14 DAY TRIAL // Mama June, part of TLC’s most famous reality TV family, the cast of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, is finally speaking out on allegations that she’s dating again the man who went to prison for molesting her daughter Chickadee when she was just 8.
TLC is no longer producing and / or airing episodes from the show, pulling the plug on it immediately after photos emerged showing June with Mark McDaniel, a registered offender who had been released from jail after a 10-year sentence on child abuse charges.
Since then, Chickadee, who has been revealed to be living estranged from the family, has been talking to the press about the kind of abuse she had to suffer at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend, and how heartbreaking it was to see the two together again.
Mama June is pretty much clueless
This is the conclusion that one inevitably draws after seeing her try to talk her way out of a very bad situation – because she hasn’t just lost her steady income source, she’s also running the risk of losing her kids after Child Protection Services launched an investigation to determine if she endangered the 3 minors she has in custody by reconnecting with McDaniel.
For the first time since the scandal, June sat down with ET for a series of interviews that started airing a couple of days ago. Embedded below is just a taste of the kind of explanations she offers for her despicable behavior.
For starters, she doesn’t seem to see anything wrong about her spending time with a man who admitted to and went to prison for forcing himself on an 8-year-old girl – her own daughter, no less.
June doesn’t want to see the court documents detailing the kind of abuse Chickadee (Anna) has been put through, saying it’s too painful a thing for her. She tries to convince the interviewer that she knows what is written on those pieces of papers, though in a previous video she admitted she didn’t believe her daughter’s story 100 percent.
She explains that she reconnected with McDaniel because Pumpkin, one of her 4 daughters, thought he was her father. It turned out that he wasn’t – but only because the real father is another man who’s currently doing time in jail for child-related charges.
Mama June’s troubled past
In the video, the reality star also talks about her troubled past – and there is something about how casually she mentions having started sleeping with men at the age of 12 that sends chills down the spine.
She doesn’t think this might have made her “insensible” to the dangers her daughters were in around McDaniel. She probably doesn’t even understand the question.
In the special that aired on ET, Mama June also says that the only reason she and her pedophile ex reconnected was Pumpkin. Then, on second thought, she adds that she took pity on him because she didn’t know he was “so sickly,” having been diagnosed with leukemia and another disorder she won’t mention.
This detail is probably offered as an explanation for the fact that she bought him a car and went house-hunting with him.
However, she insists, she doesn’t love him, they’re not a couple and no, they are not speaking anymore. Confronted with photos proving that they met more than twice to speak about Pumpkin (which was her story up until that point), Mama June just stares and mumbles, can’t talk her way out of that.
