Who is Jessica Fisher’s father? Singer reveals HARROWING ABUSE by 'Willis Family’ patriarch spanning years

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Jessica recalls some pleasant memories of growing up with her siblings, including numerous trips to Ireland, but she also recalls a great deal of misery. On a recent trip to New York with her husband, photographer Sean Fisher, she told New York Post, "I was literally doing shows, singing and putting on a performance but I was also putting on a performance every day offstage as well pretending to be happy. I was beaten and spanked for not smiling."

Even at age 23, Jessica was prohibited from having a cellphone and was not permitted to go out on dates without an escort, despite the fact that she was the lead vocalist, fiddle player, and primary songwriter for the family band. Her father, who kept a cache of AR-15 rifles at the house, had to approve of her haircut and wardrobe, like he did for many of her siblings. Her father referred to her as "demonic" when she started to rebel and said she wanted to leave home in her early 20s. Even though they were well aware of Toby Willis' extensive history of abuse, her mother and some of her siblings advised her not to report him, and accused her of disturbing the family's harmony.

In Toby's personal life, tragedy shaped his early years. Six of his parents' nine children were killed in a catastrophic vehicle disaster in Wisconsin in 1994, leaving his pastor father Scott and his wife Janet as the only survivors. Later, the family received a settlement of $100 million. Toby, a high school wrestling champion, met Brenda, his future wife, while they were both teenagers. They got married in the early 1990s and started having kids right away; Jessica, the oldest daughter, was born in the Chicago region in 1992. In 2001, the family relocated into a home that had originally belonged to country singer Randy Travis just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. There would eventually be 12 children in the family, all of whose names started with the letter "J." They forced their kids to participate in rigorous extracurricular activities including wrestling, competitive swing dancing, playing instruments, and singing while homeschooling. 

Jessica, now 30 years old, broke her silence about her upbringing for the first time in a disturbing blog post from 2018 that began, in part, “As far back as I can remember, I was sexually abused by my father. I figured out I was about three years old in some of the earliest memories."

When Jessica was nine years old, her mother came up to her and inquired as to if her father was acting improperly. Hesitantly, Jessica nodded. But according to Jessica, her father initially denied everything and later escalated his covert and "dangerous" abuse. When speaking about the time she and her sisters were assaulted at the Willis house and while on tour, she said it is "astounding how it wasn't talked about." “Much later, we got to the point where there were conversations about the problem, Dad’s problem. But none of those times did I say that Dad this or that to me.”