Aziza Kibibi describes being sexually abused by her father starting at age ten, including rape and pregnancy. Her father later directed the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly." The interview examines how isolation and indoctrination enabled the abuse and connects to the case of music director Aswad Yende, sentenced to 90 years for raping his daughters.
Your dad proposed to you in front of your siblings and your mom?
Yeah. So my father was molesting me. And he started raping me when I was 10. By the time he moved me and my family away from Paterson, from any family members, we moved to East Orange. And I got pregnant.
You got pregnant by your father?
Yes.
When you isolate people, you can pretty much indoctrinate them, right? And so in your mind, being so young, part of you, did part of you think that this was normal?
I was more afraid. You know, my father, he eventually became a music video director.
Oh.
So my father directed "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees.
<LYRICS>Killing me softly with his song, killing me softly.</LYRICS> The award-winning music director Aswad Yende has been sentenced to 90 years in prison after New Jersey court found him guilty of raping and impregnating his daughters. Many of the assaults are said to have taken place from the mid-1980s to 2002 in an abandoned funeral home.
And even though I didn't like what was happening, he was my parent, so I accepted what was happening. But then when it got to the point where you You know, he's basically trying to do things to my body in order for him to be able to fit inside of me. So by the time he told her that he was setting up these threesomes with his girlfriend, got to the point where we weren't allowed to pray to God. We had to pray to him. And then he said he would get the message to God. I consulted my children before I decided to go public with my story. By that time, yes, I had told my daughter when she was 13. She had remembered— she was the only one that remembered my father because she was 5, but she did not know that her and I were sisters. She knew he was Daddy, but she didn't know that he was also— that Daddy was also Mommy's daddy. She was not aware of that at all.
