Rory Feek’s Daughter Says Their ‘Broken’ Bond Can’t Heal Without Therapy

Hopie Feek says her relationship with her dad Rory Feek was in serious trouble long before paternity test results revealed that he wasn’t her biological father, a piece of news she shared publicly earlier this month.

“My relationship with my dad is broken,” the singer’s daughter tells People.

“Not because of this new revelation, but because he refuses to go to family therapy,” she goes on to say, adding that Feek has breached her trust again and again, often by making the most personal and vulnerable details of her life fodder for his popular blog.

After Hopie announced that her biological dad was not Feek, but rather, another man that she identified as B.C., Feek published a blog post admitting he wasn’t entirely surprised by the revelation.

While he never officially knew that someone else was Hopie’s biological father, he admitted he’d had suspicions when she was a baby, and shared the timeline and details that played into those suspicions.

But Hopie said that her “one request was for him to be kind and not shame my mom,” and said that his response had gone against that ask.

She also described their initial conversation as “private and sincere,” but said Feek’s public response overstepped the boundaries she put in place to shield herself and her mother, Tamara Gilmer, from public scrutiny.

She also said that she felt hurt by the way Feek described feeling “frustrated” when he first found out that Gilmer was pregnant with Hopie. As Feek wrote, he and Gilmer were married at the time, but their marriage was struggling. They had one child at home at the time, Hopie’s older sister Heidi.

“It was also hurtful that he said he was ‘frustrated’ when he found out I was going to be born,” she told People, “like I was always unwanted.”

It’s not the first time that Hopie has felt that Feek has used her personal stories to augment his own platform and celebrity. She came out as bisexual to him in the mid-2010s, and said he was “hateful and judgmental” in response.

“Later, he convinced me to let him write about it in his book. I regret that,” she said earlier this month.

Now, Hopie says that her relationship with Feek can’t be healed without help from a licensed mental health professional, saying that a longstanding pattern of betrayal and trust — not blood ties — is what has damaged their bond.

“Him taking the two most vulnerable conversations of my life (coming out to him and telling him we’re not biologically related) and publishing them to the world is something we need a professional to help us navigate.”