After revealing last week her life-threatening battle with the autoimmune illness Graves disease, acclaimed rapper-producer Missy Elliott is now opening up about her painful childhood of poverty and sexual abuse.
According to The Boombox, in VH1’s latest episode of Behind The Music, which premiered on June 29, Elliott reveals that she grew up impoverished with her mother and father in Portsmouth, Virginia.
“I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me, because mice was running on me while I was asleep,” she revealed.
According to Elliott’s mother, Patricia Elliott, things were so bad that the family went without running water and a bathroom.
“We didn’t have running water … We were going in a pot that sat by her bed, because we didn’t have a bathroom,” said Patricia Elliott.
During the episode, Elliott also shared her story of sexual abuse, candidly revealing that at the ago of 8, she was molested by her 16-year-old cousin. The abuse continued for the next year, but Elliott says that at the time she never told anyone and the memories of the abuse still haunt her to this day.
“Each day he wanted me to come to the house after school. It became sexual, which, for me at eight years old, I had no clue what that was, but I knew something was wrong,” explained Elliott. “Being molested … it don’t disappear. You remember it as if it was yesterday,”
–nicholas robinson
