A woman allegedly related to George Zimmerman and his family told investigators that members of Zimmerman’s family were boastfully proud racists and that Zimmerman sexually molested her for several years.
“It started when I was six,” the woman told investigators in 2012. “We’d all lay in front of the TV and we had pillows and blankets and he would reach under the blankets and try to do things and I would try to push him off but he was bigger and stronger and older,” the woman said, audibly weeping in the Florida State Attorney’s Office interview recording released Monday. “It was in front of everybody and I don’t know how I didn’t say anything, I just didn’t know any better.”
A number of news sources have reported that the woman is a relative of the Zimmerman family, though her exact relationship to Zimmerman was redacted from the interview recording. Zimmerman’s legal team, in a statement released in 2011, identified the woman as a cousin.
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“We’ve known about this since the beginning but out of respect to her privacy, her emotional state, we haven’t said anything,” Natalie Jackson, an attorney for the family of victim Trayvon Martin, told The Huffington Post.
The woman told investigators that she was coming forward because she thought that Zimmerman might have shot and killed Martin because he was black.
“This is the first time in my life that I’m not afraid of him,” the woman said. “[H]e cant get to me. If I saw him on the street or saw him anywhere it would just make me break down in tears, but now with everything going on I know that he’s not going to be out in public. I won’t go to Target and see him anymore. I’m not afraid of him anymore.”
The witness claims that Zimmerman has also abused one other female, who has yet to come forward.
Zimmerman’s defense attorney, Mark O’Mara, argued that witness 9’s statements were irrelevant to the Trayvon Martin case. Some of the racial implications made by the witness, he said, could likely cause “widespread hostile publicity.”
“I was afraid that he may have done something because the kid was black,” the witness told investigators. “Because growing up they’ve always made, him and his family have always made statements that they don’t like black people if they don’t act like white people. They like black people if they act white and other than that, they talk a lot of bad things about black people.”
(Photo: AP)
