Aziza Kibibi, the first daughter of Charles McGill, a.k.a Aswad Ayinde, who is a Grammy Award-winning African American has released a video on Instagram and Tiktok, chronicling years of sexual abuse by her father.
The facts of this story are dark, disturbing to the bone. Even a court reporter said it was the worst case she’d ever heard. It all started with a man who found success in the music business while secretly abusing his wife and children with brutal depravity.
To the world, Aswad Ayinde was the MTV award-winning music video director who found fame after directing The Fugees’ Killing Me Softly video.
Behind closed doors, he was a sexual predator who would sneak into her bedroom at night to teach her “how to be a woman”.
Aziza Kibibi was only eight years old when her childhood was torn apart by sexual abuse, rape and violence at the hands of her father.
By the time she reached her teenage years, Kibibi’s innocence was a fleeting memory and the little girl once bubbling with hopes and dreams had been replaced by a desperate young woman who had become her father’s “girlfriend” and sexual plaything.
On 26 July, 2013, and after 27 years of emotional anguish, Kibibi’s nightmare finally came to an end.
Her father was found guilty of raping and impregnating her four times and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
He will start serving the term only after he has finished his 40-year sentence for repeatedly raping another daughter, who also had a child by him.
With her father behind bars, Kibibi now has the harrowing task of rebuilding the life that he stole from her so many years ago.
Speaking exclusively to IBTimes UK, the Kibibi opened up about her traumatic upbringing and the aftershocks of the experience that are still rippling through her family.
Kibibi was the eldest child of Ayinde who had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, shortly after marrying his high school sweetheart, Beverley.
Kibibi told NJ.com her childhood started off relatively normal.
She lived with her mother and father on the third-floor of an apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, with her Jamaican immigrant grandparents living below.
It was in that very apartment – just metres away from where Kibibi’s grandparents lived – that Ayinde started his two-decade campaign of sexual abuse.
Kibibi was home-schooled but still allowed to play with the neighborhood children. When her family grew to include eight children they moved into a bigger apartment in the same building.
It was when Kibibi started to mature that her father started giving her unwanted attention.
“He told me I was special. Initially, it was to teach me to be a woman,” she said. “By the time he started having intercourse with me, he was getting more and more violent. When I would start fighting him, he would hit me. It was more about threats.“
Her father began to change, and became more controlling over the family. He moved them out of their grandparent’s apartment to another house in Paterson before relocating to Eatontown in Southern New Jersey. The children were only allowed to watch a small amount of TV, and nothing that depicted traditional family life.
Modern medicine was outlawed in the house, and he actually told his wife that his relations with Kibibi were to treat her eczema.
“Initially, I didn’t know it was wrong,” Aziza said of her father’s first advances in 1986. “I looked to him for confirmation that what he was doing was okay and he told me it was.
“He made what he was doing to me seem like something special. He made me feel privileged.”
By the time she was 10, he had started having intercourse with her regularly and quickly became more aggressive towards her. When she tried to fight him off, he would beat her.
Kibibi believed that her father enjoyed his position of power in the family and would often reinforce “the mental oppression with the physical abuse”.
Ayinde continued to reign with an iron fist and isolated his children further from the outside world by home-schooling them. They were only allowed small portions of TV and limited interaction with other youngsters.
By then he had also started molesting Kibibi’s two younger sisters. They were aged 11 and 12. But even though he had a number of sexual partners within the family, including his wife, Kibibi remained his favourite lover.
She remembered being chosen to escort him to public events with the Fugees at the height of his fame and being introduced as his “young wife”.
“I was in the public eye but I was not his daughter,” Aziza said of the deception. “The only thing I could do was stay strong through it and pray that it would end.”
More disturbingly, he exploited her desire to protect her younger siblings from being sodomised and coerced her into satisfying his ever more outrageous demands.
As a result of the emotional blackmail, she eventually stopped fighting back and allowed him to rape her to stop him subjecting her younger sisters to the same ordeal.
Kibibi wasn’t the only one Ayinde was having sex with. He had a mistress – a Manhattan lawyer whom he had another two children with – and was also abusing one of Kibibi’s sisters.
He called himself a polygamist and a prophet. His family was allowed to pray to god but could only do so through him.
“He said the world was going to end, and it was just going to be him and his offspring and that he was chosen,” his ex-wife, Beverly Ayinde testified at a 2010 pre-trial hearing. She said he was attempting to create a ‘pure’ bloodline by procreating with his daughters.
Over the years that followed Aziza gave birth to four children by her father, with all but one of them surviving.
When Kibibi’s first child was born without defects, Ayinde took it as proof and continued to rape the girl to get her pregnant. But the following children would not be so lucky.
Two further daughters born from her father would be diagnosed with phenylketonuria (PKU) a condition that prevents the body from breaking down amino acids. PKU can cause brain damage and seizures.
Dr. Anna Haroutunian, a PKU specialist who has treated Kibibi’s children, said they definitely got the condition because of inbreeding.
PKU is a recessive gene, so both parents must have the gene in order for it to pass along to the child.
The gene only appears at a rate of 1 in 4,000 world wide and is must lower for African-Americans. Likely Kibibi’s paternal grandfather had the gene.
Her sisters would also have one child each by their father.
For years she directed her anger and blame at her mother Beverley – who was aware of the abuse her children endured but turned a blind eye.
She has always maintained that she did not go to the authorities out of fear of him.
“I was afraid to ever accuse him of being demented or being a paedophile. I knew the word, but I wouldn’t dare use it because it would result in a beating,” she said at a pre-trial hearing in 2010.
But her daughter believed that it was mainly shame and jealousy that prevented her mother from seeking help or leaving him. Rather than finding an ally in the woman who gave birth to her Kibibi’s efforts were met with anger and resentment.
“There was no refuge at all,” Kibibi recalled. “She took on the role of a woman scorned by her husband.”
“She saw me as the other woman. So she treated me different.
“I wasn’t her daughter for a long period. I was the younger woman that stole her husband.”
Kibibi believed that her mother should take responsibility for the part she played in Ayinde’s devious scheme.
She recalled one particular day when the family were visiting relatives and her father fell asleep. Despite pleading with their mother to take them away while he slept, she simply told them: “No. We are going to stay.”
Kibibi continued: “Now she blocks out a lot of what happened. I am sympathetic to her position but she is responsible as far as I’m concerned. If was in her position my children would come first.
“As a mother myself I would die before allowing what my father did to continue.
“I believe that if she had a second chance she would do it differently.
“I know she is suffering because of what she didn’t do in her own mind and I think she is doing her best to make up for it.”
Her other siblings have not shown that same level of compassion.
In 2002, Kibibi thought she had finally been presented with a way out when an anonymous source – later revealed to be her grandmother – tipped off the child protection services.
But social workers’ investigations foundered and the case was closed with no action taken. A despondent Kibibi took that as futher proof that “my dad was untouchable”.
“In his mind he was not guilty. He believed that if God allowed him to do these things that he knew were wrong then he must be somebody special.”
Later that year Ayinde and his wife separated and Kibibi and her sisters moved away from their father. A year later he raped her for the last time.
But it would not be for another three years that the sisters would find the courage to report their father to the authorities. They were reticent partly because they were concerned about the ramifications such a terrible secret would have on their children.
Their decision was ultimately spearheaded by the discovery that Ayinde had fathered more children with other women. His daughters feared that those children would be molested too.
Kibibi was finally able to stand up against her father during his sentencing this year when she delivered an emotional witness statement. He repeatedly lashed out at her, calling her a liar and characterizing himself as the victim.
In spite of his inability to accept responsibility for his actions, she could not help but feel pity for him as he was led to his prison cell.
“I was so relieved but at the same time I was conflicted,” she said. “He was my children’s father. I felt sorry for him.
“But I know he did it to himself. He had plenty of opportunities to do the right thing. And this is how God wants it to be. Everyone should get what they deserve.”
The physiological scars that he left behind are still visible in the cracks left in her family. There is still a lot of distrust in her family and they struggle to bond because her father propagated an “every man [sic] for himself” within the household.
Today Kibibi lives in East Orange with her children and another son, now five, by her ex-husband.
She went back to school for her GED and will finish her liberal arts degree from Essex County College this fall. She also runs her own baking business and plans to start a restaurant someday.
Her 16-year-old daughter suffers from a metabolic disorder, a result of inbreeding and another child died at the age of nine from a genetic disorder.