We don't hear much about Lauryn Hill's personal life. She's been teased over the years about her reputation as being an artist who won't show up on time—if at all—to her live events, and her romantic relationships have been kept under wraps. Her children have stayed away from the spotlight and out of the gossip blogs, aside from daughter Selah who she shares with Rohan Marley.
On Monday (August 10), Selah spoke candidly with the public about her relationship with her parents on Instagram Live. The two-hour dialogue was quite revealing as she talked about the "trauma" she endured growing up dealing with an absent father and a mother who used discipline as a means of control. Selah said she would Google what it was like to have a father and admitted to having severe daddy issues.
"Honestly guys, I'm just hurting. I can't even front that I'm not," she said. "I've been hurting for so much of my life and so much of my life has been me avoiding how much I'm really hurting just from the circumstances." Selah called her mother "an amazing woman" but detailed the spankings she would receive.
"She would spank us to no avail," Selah stated before giving an example. "She was just very angry. So, so, so, so, so, so angry. She was literally not easy to talk to and then half the time we didn't live with her. I lived with my grandparents half the time... It's crazy, I'm playing this trauma back in my head as I speak to you." She would have one of the kids "go get the belt" and when they returned, she would hold their hands up so they were hanging "as she beat us. Literally, just like that."
Selah made a whipping motion with her phone cord and said that even the sound devastated her. "And then the threats, the constant threats... That belt man. That's that slave sh*t. That was some slavery sh*t. All Black parents were on that sh*t." She did admit that things calmed down when she became a teenager. Watch Selah talk through her personal issues and realizations about herself below.