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Shania Twain
As a child, country singer Shania Twain watched her mother Sharon endure physical abuse for years allegedly at the hands of stepdad, Jerry Twain. "[It was] overwhelming for any child to never know what to expect from one day to the next," Twain told Nightline in May 2011. "It could happen anytime. But also you don't know if they're going to survive it." The singer spoke of an incident where her stepdad, who legally adopted her at age 4, shoved Sharon’s head into a toilet. "I thought he'd killed her. I really thought she was drowned, or dead, or that he had just smashed her head in and she was never going to wake up,” she continued. "So I'd gone through the shock and experience of really believing my mother had died at that moment. Also, through the humiliation of how I thought she had been killed, by drowning in a toilet seat. ... It was very, very obviously very hard to take."
Twain said she has finally accepted those experiences as part of her life. "I think I've remained very detached from my life to this point, almost as though it was a different person, every phrase I went through," she said. "So I've reconnected and said, no, this is actually who I am. I'm neither embarrassed of who I am, where I come from, what I've experienced, I'm not ashamed of it."
