Rape Victim Refuses To Meet Daughter

A woman wants nothing to do with the daughter she gave birth to as the result of a rape, but the daughter feels differently. INSIDE EDITION speaks to both women.

A woman breaks down as she remembers her darkest secret, how she was raped and became pregnant when she was just 16 years old.  

Kathleen Hoy Foley said she was date raped in high school and put the baby girl up for adoption in 1964.
 
She said, “Unless you've been there, you have no idea what it's like to have a rapist invade your body. Your whole entire body. The rapist was growing inside my body and there was no place I could go. I do not consider it a birth. It was an expulsion from my body. It was an expulsion of the rapist from my body.”

The child Kathleen gave birth to almost 50 years ago is Elaine Penn. Penn laughs in disbelief at those brutal words.

INSIDE EDITION’s Diane McInerney asked Penn, “What does it feel like that the woman who gave birth to you wants nothing to do with you?”

Elaine said, “You have that moment and you go, ‘Oh my god, the person who you're closest related to just thinks these horrible vile things about me.’”

The two women have never met, and Kathleen wants to keep it that way.  

INSIDE EDITION’s Les Trent asked Kathleen, “So you have no obligation to see her?”

Kathleen said, “I have no connection with that woman. None.”

So how could a mother reject her own flesh and blood?  

Kathleen was so traumatized by the rape in high school, that when she arranged for the adoption, she wanted nothing to do with the child. She didn't even want the child to know her name. But Elaine was determined to find her birth mother. Using some old-fashioned detective work, she looked through dozens of yearbook photos from high schools in the Trenton, New Jersey, area, and found a match.   

There she was, Kathleen Allen, in the high school yearbook. But then Elaine got the shock of her life when she wrote to her birth mother.

Kathleen said, “I told her no contact, I got another letter saying I owed this woman my information, I owed her.”

Trent asked, “Did it feel like stalking?”

Kathleen replied, “Yes, it was stalking. It was stalking.”

McInerney asked Elaine, “She says what you did was traumatizing.”

Elaine said, “It's infuriating. Its like, aren't you human? Don't you have any feeling, any compassion at all?"

But Kathleen says her life has been turned upside down. She hadn't even told her husband of 45 years that she was raped in high school and had a secret child.

Trent told Kathleen, “You gave birth to her.”

She responded, “If a woman does not want to reveal her information she has the right to keep that confidential.” 

Elaine now has her own loving family, two teenage daughters and husband Scott.

Scott said, “It was horrible. My wife felt like a piece of trash.”

Elaine says she feels sorry for the woman who gave birth to her.  

She said, “It's sad that there's such vileness and such hatred.”

Kathleen emotionally said, “I have been shadowed by this sinister shadow my entire life. I have been chained to this rapist my entire life and it is not over.”

Kathleen has written a book, Woman in Hiding, that advocates privacy for all women who give up their children in adoptions. Elaine, in the meantime, is fighting for more open adoption laws.