Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn with the Dionne Quintuplets.
In 1997, the three surviving Dionne Quintuplets (b. 1934), Yvonne, Annette and Cecile, wrote an open letter to the parents of the McCaughey septuplets (born November 1997), warning against allowing too much publicity for the children. The letter read:
“Dear Bobbi and Kenny,If we emerge momentarily from the privacy we have sought all our adult lives, it is only to send a message to the McCaughey family. We three would like you to know we feel a natural affinity and tenderness for your children. We hope your children receive more respect than we did. Their fate should be no different from that of other children. Multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products.Our lives have been ruined by the exploitation we suffered at the hands of the government of Ontario, our place of birth. We were displayed as a curiosity three times a day for millions of tourists. To this day we receive letters from all over the world. To all those who have expressed their support in light of the abuse we have endured, we say thank you. And to those who would seek to exploit the growing fame of these children, we say beware.We sincerely hope a lesson will be learned from examining how our lives were forever altered by our childhood experience. If this letter changes the course of events for these newborns, then perhaps our lives will have served a higher purpose.Sincerely, Annette, Cécile and Yvonne Dionne”
The McCaughey septuplets on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Today (2015), Annette and Cecile are 91 years old.
I doubt they would waste their energy in doing so, but can you imagine what sort of message they might have for Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar?
The Duggars have done the same to their children, and the victims of their oldest child, as the Dionne Quintuplets’ parents did to them. They exploited them, abused them, and then covered it up. Their TV show’s former popularity is akin to the “Dionne Fever” that gripped Canada, and then the world, in the days and months following the births of the five identical girls in a small French-Canadian town in northern Ontario during the Depression.
According to a 1995 book called “Family Secrets”, Yvonne, Annette and Cecile Dionne allege that Oliva Dionne sexually abused them when they were teenagers, and Elzire physically and verbally abused them for much of their lives. Their parents also continued the public exhibition of the sisters, and forced them to dress identically, even as teenagers.
The Ontario government did the same thing to the quintuplets when they were children: they were exhibited to the public, earned millions of dollars in doing so, but were treated little better than servants with no access to their own money until they left their parents’ home at age 18. Only in the late 1990s did the government admit what they’d done, and given the surviving sisters back the money they had earned, plus apologized to them formally.
