“What’s The Darkest Secret You Found Out About A Family Member?”: 35 People Share Heavy Stories

My great uncle is a rapist that prefers underage family members. I don’t know how many people actually know, but my grandparents certainly do along with his victims (my mom, aunt, and I know at least a few or their cousins but I’m not sure which).

But then he found Jesus again so we all have to forgive him and pretend nothing happened? It was before I was born but that’s the basic run around I’ve gotten from my grandparents, they don’t ever actually acknowledge it just that “Tony did bad things but he found God”. I eventually put two and two together about my mom’s history or sexual assault and her making sure that me and my female cousins were never left alone with him. And now that I’m in my 20s that duty has been passed down to me at every family gathering. It’s like an unspoken rule that you can’t say **why**, just the warning. Don’t leave your daughters alone with him.

I’m tired of it though. Tired of shooing little girls away and having to pretend like it’s normal. Scoping toddlers out of a predators arms and acting like everything’s fine and I’m just baby crazy. When this is all over, I’m not going to stay quite anymore. The next time I have to around him I’m taking children right back to their parents with the full f*****g story of why it’s dangerous. I’m tired of having to protect a rapist to keep peace.

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. My uncle realized his brother was letting him get further and further ahead. He stopped and turned around to see his brother starting to bring the shotgun up in his direction. He asked him what the hell was he doing, 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.

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...

Not necessarily a family secret but a weird story nonetheless.

This happened around 2013 - Instagram wasn’t totally new but it was still a much smaller platform centered a lot around visual artists. Through Instagram - a friend of mine found a profile that was my goddamn doppelgänger. 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.

Now, for the purpose of the story I’ll just say I am incredibly unique looking. Dark brown hair, firey 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 RayBan Clubmasters. I am a professional Tattooer and he is a painter who owns an art gallery.

So - 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 drunken 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! Bought plane tickets, made arrangements and 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 were long lost brothers and he goes “that’s entirely possible! My Dad was never in the picture - he was a traveling biker that hooked up with my mom one night.” Which was weird because my dad was a tattooer and notorious biker who traveled in the area he 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 loled and agreed that would be funny - 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 have a brother is bittersweet for me - I wanna respect his right to have contact with me or not but it does break my heart a little every time I think about him.

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.

He caught her in bed with her cousin, with which she was had been in love for a long time.

He spoke with their pastor, who told him to forgive and forget.

That worked, until 6 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 and be happy instead.

I found out that my grandfather’s first wife (before my grandma) died of botulism from eating some tomatoes she had canned at home. She could have been saved, but he refused to take her to the doctor because the botulism was her “fault.” He let her die to teach her a lesson.

My step-grandfather had a completely hidden life in Australia before he met my grandmother. He had a family and kids in Australia, and faked his death by driving his car off a cliff then moving to America. His kids thought he was dead 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 death to disconnect from them.

My father used to secretly go to parks and highway rest stops to meet other men for anonymous sex.

Just in case you're wondering, he really hated gay people.

My biological grandfather threatened to kill my grandmother while she was very young and pregnant with my uncle. (Long story short, he was engaged to someone else).

My grandmother became a nervous wreck while pregnant and wouldn’t leave the house and he used to throw bricks through the 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 to say someone might have killed him for her.

It wasn’t until we were going through her boxes of photos and ‘love letters’ we realised she was actually friends with the Kray twins...

Found out the hard way that my grandfather was a sexual predator. Turns out my grandmother had been in denial despite both my aunts, their friends, and young girls in their small town claiming he raped/molested them (one 16 year-old even got pregnant and *he paid for the abortion*). Grandma lied about his whereabouts/activities for years to protect him because if he went to jail she'd be unable to afford their house. So, long story short, me and my then 10 year old cousin were his latest and final victims.

Thanks, Grandma.

My father tried to kill my mother while she was pregnant with me

Not really dark at all, but surprising. My mild mannered Buddhist lawyer uncle was International Mr. Leather's "Leather Daddy's Boy of the Year" some time in the late 80s.

Step father was cheating on mother. Didnt find out because he was caught cheating; found out because he and his mistress were drunk, got in a fight, and he punched her so hard that she fell over and died. Found out about the whole thing during the investigation, the trial, and the conviction. Was weird to have a lawyer want to call 12 year old me to a stand to defend the character of a man I already had very little interaction and a fear of, and that was before the manslaughter charge.

That my grandfather murdered his own brother to inherit his money

Two years ago I found out that my Dad had a wife before my Mom and she died in a freak accident on their wedding night.

My great uncle told his wife that their son died right after being born and 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. It was only found out when the family lawyer was dying and contacted the sister to tell her she has a living brother who lives in a home run by the state. I guess he 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 effected his life at all.

Found out my birth father was still alive and living in California after being told for years he had died in the Navy before I was born. Fast forward a couple of years and a Sister whome I was told had died at birth contacted me saying she had been adopted. Put all the pieces together and found out that my Grandparents, mother then 16 and uncle then 14 were stealing cars in Southern California and running them down to Tijuana. When the Feds started snooping the whole family ran for the border and made it as far as central America where my mother discovered she was pregnant with me. They then turned noth and made it to Zapata Texas where I was born. She gave me the name of her last boyfriend and told me he died in the Navy. Less than a year after I was born she gave birth to my half sister and gave her up fo adoption telling the family she was still born. My mother was a pathological lier all her life and I didn't find out until I joined the Navy at 17 and found my birth father was still alive.

Also found out my Grandmother was a prostatute, madam, and arsonist as well but that is another story.

I recently found out that my grandmother committed suicide as a result of the sexual abuse she received from her grandfather as a child (aged 8-14). Apparently her mother and many of her relatives were compliant with it and would even send her to his house for week long visits where she would sleep in his bed.

when i was a kid we went to my grandma’s house every sunday and all of my uncles and aunts would be there. one day i noticed that one of my uncles didn’t show up anymore so i asked my family where he is. they told me that he wouldn’t be able to visit anymore because he moved away.
years later i found out that he raped and killed two women and they locked him up.

My parents had a nasty divorce which was often accompanied by a lot of s**t-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 the big guns. My siblings and I were just watching t.v in the living room one day and the conversation moved to my dad coming to town to visit, at which point 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 it 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 the victim of sexual abuse was a stain on someone’s character, but it was a really weird way to find out something so deeply personal about my dad.

TL;DR: My mom told my siblings and I that my dad was molested when he was little as a way to spite him.