Trigger Warning: This article contains references to child sexual abuse that some readers may find distressing.
Logan Gifford from Las Vegas was deprived of a normal childhood. He was only 10 years old when his mother, Doreene, started to se*uallly abuse him.
In a recent interview with the Key Witness: Aftermath podcast, Gifford detailed the abuse that continued relentlessly for nearly seven years and opened up about his helplessness during that phase of his life. Gifford revealed the abuse finally stopped when he decided to call the police.
For years, he believed his brother was the result of an affair his mother had with a colleague. However, after looking at the uncanny resemblance he shared with him, he soon started to doubt who the teen’s real father was.
Gifford said that even before the abuse started, he experienced a troubled family life. “…my father was a chronic alcoholic, and he used everything except for heroin… there are no clocks in the casinos… There’s a huge underbelly of a black market here that we were extremely exposed to, like strippers and narcotics,” he said.
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“I could recall sitting in the corner of the room and watching these very much adult activities take place, and I was maybe three or four years old. It is a ruthless place. I’ve seen it chew people up and spit them out as it basically did with my family.”
Gifford recalled unhinged incidents involving his mother, including an instance when, he was four years old, she held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill herself. “My opinion of my mother had started to shift the more promiscuous she had gotten outside of the marriage.”
Soon, Gifford said his life took a horrific turn.
“The night my life changed, I was asked to stay up late, and I was led back to my mother’s room. The door was locked behind me and I turned the corner, and I saw a p*rnographic film playing on the television. She then began to expose herself, and I was se*ually assaulted by her for the first time that evening.”
“I knew it was wrong immediately when it happened, and I want to make that abundantly clear. I didn’t know how to respond or what to do afterwards because if I’m being transparent, I feared her. She was unstable.”
“I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to talk about it for a long, long time. I remember feeling very peculiar as well the next morning because how do you go about and live a regular life after that?”
His mother, Doreene, was convicted of child se*ual abuse charges in 2015 and sentenced to eight to 20 years in prison. She served nine years before her release.
She received her sentence after taking an “Alford plea,” a special type of guilty plea where a defendant maintains that they are innocent but agrees to accept a guilty verdict because they know the court has enough evidence to convict them anyway.
Years later, Logan took over the care of his younger teenage sibling. To figure out who his brother’s real father was, Logan filed a court case asking for advanced DNA testing last year. The results show that both he and his own father share a 99.9% DNA match with the sibling.
However, Gifford was not completely satisfied with the results. In a conversation with 8 News Now Investigators’ David Charns, he said, “I’ve always affirmed that there was a strong possibility… The resemblance is stunning, and if people knew, it, I mean, it’s a carbon copy.”
Gifford said his bond with his brother is stronger than ever, and he is aware of the legal proceedings.
“He is very much aware of what’s going on and why we’re pursuing it the way that we are. Um, it just made us revere that relationship even more.”
While Gifford said he is thankful that the judge made him his brother’s legal guardian, he won’t stop until he finds answers to why his brother was born with cognitive difficulties.
“The judge looked at the case and said that, well, there’s nothing necessarily ruling this out. …was born the way that he was… I think it’s fair that we continue to pursue that because that’s what this has been about the entire time,” he said.
Disclaimer: The Inquisitr individually could not independently confirm the facts of this incident and is reporting based on the information available within the public video record.
