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Mo’Nique’s brother admits he molested her: ‘I’m Not a Monster’

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Updated on July 6, 2023

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According to the Associated Press, Mo’Nique’s brother Gerald Imes acknowledged that he assaulted the Precious star when they were children. Mo’Nique is an Oscar-winning actress.

Imes said on the Oprah Winfrey Show that he wished to apologize to his sister, who received an Academy Award for her performance in Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire as a controlling mother.

Mo’Nique was perhaps 7 or 8 years old when the abuse began, according to Gerald Imes, who said that it lasted for almost a year.

“I’m sorry, Mo’Nique. I’m sorry,” Gerald Imes said today on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “I betrayed everybody’s trust. I broke that trust. I broke that bond.”

Imes said that the sexual abuse was motivated by his own drug and alcohol usage issues. “I started using cocaine, heroine, alcohol at the age of 11. I used these drugs to hide my own pain, to hide my own fears… The drugs allowed me and afforded me the opportunity to hurt my sister,” he stated.

The abuse took place at night when he thought Mo’Nique was asleep, Imes said, and continued for a year or two.

“It happened more than I wanted it to,” he said. “I became a perpetrator. I abused and betrayed the trust of my own sibling — my own sister.”

Though the episode didn’t reach any easy conclusions about the actions of child molesters, it did reveal how abuse within a family can happen — and how it can devastate it for decades.

Imes said he was also a victim of molestation during his youth, which sent him on a downward spiral to abuse drugs and sexually molest Mo’Nique.

“I hid my own molestation and pain and guilt and shame because I thought it was my fault that these things happened to me,” he said. But, he acknowledged, “the drugs weren’t an excuse. They just … afforded me the opportunity to do the things … that I always wanted to do.”

But in a situation that’s not uncommon in abusive families, he says of Mo’Nique that “We still had a bond. We were still brother and sister. We still loved each other.” Difficult and baffling as that is to hear, Imes’ tale is a blunt reminder that sex abusers aren’t always the creepy strangers lurking in doorways. In fact, they rarely are. It’s those close relationships and bonds of trust that can make abuse go on for years — making kids feel like participants in their own exploitation. As Winfrey, a vocal abuse survivor herself, said on her show last fall, “The people who are doing this are people you love. When somebody does it well, it feels good. And the mistake people make is thinking that if it feels good, you must have wanted it.”

Imes was eventually convicted of molesting another girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Now he says that he hopes that “somewhere, somehow … we can come back together as brother and sister and say: ‘You know what? This happened. I’m sorry that it happened. I’m sorry that it happened to you, and that I was the perpetrator … Now let’s share this together and move on. Let’s help someone else.'”

The actress had discussed the molestation in previous interviews.

Mo’Nique, 42, opened up to Barbara Walters about the extent of her sexual abuse, which she said consisted of “touching your breast, someone rubbing your vagina, someone rubbing your behind, someone rubbing up against you with their private parts.”

She told Walters that fear prevented her from telling her parents. “I think for the same reason most people don’t tell. You’re afraid. I was afraid of my brother,” she said.

Mo’Nique said the only apology she ever got from her brother was half-hearted: “The apology that I got from my brother is, ‘If you think I did something wrong, then I’m sorry.'”

She hasn’t responded to a request for comment sent to her publicist. Winfrey said Mo’Nique didn’t want to be a part of the interview but gave Winfrey her blessing.

“She said if your expressing what you had done to her could save one family then it would be worth it,” Winfrey told Imes. Mo’Nique’s parents also appeared on the episode.

“It was such a heartbreaking thing to accept,” said her mother, Alice Imes.