Hermès

Sinéad O'Connor said her mother beat her naked from infancy to age 13, forcing her to spread her limbs so she could stamp on her abdomen - trying to destroy her womb. She'd cheerfully answer the phone mid-beating, her foot still on Sinéad's body. At five, Sinéad won a kindergarten prize for curling into the smallest ball. Years later, she tore up the Pope's photo on live TV to protest child abuse. In the video below Sinéad O'Connor describes for the first time what her mother did to her behind closed doors. The day her father left, her mother was furious the children were upset. She made them live in the garden shed. For months. She dressed Sinéad like a boy. Chopped her hair off. Told her she shouldn't have been born, that she wanted a son. Made her strip naked before every beating so she could attack her stomach directly. Said she wanted to burst her womb. Stop her from being female. One weekend Sinéad put on a dress with a missing button. Her mother beat her, took the light bulb out of her room, locked her inside and left for the entire weekend. Every last day of school the other kids celebrated. Sinéad and her brother cried and hid the hockey sticks and tennis rackets around the house. It never worked. She'd invent a reason anyway. A crooked lampshade. A dusty shelf. Anything. Every morning when they heard her footsteps on the stairs they wet themselves with fear. She made Sinéad repeat: I am nothing. I am nothing. Over and over until she believed it. She ran away at 13. Never received trauma treatment. Said the only therapy she ever had was music. Was Sinéad O'Connor's mother a sadist, or something worse - a woman who looked completely normal to everyone outside that house?