Mamamia article
25 Jan 2025
Until she was 64 years old, Judy King's only clear childhood memory was of her mother lamenting her birth. The rest are a blank space, the truth shut out after years of severe sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
Judy's father first sexually abused her when she was 11 years old. That night, as he became increasingly drunk, he insisted Judy climb into bed with him where he proceeded to touch her inappropriately. At the time, Judy believed all fathers were good, so she must have been bad.
"It happened a second time, when I asked him to come to the local baths to see how well I had learnt to dive at the pool," Judy tells Mamamia.
Behind the changing sheds, he touched her again. Again, she blamed herself.
"I never went back to the baths. Instead, I went to early morning mass, embracing religion as a comfort."
By the time she was 15, her father was anally raping her.
"I have one memory of him standing beside my bed, but no memory, at the time, of the sexual act," she says.
"What I experienced was a sensation of my body levitating up from my bed to join a drawing of a guardian angel that hung above my bed.
"The knock on effect of my father's sexual abuse was a total loss of the ability to read or concentrate on the written word in any form. I lived in a cloud. Prior to the sexual abuse, I remembered I could read and at one time I devoured books. My opinion of myself descended to the lowest of the low."
After failing her exams and refusing to take up the boarding school place at a convent offered by her grandmother, Judy lashed out at her father.
"After he swung around in the car and hit me with force in the mouth, I suddenly saw the truth in an instant and jumped out of the moving car," she says.