A woman on TikTok has gone viral after sharing details of her kidnapping story in a series of videos on the platform.
Shawnette Davis, 26, had always assumed the people who she considered her “parents” were her biological family. However, she later found out that she was adopted, but that was not the full story.
At 26, Shawnette Davis Found Out That the Couple She Grew Up with Had Kidnapped Her as a Child.
@thebeardedmom how I learned I had been kidnapped #storytime #realshit #thisismylife #nomoreshame #kidnapped #survivor #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp
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Shawnette, who shares videos under the pseudonym thebeardedmom on TikTok, explained her situation in a video entitled “how I learned I had been kidnapped.”
In the video, Shawnette said she was about to get married in 2006 when she tried to find her biological mom as she believed she was adopted.
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“I assumed that the fastest way to track my biological mother down would be to seek out a criminal record for her,” she told viewers. “I don’t know what compelled me to call the sheriff’s department in the city that I was born. It just seemed to make sense at the time.”
She did call the sheriff of the municipality she believed her mother resided in and the sheriff quickly became interested in who Shawnette was.
After answering a few of the sheriff’s questions, the sheriff instructed Shawnette to sit down because he had something important to tell her, according to Shawnette.
“I sat down. He told me he couldn’t find any information about my mother, but that I was a missing person,” she recalled. “There was a police investigation I could not access because the records had been archived, but I had been kidnapped.”
“So yeah, tough day,” she added.
Shawnette continued to share her story in a series of videos that followed. She described her “parents” who she refers to in the video as her “captors” and learning that they were not indeed her biological parents.
She learned that she was told that she was adopted at age 10 after experiencing abuse and an unhealthy home life.
“That’s when they sat me down and, Angie is the name of my female captor, she told me she wasn’t my biological mother and she didn’t want to have anything to do with me and I was going to be living with my father, Steve, for the rest of my life,” she explained.
After living with Steve for a brief period and experiencing more abuse at his hands, Shawnette said she became a ward of the state.
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Years later, she learned that she had was never adopted and instead had been sold to her captors by her mother who had Shawnette when she was just a teenager.
The teen sold Shawnette to her captors when she was 6 months old. After Shawnette’s grandmother discovered her granddaughter had been taken, she contacted police and reported the child abducted.
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“My mother’s family, they all believe that I was kidnapped,” she explained. “The family that kidnapped me, their family all believe that I was saved from a crazy lady.”
Viewers commented on the video about the alleged exchange of money, questioning if Shawnette’s use of the term “kidnapping” is the correct one. In a video, she told them that she feels it is the right term for the situation.
Shawnette Did Eventually Reconnect with Her Mother.
A Yahoo! News article reported that Shawnette’s biological mother, Julie Bray, claimed she’d been looking for her biological daughter for years. But, Shawnette said, “none of that was true.”
In fact, she was warned by her biological aunts and uncles to stay away from her biological mother. They told her “not trust my biological mother as far as I could throw her. That she was a psycho and to stay as far away from her as I possibly could.”
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Unfortunately, Shawnette did not follow their advice and what followed ultimately ended her relationship with all members of her biological family.
“It became really uncomfortable to try to get to know each other. My grandma had gifts for me she had been buying my entire life,” she explained of the strange circumstances.
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Shawnette tried to make things work with her family through the years but after the death of the only family member she had actually bonded with and the end of the marriage that kicked the whole saga off, Shawnette decided to cut all ties, Yahoo! reported.
The woman tells even more of her story in the some 16-odd videos she’s made on the topic and shared on TikTok. She shared that she and her biological mother do not speak and that no one has been charged with her kidnapping.
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“This has been super cathartic. Nobody’s ever cared about my story before and I always feel like an odd man out,” Shawnette told her viewers.
She also said that she’s doing better today than ever before. “I’m not perfect,” she added, but “I’m good. I am.”