a narcissist of the "not letting a silly thing like being married get in the way of his dating life" variety. He actually decided he had big dreams and bailed on his family when I was a kid, then passed soon after that.

I usually don't think of him as my uncle because I didn't have a real relationship with him. I’m not sure why he didn't shoot my uncle—sometimes I think he might have wanted it to look more like an accident, or didn't want to look his brother in the eye. I obviously can’t prove the story, but the way that my other uncle described it, he was really afraid of his brother and thought he was capable of fratricide.

Thowitawaydave

8. Loose Lips

My parents had a nasty divorce, which was often accompanied by a lot of trash talking about each other. There was a lot of “well your mother blah blah blah” and “your dad is such and such,” most of which I would just ignore because it was incredibly immature and embarrassing, until one day my mom broke out an enormous revelation.

My siblings and I were just watching TV in the living room one day and the conversation moved to my dad coming to town to visit, and my mom overheard. The mere mention of dad prompted this woman to stop whatever she was doing, come into the living room, and say something along the lines of: “Talking about your dad again, huh? Did you know that he was molested?”

My dad had never mentioned anything about this in the 18 years that I lived with him, which is understandable. To this day, I have no idea why my mom felt the need to blurt that out to the three of us, or why it is she thought that being a victim was a stain on someone’s character, but it was a really weird way to find out something so deeply personal about my dad.

Just to ease my conscience, my mom was actually a great mom. She practically raised us on her own, and the divorce wasn’t her fault in the slightest. She got hit with the passing of both of her parents and a divorce all within a two-year time span, on top of losing the house. This was completely out of character for her, which is part of why it caught all of us off guard.

She’s a good woman who said something awful that she now regrets, but it's out there now.

cgamble336

9. The Truth Will Out

man in green black and yellow floral button up shirtPhoto by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

My great uncle was slain along with his wife. Meanwhile, the suspect was run down and got stuck in a swamp before shooting himself in the head. The strange particulars: My uncle, his wife, and the suspect were all deaf/mute, and the suspect was renting a room from them. This happened in the 40s, and no one ever found the motive…until recently.

A few years ago, I took a DNA test, and found that I had cousins who were descended from the suspect’s wife. Yep, turns out my great-uncle was cuckolding the guy.

_finalOctober_

10. Double Standards

Both of my mother's parents had affairs behind each other’s backs. However, my grandmother eventually had Parkinson's, and in one of her confused states she told my grandfather that she had an affair. Suffice to say, my grandfather was not happy—and he got a cruel revenge. That man put her right into a home. And that wasn’t all.

He then started talking to my mother, trying to figure out when it could have happened. He speculated that it happened around the same time he was having his affair, which was around 1966. My mother was shocked, since she was born in 1967. So my mother may or may not be related to the man she believed to be her father.

Witchgirl2658

11. Unsolved Mysteries

There is strong debate in our family as to whether my aunt fell out of the window of her apartment, whether she jumped, or whether someone pushed her. She survived, but with brain damage, and says she can't remember.

Smart-Connections6154

12. Past Lives

woman in white shirt lying on bedPhoto by Marie-Michèle Bouchard on Unsplash

Two years ago, I found out that my dad had a wife before my mom, and she perished in a freak accident on their wedding night. She was sleepwalking and fell to her end over the balcony.

PookFreak

13. Don’t Go Digging Around

A somewhat distant cousin of mine came home from WWI completely shell-shocked and was institutionalized. One day, he turned up at home, saying he was cured and released. Nothing could be further from the truth. He then took his family to a cliff-side park to celebrate with a picnic. About halfway through the picnic, he took their two older children to the edge of the cliff and pushed them over.

He then took his baby from his wife's arms and threw the child over the side. His wife fell over the cliff trying to get to the children. He then jumped over after all of them. As you can imagine, it was all over the national papers. I only found all of this out one day when I thought I'd take a little break during my lunch to do some genealogy stuff. It was not the lunch break I had planned.

taniapdx

14. Father Of Mine

I'm the only child between my mom and dad, but they both had children from previous relationships. All of my siblings were 15+ years older than me. When I was seven, everything unraveled in the most brutal way. My mom and dad split because my dad "had feelings" for my mom's oldest daughter, who actually already had four kids.

Ok, gross, but both adults, so whatever. Cut to 13 years or so later and my dad is suddenly all involved in the life of one of the kids of that sister. 20-year-old me was oblivious as to why this was happening. It took me another seven years to put all the pieces together that my dad was actually the father of that kid. I had grown up thinking she was just my niece, but she was in reality my half-sister-niece.

I've never discussed it with anyone in my family. My mom passed before I put all the pieces together. But wait...there's more! My family and I are all from Mississippi. Cue Deliverance banjo music. My dad was born in 1945, so unsurprisingly, he's super prejudiced. Well, that sister-niece of mine? She ended up having two kids with a Black man.

Anyway, karma's a witch. Cheat on my mom with your step-daughter, get her knocked up, basically have nothing to do with said child's life, then the child goes and commits, in his eyes, probably the biggest betrayal possible. I would throw a chef's kiss right here except all I really care about from this story is the pain it must have put my mom through, and I was too young or oblivious to be there for her. Miss you, Cotty.

WiscoSippy

15. Kissing Cousins

womans black hair on blue textilePhoto by roman raizen on Unsplash

A few years before he passed, my dad and I had a long heart-to-heart, at the end of which he told me he wasn’t the one to first sleep with my mom on their honeymoon. And the plot thickens. Apparently, he caught her in bed with her cousin, who she had been in love with for a long time. He spoke with their pastor, who told him to forgive and forget.

That worked...until six years later, when he caught her again with the same cousin. He told me he wanted to leave with me but ultimately decided to stay, because he wanted me to have a family. With all that happened in my childhood, and to him (workaholic, diabetes, heart attack), I wish he’d left that day and been happy instead.

Bassman1976

16. Too Young To Go

Oof. When she was only nine or 10 years old, my mom saw her friend get into a fatal accident when a bus ran her over. After she told me about that, I never questioned her again about her past because who knows what else she went through! I may think she is frustrating, but seeing her sad is not my goal at all. I felt terrible for her, and for the kid.

Permalink

17. The One You Gave Away

My great uncle told his wife that their son passed right after being born. But that was a huge lie. Instead, he gave him up to the state because he had Down's Syndrome. They had twins, a boy and a girl, and he somehow hid it from the whole family for about 40 years that both of them had actually survived, but they’d only brought the girl home.

We only found out when the family lawyer had terminal cancer and, overwrought with guilt, he contacted the twin sister to tell her she has a living brother who lives in a home run by the state. I guess the lawyer had helped my great uncle with the whole thing and still felt terrible about it. Also, for some added context, my great uncle was extremely wealthy. He could have easily paid for multiple caregivers to help his son, and it wouldn't have affected his life at all.

stev10

18. A Little White Lie

person wearing gray shirt putting baby on scalePhoto by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

I found out from my dad that one of my cousins isn't related to anyone in the family. My aunt and her mother used to work at a hospital maternity ward, and apparently, a woman came in one day and gave birth to him and then left the next day without him. My aunt decided to adopt him, but a few months later the woman showed up again asking where he was...

They both lied and said that he was given up and that they didn't have a clue where he was. They still haven't told my cousin anything.

Existed_

19. Tough Love

I found out that my grandfather’s first wife, who he married before my grandma, passed of botulism from eating some tomatoes she had canned at home. But that’s not even the worst part. She could have been saved, but my grandfather refused to take her to the doctor because the botulism was her “fault.” He let her perish to teach her a lesson. They had two kids who he left motherless.

Filiaeagricola

20. Sowing His Wild Oats

My mother is the youngest of four kids by a hefty gap—about 11 years—and she looks distinctly different from her siblings. They're all brown while she is a very light tan. Turns out my grandfather (while married to my grandmother) seduced and impregnated the daughter of a white officer who stayed back after the officer's country ended their colonial occupation.

My grandpa was in his early 40s, and the girl was 15 when he knocked her up. The agreement was he would take the child home and raise it as his own so the officer wouldn't rip him a new one. So my mom is 1/2 white European and I'm 1/4, which explains why my brother and I have always had the lightest skin and sharpest features in the family.

My mom found out when she was 16; I found out when I was 21. My grandmother was a gosh darn saint.

indible825

21. The Fugitive

man in white crew neck shirtPhoto by Matt Sings on Unsplash

1990, I was five years old. I'm at my dad's house after he left for four months to Tennessee. He frequently did that because he supposedly loved the state. My mom is watching America's Most Wanted, and a segment involved a man in Tennessee being slain, with a sketch of the last person to see the victim alive. When I saw it, my blood ran cold.

The sketch was an exact image of my dad. Supposedly, a mutual friend of my parents went to the local law enforcement on other business and the deputy asked, "Hey, have you seen Rich lately?" The friend responded, "Sure, a couple of weeks ago I saw him downtown." They insisted that if anyone saw my dad, they needed to talk to him.

If he did do it, he's an extremely good liar because he was never brought on charges to my knowledge. I've been estranged from him since I was eight.

delightfulllifeless

22. The Whacky Aunt

We once found a "family photo album" in my whacky aunt’s house. We started flipping through the plastic pages and BOOM! Photos of my aunt at a very intense "intimate" party. There had to be like 20-30 people in these photos. It was back in the 80s, I’d imagine, and everyone was so hairy and ugly. I guess Aunt Jan has some specific tastes.

It's a funny story that only me and my brothers know. We've always considered our Aunt Jan to be very weird, but after seeing that album it all kind of all made sense. Nice lady, though.

HankToTheHill

23. What Happens In North Carolina

My dad's grandfather and his friends took the life of a Fish and Wildlife ranger, more or less openly, and got away with it. They would go on an annual hunting trip, and this was long enough ago that they did this by taking a train of pack mules out into the wilderness in rural Northern California. They would spend a couple of weeks at least nominally hunting, but mostly drinking really heavily.

One year, a ranger shot one of my great-grandpa’s friends. The ranger (who I'm inclined to believe, for what it's worth) said it was an accident. What certainly wasn't an accident, although they maintained in their story that it was, was that on the next year's trip, they encountered the same ranger, and that time the ranger was the one who was shot and perished.

It was ruled accidental, no charges were ever filed, but I've heard enough other stories about what kind of man my great-grandfather was to know that what he did to that man was 100% on purpose. I never met him, but my dad knew him well and believes the same thing as me. To me, it's a really frightening example of the kinds of things people got away with in small towns and in rural areas back then.

It was an extremely isolated area...there were hardly any roads even. My dad says he remembers my great-grandfather bragging in the bar about it, and nothing ever came of it.

Fearlesslingonberry

24. Divine Intervention

welcome to fabulous las vegas nevada signagePhoto by Grant Cai on Unsplash

I had some family move to Las Vegas with a local church’s money—it was close to a million dollars—to open a new church for them in Sin City. Well, they gambled it all away. They came back and, unsurprisingly, the church told them to screw off. Instead of thinking about their choices, they started their own church that allowed them to buy multi-million dollar houses, brand new cars for them and their kids, basically a luxury lifestyle.

They now sell merchandise at the front door to their church, and members are required to provide bank information. These family members tithe 10% of the monthly household income from all families. If you don't pay up, they kick you out. They also tell you how to eat and exercise. If you don't follow these rules, guess what? They kick you out.

They put the church in an old movie theatre, so they have multiple stages, full lighting, and AV crews. They do love offerings when they need extra cash. God tells them to take trips—like, apparently they told their congregation God told them to ride motorcycles through the Grand Canyon. One of my relatives even claimed he had healing powers for a short amount of time and got SAINT tattooed down his arm.

The whole nine yards. They've cut contact with all our family because we won't be part of their church. Also, their church is well known in our city and local area, but no one has stepped foot in it.

TidoLeroy

25. Early Trauma

My dad's friend shot himself in the head in front of my dad and some other friends when he was 15 years old. They were all hanging out at the friend's house having a good time when the friend went upstairs, grabbed his father's pistol, and came back down, calling everyone's attention as he did so. He then put the pistol to his head, squeezed the trigger, and collapsed behind a couch.

They all thought it was some sort of sick joke at first, until they looked over the couch and saw his body and the blood. I first heard this story from my mom when I was 18, which explained some of my dad's behavior toward toy guns when I was a kid, but I never brought it up with him. I just hoped that one day he would open up to me about it. Eventually he did, but we haven't talked about it since then.

I'm amazed at how my dad turned out to be such a great man after having to experience something awful like that at such a young age. According to him, it's something that never left him, either. He still has nightmares about it and gets really uneasy in movies and television shows when they show someone getting shot in the head.

-eDgAR-

26. Double Trouble

My mother supposedly has a fraternal twin. My grandmother couldn't handle the thought of two kids, so she gave the male child away to someone she knew who was moving away. My mom found this out in the worst way. In a rage one night way back when, my grandmother screamed at my mom that she kept the wrong child; this event was never mentioned before or after that moment.

My mom was roughly 12 at the time. She asked my great-grandmother about it, and she knew the boy's name but not where they moved to or who he was living with. My mom actually had met him once but didn't know who he actually was. My grandmother now denies it ever happened and my grandfather felt that "surely they'd have had to tell me." I doubt they would have, though.

When she was pregnant with me, my mom asked my great-grandmother what my middle name should be: My middle name is actually her long-lost brother’s middle name.

psychotrshman

27. All Mine

Seventh day Adventist church, Banbridge © Albert Bridge cc-by-sa ...www.geograph.ie

In the late 1960s, my maternal grandmother’s husband divorced her and gave her partial custody of their two boys. During one of the visits, she took off with her two kids and moved them from North Dakota to California. Her entire family was Seventh Day Adventist, which is a tight-knit community. So when she moved to California, she found an area that was very Seventh Day Adventist and sort of waited, knowing that the community would protect her from the authorities.

Keep in mind that her previous husband had not been accused of anything and she was just mad that she did not get full custody of the children. This arrangement lasted from about 1968 until 1971, until finally she had a falling out between either her adopted mother or her cousin and they called up her husband, who then came and got the kids.

My grandmother did not receive any real charges for the kidnapping but was not permitted to see the kids again. As far as I know, she has not seen either child since 1971. The Seventh Day Adventist Church later paired her with another parishioner who would become my grandfather. Neither my mom nor my aunts have ever met their half-brothers.

This was never kept secret from the family, it’s just not something that we bring up a lot. Also, my grandmother continued to talk about them obsessively right into her old age. According to my mom, she had a framed picture of them walking away from her. The story behind the picture is that they did not like living with her and so when their dad came for them, they walked away from her and did not look back for the last photo.

No_Entrepreneur4841

28. About Time

My parents told us they were "married in secret" until they found out my mom was expecting, and then they told their families about the marriage. It later came to light that they actually married on the same day that they found out my mom was pregnant, and lied to both their parents and to us to cover up that they had been having pre-marital relations. But that wasn't the doozy.

My father was an only child and his parents absolutely idolized him. They were very strict Catholics and very strict with my dad, never allowing him to play sports because they feared losing him or whatnot. My paternal grandmother had like five miscarriages. Anyway, after my dad's parents passed, he was going through their documents and he learned THEY had to get married in the same way, too.

Their wedding license was dated two months AFTER the date he had always been told! A very Catholic secret in a very Catholic family...

femsci-nerd

29. Indefensible

My stepfather was cheating on my mother. We didn’t find out because he was caught cheating; we found out because he and his mistress were drinking, got in a fight, and he punched her so hard that she fell over and died. We found out about the whole thing during the investigation, the trial, and the conviction. It was so bizarre.

It was weird to have a lawyer want to call 12-year-old me to the stand to defend the character of a man I already had very little interaction with, and certainly had a fear of—and that was before the manslaughter charge.

blazedanddefused

30. Everybody’s Got A Story

man in blue crew neck t-shirt and brown shorts sitting on blue and white textilePhoto by krakenimages on Unsplash

My favorite aunt and uncle, who were together for 15 years but never married, lived in a trailer park. Growing up, they were the funniest to be around. We would bake cookies, do paintings together, etc. Then my uncle passed in his sleep one day. I was told as a child, when I was maybe 10, that he passed from his diabetes; I'd seen him inject his stomach before, so I believed them.

Fast forward about six years. My aunt lived with my grandma at that point and was diagnosed with lung cancer. Now, I knew my aunt always smoked and drank a lot, but my mom decided to tell me then that she was also an addict, and up until my uncle passed they did a lot of hard substances together. That’s when it dawned on me. My uncle most likely overdosed.

This still didn't change the fact that I loved my aunt. She got sicker and sicker with cancer, and it even spread to her throat. She went into remission, but once it came back she gave up. I miss her so much.

idekmanijustworkhere

31. In Cold Blood

I found out that my great-grandpa got away with murder. He thought that my great-grandma was cheating on him with her dentist, so he went into his office and shot him. And yes, he really got away with it. They didn't find out that he did it until he told everybody right before he passed. As for if my great-grandma actually cheated on him...I don't know.

But, considering he was a jerk who she was afraid to leave and he ended up being capable of chilling acts…probably.

AlexGeekSpeak

32. The Modern World

I found out two years ago that my mother had a baby she gave up for adoption 18 months before she had me, and then had another baby when I was three that she also gave up for adoption. All three of us have different fathers, and I think the only reason she kept me was that my father married her, even though that marriage only lasted a year.

My mother remarried when I was five and my half-brother was born when I was seven. As far as I knew for 59 years, he and I were our mother's only children. I never saw her pregnant with the second baby either, because she sent me to live with my great-grandparents across the country during her pregnancy. My mother and grandmother were the only people who knew about this, and they both took the secret to their graves.

In fact, the only reason any of it was found out is because of all of the DNA testing people do now. This discovery really impacted my sense of identity for a while, my view of my mother, and our relationship. I've met my half-siblings, an older sister and younger brother. I like them and I'm glad I've been able to answer some of their questions, but the initial discovery really messed with me for a bit.

This all happened in the mid-late 1950s with my mother. Condoms weren't available to teenagers at the time, and there wasn't really abortion available, only homes for unwed mothers. She went to one when she got pregnant with my older sister because she was only 16. I don't know how my mother managed her pregnancy with my brother.

She would have been around 21 years old and probably made up some story about a long-gone husband or divorce or something with the help of her mother. I have never done DNA testing, but the half-siblings have done it, including the one I grew up with. The siblings found other relatives first and made their way to me eventually.

I don't think I will ever do DNA testing, because I'm done with surprises. The other relatives were the ones who told me about the siblings. Still, the story gets even wackier. The relatives were actually my mother's half-sisters, from the father she never met, who she never knew existed. They found me eight years ago after extensive genealogy research.

I also have a half-brother from my biological dad, whom I met for the first time a couple of months ago. I've known he existed since I was 19 but wasn't able to find him, and he finally found me. I'm 62 now. Quite frankly though, my adopted siblings were better off. Both my parents and my stepfather are now gone, though I don't believe my stepfather ever knew about the adopted babies. I think the only other person who knew was my grandmother.

Cheercraft

33. Giving It All Up

man wiping his tearsPhoto by Tom Pumford on Unsplash

My uncle didn’t actually have a stroke spontaneously. Rather, he deliberately stopped taking his blood thinners. He was 63 years old with a wife, four kids, and 15 grandkids, the oldest of which was 13 and the youngest was not even a year. But he was just done. His wife doesn’t know, his kids don’t know. I only know because I overheard the family doctor telling my dad.

As far as I know, only myself, the doctor, and my dad know what really happened.

Phranquelhynne

34. An Old Grudge

When I was growing up, my grandfather hated anything Russian. If there were any news about them, he turned off the TV. If they played against any other team in hockey or something, he didn't watch it, even though he loved ice hockey and even if it was a World Cup Final or something. When I was a kid, I didn't understand why.

To me, he was just a retired carpenter and grandfather. When he passed, my uncle told me everything. How he served as a foreign volunteer for Finland in the winter war against the Soviet Union; my great-grandfather was from Finland. How his friends were taken as POWs and executed. He was even wounded and almost perished in the battle of Ilomansti, the last big battle.

Intralipid

35. Lost At Sea

My great-grandmother had a child just after WWI and put it up for adoption. The birth dates we found indicate that the child was conceived while my great-grandfather was in France fighting, and where he perished in combat. We know almost nothing about this child, other than the birth date and birth name, and we only found out a couple of years ago, when one of my cousins was putting together an extensive family tree.

gogomom

36. About Schmidt

boy in red turtleneck sweaterPhoto by Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash

My husband’s name wasn't actually his name. To be honest, he didn't know about this either. It was when we went to get his birth certificate for our marriage license that it all hit the fan. So lets say my husband's name is John Schmidt. Well, his birth certificate said John Jones. Our license says John Schmidt, and my husband swears when he got the license 20+ years ago, the birth certificate said John Schmidt.

The clerk’s office states that this was impossible. The only person they have on file is Jones. So, after calling and researching and digging around, the conclusion that I came to was this. Back in the 80s, he was “adopted” by his stepdad Papa Schmidt. But since it was the 80s and nobody cared about anything, instead of doing a proper name change, they just started using the last name Schmidt.

So my husband had to do an official name change, but it still doesn't explain how he had a birth certificate at one point that says Schmidt on it and not Jones. He swears up and down that’s what it said. So either it’s a fake memory or we are living in an alternate universe. Either way, $300 later and his name is officially Schmidt, which makes me one too...

figstea123

37. You Can’t Handle The Truth

My dad told me that before he and my mom had divorced, he hadn't been happy with her for several years. My mother even had a miscarriage at one point, which destroyed the both of them, but he couldn't leave her because he was afraid that she would hurt herself. So his only thought was to have another kid with her—me—so that motherly instinct would hopefully prevent her from hurting herself. Not a fun thing to find out.

SnooDonuts5850

38. Gone Too Soon

When I was very young, my oldest cousin passed at the age of 23. I really liked him because he would take to me this local lake and we'd throw rocks into the water. I remember not understanding what was going on other than watching everyone be sadder than I ever knew was possible at the time, but I wasn't told why. Years later, I found out he took his own life. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Years after that, I found out what happened. My aunt found him hanging in the shed with a note saying he was gay, and based on how he heard the family talk about homosexuals, he thought they'd never accept him. To this day, they hold opinions I would deem hateful toward others, so honestly, I'm not sure he was completely wrong. Today he would be in his 50s.

depthandbloom

39. Wrong Place, Wrong Time

gray concrete cross on green grass field during daytimePhoto by Waldemar on Unsplash

My great-grandma passed when my grandma was four, and her father remarried a woman who had kids of her own. Well, my step-great-grandma used to beat my grandma and her siblings horrifically as soon as their father left the house. She also locked them in the basement all day, horrible stuff like that. Obviously, this had a negative effect on them.

My grandma grew up to do this to her own kids, for instance. More to the point, one of my great-uncles became an alcoholic. He also robbed graves. Apparently, he had kind of a thing for gold teeth, but he also took jewelry and stuff that he could sell to buy booze. My mom says she could remember him showing up at the backdoor when she was a kid, covered in dirt, and her mom would always take him in for a while, feed him, clothe him, etc.

Then he'd go right back out to drinking and doing the same stuff. Anyway, my mom always told me that this uncle passed in an accident. Several years ago, though, one of my uncles informed me that what really happened was that he was found passed out on someone's front lawn. They had called the authorities and when they arrived and tried to detain him, he woke up and started resisting, fighting the officers. So they used fatal force.

JamiSings

40. Until The Bitter End

When I was young, I was told my grandpa was killed by an ex-convict, and that the man hit him in the head or something. When I got older, I was told that he didn't go that easily. Apparently, some guys broke into his house and tied him up. They told him he must give them the documents for the house as a present or something akin to that.

When he didn't do that, they started tormenting him. But they didn’t know my grandpa. He was a strong man, and he never gave in. Although he passed, they never got those house documents.

runkteenager

41. Our Little Secret

This involves my father-in-law, who is a very active member and local leader of the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon). He's somewhat of a genius, and he built a distillery in his garage to make his own hand sanitizer. Within a few months in, he started acting a little strange. One day while explaining the distilling process to me, he gave me one of the bloated pieces of corn in the batch, and ate one himself.

That's when I realized he wasn't just making sanitizer, he was also making and drinking some pretty stout moonshine. This is the same guy who continues to look down on his kids for simply drinking coffee. His wife and adult kids have no clue and continue to blame it on other things like exhaustion, internal imbalance, etc. Nope.

Lifteekwayshun

42. Jekyll, Meet Hyde

grayscale photo of man wearing sunglasses and jacketPhoto by Ana Itonishvili on Unsplash

I recently found out that my grand-uncle was a mob boss back in his days. I remember him from my early childhood. He was always kind, soft and smiling, willing to play with me or do anything whenever we asked for it. At the same time, he was doing some pretty nasty stuff in his "other" life. It’s still hard for me to reconcile the two sides of him.

Ok_Professor_6978

43. Boxing Clever

I recently found out that my great-grandpa wasn't actually my great-grandpa. My great-grandma had conceived my grandma (her daughter) with a famous boxer who was extremely abusive. She divorced him after having kids with him, and then met my great-grandpa while she was supervising the manufacturing of munitions during WWII.

My mom and I are the only ones besides my grandparents who know the true story. I talked to my mom more about the story and it turns out that when my great-grandma’s first husband (the boxer) passed on, she wore a red dress to his funeral.

Pyrrhic_Void

44. This Rocks

My mother was a groupie for Credence Clearwater. There are five kids in my family, and none of us know who my older sister’s biological father is. We all like to speculate about it...except for my mother and older sister, that is.

Vitnerd

45. All In The Family

woman touch man's handPhoto by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

My grandparents swapped spouses. My grandmother on my mother’s side had an affair with my grandfather on my father’s side. Everyone got divorced, and then my grandfather on my mother’s side fell in love and married my grandmother on my father’s side. Family reunions were fun.

Turinggirl

46. Twisted Family Tree

Here goes: My two remaining grandparents, my father's father and my mother's mother, married each other when they were 75. This made my mother and father step-brother and step-sister. Since the son of my father's sister (my aunt) is my cousin, and the son of my mother's brother (my uncle) is also my cousin, I became both cousins. I am, therefore, my own cousin. I'll never be alone...

Pigs100

47. Daddy Issues

My father tried to kill my mother while she was pregnant with me. He never got charged, and I found out about this when I was 20, after my mom told me in private. She said back then, my father had a drinking problem and he would get really violent sometimes. She said something to him one time so he grabbed a knife, pushed her next to an open window, and put it at her throat.

He then made her choose between jumping from the fourth floor or getting her throat slit. My mom said she cried and begged him to think of the unborn baby (me). Some neighbors heard the noise and intervened. They managed to take it away from him, and she was safe. But here's the brutal kicker. My mom is religious and doesn't believe in divorce, and they're still together after 45 years.

His violent tendencies toned down after me and my brothers were old enough to knock him out if he tried that again. However, I'm the only one in my family, besides my mom, who knows this happened. I've always had problems with him, but I hated him bitterly after my mom told me what happened then and other times as well.

GloryGloryLater

48. The Lion Of God

a man in a suit and tie holding a piece of paperPhoto by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

For context, my dad is the second youngest of 15 children. My oldest aunt has a son who is around the same age as my dad, we'll call him Vince. Vince and my dad knew each other growing up, and always got along. Vince was even one of my dad's groomsmen. A few years after that, Vince became very openly religious, and would try to get family members to go to church with him.

Except then my family started to notice that Vince would change which church he would go to after about a month. Fast forward to when I was a kid. There was a family get-together, and Vince and his girlfriend show up. It takes a dark turn. They start making people uncomfortable with their religious talk. Not the normal day-to-day stuff, but actually telling people they are going to heck for drinking.

They were also telling people that Vince is becoming a preacher and they need to attend his services, or else damnation, etc. According to my mom, I was really sick at this time and she took me to another room to give me some peace and quiet and hopefully I would stop fussing. She overheard Vince and the girlfriend in the next room talking about who they can single out and who would go along with them.

My mom freaked when she heard my dad's name, and Vince saying that he would be easy to convince, and his job should be able to fund things. My mom immediately went and got my dad and told him what she heard. Dad confronts Vince, and a huge argument ensues. Vince ends up leaving and saying everyone is damned, they are Satan, etc.

The rest of the family then talked about what happened, and it all became clear. He was not a good guy. His sister had kicked him out because he was mooching off her, refused to get a job, and she found him taking money from her purse. My aunt had to do the same for the same reasons. The same story over and over. Basically, they realized Vince was just a con artist trying to live off others.

Fast forward to the late 1980s, and not many people have heard from Vince recently. There is a huge family get-together again, and two aunts and a few cousins refused to attend because Vince was not welcome at the party. They were saying that Vince was the "Lion of God" and we were wrong to reject him. Another fight ensues, and the two aunts and handful of cousins don't end up attending.

Fast forward to the mid-90s when my grandma passed. One of the two aunts comes to the funeral (the other had passed a few years earlier), with Vince in tow. Vince was warned that he could come pay his respects, but to behave himself. My aunt was timid and repressed near him, and was open and nice when he wasn't around. It was really weird.

My parents didn't want to talk about it. Later that night, I did some internet searches. That's how I found out the chilling truth. Apparently, Vince was now the leader of a religious cult. He sucked in my two aunts, about seven of my cousins, and about 30-40 various people through the years. All the same M.O.: They must give up their money and belongings to join and "serve God."

He especially preyed on immigrants who came over by themselves. Basically, he bought some farmland, his disciples work the land, he sells what they grow/make, and he keeps the money. He is still active to this day, and many people who have left him have their own websites against him. It’s honestly head-spinning thinking about this guy.

aesoth

49. A Brand New Start

My grandpa who passed in 2017 was a very quiet man and didn't talk a lot. A few years before he passed, my mom (his daughter) told me why. Apparently, when he was around 10 years old back in the late 1930s or early 1940s, a girl around his age lived across the street. One time, they went out with his pistol to shoot at random things in the woods.

On their way home, there was a fence they had to get over to get home. My grandfather leaned his piece against the fence to help his friend. As she was going over, it fell over and went off, ending her life. After the authorities got involved, he was found to not be at fault, but the girl’s family stood out in the street at various times over the next two weeks, yelling "MURDERER" at my grandpa's house.

He eventually couldn't take it and ran away from home. Then in his teens, he met this guy named Rocky and befriended him. Rocky was supposedly in his early to mid-20s, and something happened where Rocky ended up passing and my grandfather took his name. I had always wondered why my grandfather had a different last name than his brothers. And it gets even weirder.

My dad was adopted and until recently, we didn't know anything about his biological family. Well, thanks to all of the DNA tests that have become common, we ended up getting connected with his biological family. Talking to that part of the family, we have come to find out that my dad's biological father has almost the same story as my mom's dad. He also had accidentally taken someone's life as a child, ran away from home, and changed his identity.

kmcdonaugh

50. The Ex Files

I found this out about two weeks ago. In my teenage years, my grandmother started dating a rough guy. For about four years, we didn't see her anymore unless we were picking her up from the hospital after he beat on her. Obviously, we were worried about her having this guy in her life. After a recent visit from my mom, I found out the whole truth, and it completely shocked me.

Apparently, my grandmother's boyfriend was a large-scale dealer who routinely, and without consequences, beat people in public. The authorities wouldn't pursue him, and people who knew who he was wouldn't press charges. My mother and her sisters went to county law enforcement. When they learned the man's name and looked up who he was, they literally gasped.

They were amazed that this individual was in their county, and said that they could not discuss him further without consequence. My dad worked for a major hotel and resort, and had the head of security (a retired secret service agent) make some calls. Two days later, an FBI agent showed up in the doorway of his office, flashed credentials, and asked why my dad was looking into this man.

After a brief explanation of the story, the agent told my dad "let it go," and left. The man was in my family's life from 1993-1997, when he passed from a heart attack. My grandmother also passed a few months later. We've speculated on everything from “mob boss” to "high value witness protection program participant." I'm 40 years old and I still have no answers on this VERY dark chunk of my family's history.

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