Last year, Ash Pereira called the police in her hometown of Enterprise, Alabama, to report a rape.
The date of the alleged crime was nearly 15 years earlier; the accused, her now ex-husband, Jason Greathouse. Pereira, now 30, was locked in a bitter custody dispute with the man, a former youth pastor who impregnated her when she was 15 and he was 25.
What ensued was shocking to Pereira and many observers: Her ex was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor, did not have to register as a sex offender, and maintains partial custody of their 14-year-old daughter.
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Pereira, meanwhile, had to defend herself against accusations that she was an unfit mother and that she was using the statutory rape accusation as a cudgel to get Greathouse to give up his child.
The battle has now pitted mother against daughter, with Pereira claiming her mother was the driving force behind her childhood marriage and her mother claiming Pereira is simply out for blood.
“I really feel for my daughter, I really do,” Pereira’s mother, Jennie Jett, told The Daily Beast. “[But] people don’t understand everything that happened.”
“You’ve given your body to someone and you need to take responsibility for your own actions”
Growing up, Pereira was used to feeling like an outsider. A self-described “military brat,” she bounced between four states before her 13th birthday: Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, New York, then back to Alabama, near the naval base in Enterprise. One of the only constants in her life was religion: No matter where she went, her parents always joined a church. Pereira and her brother spent three days a week in the pews, learning scripture and—as Pereira puts it—having “the fear of hell absolutely burned into our heads.”
At age 13, shortly after moving to Enterprise, Pereira developed a severe eating disorder—a result, she says,…
Source : yahoo
