Country singer Rory Feek and his daughter Heidi are speaking out amid a family dispute over the care of the singer’s younger child, Indiana, who has special needs.
After making several allegations about their own upbringing, Heidi, 37, and her sister Hopie, 35, say they are considering legal action against their musician father, whom they claim has cut them off from contacting their 10-year-old sister, and put her in harms way.
In response, Rory, 59, published a blog post titled “love, dad” Sunday, in which he said his daughters’ allegations have “broken my heart,” and maintained that Indiana “has never been more loved or better cared for than she is right now.”
Heidi then wrote an open letter to her father in response to the post, saying she and Hopie are “just happy to hear from him” after allegedly reaching out repeatedly to no avail.
“You’re right of course, online isn’t the place to settle this. We don’t know if you are aware, but we’ve been trying to reach you for months now offline, but you haven’t been responding,” Heidi wrote in the letter, which was shared to Instagram.
“Our hope is that this letter will find you, so you can know where our hearts are. Love is action, not words. We forgive you for your unkind words. You called us cowardly in your blog post for not facing you. We forgive you.”
She continued, “The last time we sat down to have this conversation, without a mediator as you requested, you told us you were done being our father. We forgive you.”
Heidi also included a screenshot allegedly showing multiple unanswered text messages to her dad that were sent at various points in July asking about Indiana, whom Heidi says she last saw in June.
Elsewhere in the letter, Heidi continued with a list of things for which she and her sister “forgive” Rory, including the time he allegedly “abandoned” his daughters in the middle of the night as children and boarded a Greyhound bus.
Rory discusses this incident in his audiobook, saying he went to the train station without telling anyone and asked for a ticket to “anywhere but here.” He said he dreamed of a life “that didn’t have the responsibilities” he had as he rode the Greyhound, but later returned home after wondering who would raise Heidi and Hopie.
“We found peace in our own lives and have taken the long journey of healing,” Heidi wrote in her letter. “We have come out stronger on the other side of our childhoods.”
Heidi also said that she felt “heartbroken” by Rory’s claim that Indiana’s care has never been better, especially in regards to Rory’s late wife (and Indiana’s mother) Joey, who died in 2016, when the child was just 2 years old.
Rory has since married a woman named Rebecca in July.
“My heart aches for Joey. You went on to say, ‘For the first time in her life, she has a mother.’ How can you say that?” Heidi wrote. In his post, Feek said Indiana has “always known that she has a real” mother, but said the girl “doesn’t really remember her” and has “desperately wanted and needed a mother in her life.”
Heidi also spoke about her concerns over Homestead Heritage, a self-described “agrarian and craft-based intentional Christian community” that Rory and Rebecca are a part of. Multiple members in the past have been arrested and charged with child abuse; Rory admitted there can be “a few bad apples” in large groups, while the community itself said in a statement that “in every case of abuse we’ve ever encountered, it was our ministry that exposed and reported the crime.”
In his post, Feek denied the group was a “cult,” adding, “Those folks are just living in a way that other people don’t like or understand, and it’s a whole lot easier to call something a cult and dismiss it than it is to look deeper into and actually find out what it is they are doing and why they’re doing it.”
“Love is action. And we love our little sister Indiana more than anything in the world. So we are taking action,” Heidi and Hopie concluded. “Love, your daughters.”
In addition to their letter, Heidi’s husband Dillon Hodges wrote a letter of his own addressed to Rory, in which he spoke on the country singer’s alleged decision to stop allowing Indiana to spend the night at Heidi and Dillon’s house in Alabama.
In his blog, Rory said that Indiana “absolutely” misses her sisters, and asks about them “all the time and would love to see them.” Still, he said he’d stopped allowing sleepovers because Hopie and Heidi “refused to respect my wishes when she was there,” and that the crux of the disagreement was the sorts of entertainment each party wanted to expose Indiana to.
“While I tried my best to respect your wishes when Indy came to visit us (we never allowed her to look at screens, and always prayed before meals, etc), I’ll admit that I regularly let her listen to Disney songs (and sometimes even Whitney Houston) on my iPhone,” Hodges wrote. “I know you said no music, but please don’t punish the girls for my actions.”
Hodges also admitted to recording conversations between Rory and his older daughters.
“I have been shocked and appalled by the way you have treated all your children, so I felt the need to document it,” he wrote. “You are no hero. You are no victim.”
While it’s unclear if Heidi and Hopie have actually taken any legal action against their father, Rory continues to claim that he’s doing his best for Indiana, even if he wasn’t always a “perfect father” to his two eldest daughters when they were young.
“I know they are angry and frustrated and want justice for the wrongs they think have been done,” Rory wrote in his lengthy blog post. “But if I’ve learned anything in my nearly 60 years, it’s that it doesn’t work this way…. I will readily admit that I wasn’t a perfect father when they were young, but I tried to be a good one. And I continue every single day to do my very best for Indiana.”
