In a bombshell revelation, a 26-year-old woman has come forward to say that George Zimmerman molested her on numerous occasions over the course of a decade and that she heard his family routinely make disparaging remarks about African Americans.
The woman was heard on tapes released by the prosecutor in Zimmerman’s murder trial for killing Trayvon Martin—tapes whose release Zimmerman’s lawyer Mark O’Mara tried unsuccessfully to block because he believed they would be prejudicial.
The woman said she has known Zimmerman, 28, since she was a young child and the molestation started when she was six and he was eight. At one point after the girl told her family when she was a teenager, they confronted Zimmerman and he apologized. Zimmerman’s parents also were told of the molestation. She said she is coming forward now because after his arrest she was no longer afraid of him.
Zimmerman is free on $1 million bond in his murder case, but these revelations certainly will have an effect on public opinion, something O’Mara feared.
The witness said the molesting began one day when she was staying with the Zimmermans in Virginia while her mother and father moved from Louisiana to Orlando. She said on the tape that he groped her with his hands while they lay under a blanket as they watched television with a group of children. He did it many other times during the once a year visits between the two families
“Before we left the room or left any place, he would say we weren’t doing anything – we were just laying there or we were just playing hide-and-seek,” said the woman, whose voice cracked as she recounted the events. “He would always make sure that he told me that. And I didn’t know. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better.”
The woman said she was traumatized and thought no one would believe her because everybody really liked Zimmerman, including her father. At the last encounter when she was 16 and he was 18, he had invited her to a housewarming—but no one was there when she got there except for Zimmerman, who tried to get her to lay down on the bed with him. But after he started groping her again, she got up and ran out. She told her sister about the incidents when she was 19 and her sister told her parents, who confronted Zimmerman. They all met with him at a pizzeria in Lake Mary, where he sat down, said, ‘I’m sorry,” and walked out. Her mother didn’t want to pursue charges because she didn’t think anything would come of it.
“I tried so hard to forget it all and to make it go away that I even forgot the good stuff in life,” she said. “There is things that my family talks about that sounded so awesome but I don’t remember them. It sounds like they are talking about somebody else.”
The woman said Zimmerman’s parents were also told about what had happened. In the other tape, the woman said the Zimmerman family—his father is white and mother is Hispanic—talked about race often and disparaged African-Americans, even saying, “they only like black people if they act like white people,” she said.
