Akilah Price Bellingham is a brave lady and honest person. She got arrested by Police for spanking her Children. She spanked them just to teach discipline and go to the bed early. They children were continuously disobeying and ignoring there mom and making noise in there bedroom.
One week after my arrest, a local newspaper decided to write an article about the incident. Some of the information in the article is misleading. The biggest misunderstanding was the belt.
It’s a standard and mandatory procedure to describe a weapon in a police report. The belt was described in the police report. Part of the belt’s description was that it had metal ends.
The newspaper worded their article as if I hit my children with the metal part of the belt. I sound like an absolute barbarian. I’m pretty sure the injuries from a large metal object would result in a more serious crime than 3rd degree.
The article stated that I did this for several minutes. How long several minutes are, can be quite subjective. Other than the red marks, there were no other “injuries” from the belt. I made a loop with the belt, the metal ends were grasped in the area of my hand.
The article mentioned my son being in my daughter’s room because he was scared. Scared…scared of what? See what they did there? Like many kids his age, maybe he was scared of the dark. Maybe he was scared of the weird shadow on the wall. Of course though, no context. They wanted it to sound like my son was scared of me. Scared of me as in there’s a pattern of me doing this. Which does not make any sense. If my son was scared of me , there’s no way that he would have been horseplaying and ignoring the multiple warnings. My children assumed I was bluffing about getting spanked with the belt. They assumed that I was bluffing because…..*drum roll*… there is no pattern! They were not scared of me!
The title of the article implies that I spanked my children due to them not going to bed on time. They were not spanked simply for “not going to bed on time.” They were spanked for throwing trash all over the upstairs of the house and continuing to horseplay after several warnings to go to bed.
The article also stated that my daughter tripped and fell into the bathtub. She jumped into the bathtub. I don’t have a huge luxury bathroom, where the tub is sitting in the middle of the room. It’s a basic shower/tub combo against a wall. How does one trip and fall INTO this type of bathtub? There wasn’t a banana peel on the floor, come on now.
In the newspaper’s defense, the inaccuracy of my daughter falling into the bathtub is due to the police report. Against my better judgment, the arresting officer wrote the report, and then asked if I wanted to read it or go over it. I was so distraught at the time, I could not think straight. Remember, I had never been in any kind of trouble in my 31 years of life. I was naive and declined to go over the report. I really regret that.
I served time in jail, I jumped through all the hoops. Unfortunately, this misleading article is still out there.
This article showing up on the Google SERP has been an ongoing and unfair punishment. It’s unfair not only because of the inaccuracy, but because not everyone gets a newspaper article. I can only imagine how nice that must be.
Now that I’ve cleared that up, continue reading to learn about the outcome, and other details 🙂