Good Lord, morning TV is fast becoming a place where the most upsetting stories are shared.
Yesterday, we told you about the young girl who appeared on Jeremy Kyle’s show to share her story about how her father had raped her as a child.
Now This Morning has taken a leaf of Take A Break magazine and spoken to the mother who discovered that her four year old daughter was being abused by her husband.
The emotionally distraught woman – who called herself Alice – revealed that she had met and fallen in love with a guy called Mark when she was in Egypt years ago and married him soon after.
During their relationship, Alice discovered that Mark had something of a “large sexual appetite” and a “very argumentative” character.
But what came as more of a shock was the fact that he was a paedophile and had been sexually abusing their four year old daughter Grace for sometime.
Speaking to Holly and Phil on This Morning, the emotional mum recalled how her world fell apart when she came home one day to find police swarming around their house and began questioning her husband.
“They interviewed him for six hours, they left, didn’t arrest him,” she explained. “He told them he was going to buy groceries for dinner, drove south and that was the last anyone saw of him.”
She added: “Out of 10,000 megabytes of photographic evidence, there were 800 images of our daughter.
“Not all that information came in one go, so it took a while to work out Grace had been involved.”
Alice went on to describe how after Mark had been killed in a fatal car crash the penny dropped about just how much abuse her poor daughter had gone through.
“A month after he died,” she explained, “we all got stomach bugs and she became delirious, and she started to gesture things that no four or five year old should have any knowledge of.”
Alice, who has detailed this traumatic incident in a book called Eating The Elephant, says she is glad Mark lost his life because it means that now their son Joseph will never have to find out what his father did to his sister.
“Joseph has no clue,” the haunted mum said. “he still idolises his dad.
“I say we had a troubled marriage, but I dread that day where I have to break the news.
“It is a blessing he’s gone, as I’m happy I don’t have to take my children to see him in prison, or have the unwanted publicity.”
These days, Alice says her daughter is “doing great” and is “a normal teenager for the most part”.
“She does have a physical memory of what happened, and some time she’ll have to put words to it. She’s only mentioned it half a dozen times and she’s never disclosed it in full detail.”
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