Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 26, 1995 TAG: 9509260076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: TORONTO LENGTH: Medium
The usually reclusive sisters - Annette, Cecile and Yvonne, now 61 - made the allegation publicly for the first time during a rare interview over the weekend on Radio Canada's French-language television channel.
``We've come to a point where we had to liberate ourselves from the past and turn the page,'' Annette Dionne said Saturday when asked why she had waited so long to break the silence.
The sisters became international celebrities after their birth - two months prematurely - in the northern Ontario hamlet of Corbeil on May 28, 1934.
Weighing less then two pounds each, they were the first known surviving quintuplets.
Their seemingly miraculous survival, and their family's impoverished background, inspired three Hollywood movies and made them the sensation of Depression-era Canada.
The identical quintuplets were taken away from their parents and made wards of the Ontario government, which put them on display for as many as 6,000 people a day who came to watch them play behind a one-way screen.
Their father, Oliva, fought a nine-year battle to regain custody of his daughters. They were returned to their parents in 1943, and the abuse began soon after, the sisters said.
Annette said their father, Oliva, who died in 1979, would take the girls out one at a time in the family car and sexually assault them.
When she was a teen-ager, Annette said, she tried to discuss the abuse with a Roman Catholic priest and was told ``to continue to love our parents and to wear a thick coat when we went for car rides.''
One of the quints' five older siblings, Therese Callahan, challenged her sisters' claims, saying: ``We assert that we had good parents, and that to our knowledge, our father was certainly not a sexual abuser.''
- Associated Press
by CNB