The Little Girl Forced To Live In A Dog Cage | The Oprah Winfrey Show | Oprah Winfrey Network

it was one of the most heartbreaking stories we have ever shared I believe on our show 11 years ago we should we saw the chilling headlines about a little girl from Wisconsin we never knew her name she was only known as the girl in the cage take a look the date was April 3rd 2000 the show was called tortured children and I could not believe what I was hearing a little seven-year-old forced to live in a cage in her basement so is this the cage this size I think it was a little smaller actually it's unimaginable because everybody knows I have dogs and I had a cage to decide at when I first had little puppies and I thought too small for the puppy it happened in the quiet town of brilliant Wisconsin police discovered that Michael and Angeline Rogers had been brutally beating and starving their four children for years authorities found out after the Rogers struck their 9 and 11 year old sons with wooden rods and kicked them out of the house the older boy walked barefoot and coatless in 30-degree weather to the police station and told his horrifying secret their seven-year-old sister was being kept in a small wired dog cage in the family's dark and freezing basement she was beaten with wooden clubs and was barely fed the boy said when his sister cried his mother called the girl a little pig and sprayed her with freezing water from a hose the boy also recall finding a sister stuffed in a plastic container under a basement shelf gasping for breath she was covered in her own feces the police rushed to the Rogers home and rescued the girl in the cage so the parents were charged with child abuse and sentenced to one year in jail it has been 11 years since we did that show and we wanted to find out what happened to that little girl did she even survive and if so what kind of life would she have having lived in the cage all that time well her name is Chelsea and she's now 21 years old and she's here today welcome so I was I was just watching you watch that tape have you seen that um I have seen bits and pieces of it but not that whole clip mm-hmm what's it like for you watching that it's it's sad I can't even explain it it's just incredibly sad that something like that could happen mhm and happened to you when you watch it do you think of that is happening to somebody else or do you think that happened to me it still feels like it happened to somebody else mm-hmm what do you remember about that time it's so hard to talk about because my memories are so fragmented and we didn't have mirrors or anything so I didn't know my age you didn't know what I look like I have memories that people told me that people wrote about so it's hard to know what really is in my memory do you remember being physically in the cage yes and do you remember how long you were in that cage is that where you lived um I was in there long enough to have to go to the bathroom to be hungry to want to get out and stretch my legs so do you remember why your mother would put you in the cage or was it your mother your mother your father both oh I don't know why they did did you did you think that that was normal at the time I was young it was my family loyalty I didn't know what was right what was wrong but I do remember in first grade I had a teacher who just had a baby girl and she had pictures on her desk and um this little girl had a bow in her hair and she had a little dress on and I would always tell my teacher that I wanted to be just like that girl in the pictures in the first grade you can say that and so what did you what did the picture look like and the reason why I'm asking this question is because often times people cannot be psychics obviously we're not psychics but I want people to know what the signs look like like recently we had to a set of twins who were here who were being molested for years by their brothers and their father did you all see that show and one of the neighbors said that the children would come to her house and they would be hungry and they would see that the house was always a mess and they would see signs but they didn't know that those signs meant molestation so the reason I'm asking is because the signs are always there people can't be psychic but when you see that something is not right what would it look like in your family they did have reporting's um police were notified as I grew up I believe it was two different times they came over and did an investigation and they didn't find anything nothing was reported you mean from the house that they found right when they came at the time that the police came to your house had you been living in the cage then yes you had been living in the cage did you see the police when they came to your house all I remember was a flashlight a bright light coming towards me and I didn't know what it was did you ever think to tell somebody that this was going on at your house no it was normal to me I thought every child went home and did that mm-hmm so what was happening to the rest of your family seemed they all got abused as well but they you know had freedoms they you know got fed properly at a table and I was just downstairs mm-hmm you were downstairs separated from them what would the brothers say or do would they try to get you out of the cage would they make fun of you in the cage what no I mean I don't remember any of them taunting me um I was locked in a closet once and the door was locked but one of my brothers came and he let me out and we stole candy and we tried to hide the wrappers and my biological mother she found them and that's how everything you know took off from there what do you mean took off from there um she was furious that I was let out and that we got into the candy drawer so I was sent downstairs to my cage my two brothers were locked outside with no coats no shoe is winter and you know I was downstairs I didn't know what was going on mm-hmm so do you think you blocked a lot of those memories from that time because you wanted to block the memory it's at that time do you remember what you were thinking or feeling is that are you in therapy now not currently no have you been through therapy yes off and on off and on do you remember what you were thinking and feeling as a little girl in that cage have you dared go back to those memories no I absolutely have not it's a really painful place for me to be and I really strive to go forward in my life and be happy and not be weighed down by such mm-hmm you know such things yeah but do you think you can you do you think that you will ever be able to completely move forward until you heal the wounds of the past and can look at it because the truth of the matter is you've already survived it you've survived the worst so looking at it isn't nearly as horrible as having to live through it you know yeah so you're you're you're obviously a natural-born survivor that you've come out of that and you can put two sentences together don't you think yeah yeah hi youtubers I'm excited to give you an update about our own YouTube channel now you can find new videos every day they're the kind of videos it'll make you look at life differently they may even make you laugh a little bit subscribe to the own Channel today and we'll see you on YouTube

Channel: OWN

Views: 5,561,592

Rating: 4.7446351 out of 5

Keywords: Oprah, Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey Network YouTube, Oprah Where Are They Now, Where Are They Now Oprah, Iyanla Fix My Life, full episodes, Super Soul Sunday, Oprah Winfrey Show, The Haves and The Have Nots, Have and Have Nots, If Loving You Is Wrong, Iyanla Vanzant, Livin Lozada, Oprah Life Class, how-to, season, episode, #oprahwinfreyshow, The Oprah Winfrey Show, oprah show, oprah interview, maya angelou, Chelsea, Dog Cage, tortured, heartbreaking, small wire, Little Girl Forced

Id: 2W1B7-xkqUs

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019