*Actor Mike Evans, who played Lionel on “The Jeffersons,” was an absent, deadbeat dad according to his daughter Carlena Harris.
Harris spoke to The Charay Vaughn Show more than a decade ago and shared her painful experiences with her famous dad.
As I Love Old School Music reports, Harris said, “My mother and my grandmother raised me 100%. My father he was just…he was alive, but he definitely wasn’t involved and at times he would even say he didn’t know who my father was, so…he wasn’t even always claiming me, but at times he would, you know.”
She added, “But was he a good father? No, never was a good father…and so at [age] 13 we actually concluded this foolishness and took a blood test and [the results] came out 99.9% [that he was my father]. At that point, he couldn’t say I wasn’t his anymore.”
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Despite confirming the paternity, Harris said Evans chose not to have a relationship with her.
“I just had to live with the fact that I didn’t have an…earthly father who wanted me, but the thing with that is it certainly caused me to be closer to my heavenly father and got me to a point where I was content,” she explained. “I guess…I could have a human father, but a human father can only do but so much, but when the God of the universe is your daddy, it certainly makes a difference and I’m walking in that now.”
Harris said her father ultimately had a “sad and tragic death”.
“He died in December of ’06 and it’s interesting because he actually died of throat cancer. He was a smoker [and he died] without a tongue in his mouth, broke and very miserable,” she shared. “And so uh, it was actually quite a sad and tragic death and he ultimately died in his mother’s house.”
Before his passing, Harris and her father never established a bond and he continued to deny being her father. At one point, Wendy Williams got involved in the mess.
Harris explained, “The last time that I talked to him literally I was 21 years old and at that time is when…his last couple words in that conversation to me was that he didn’t know if he was even my father and I said ‘uh I have blood tests that say you are my father’ and he said “Well I don’t know, maybe you should consider my brother.” I said ‘WHAT?!! Who’s your brother? Nobody even knows who your brother is.’ This is clearly some stuff that took place with him and my Momma that I know nothing about…um, I’m clearly innocent and at that time I’m just like ‘I just don’t understand, I just don’t.’ ”
She continued, “So I mean it was a long story, he ended up calling me back because that was like pretty tragic and I was just like ‘Who’s my father?’ I’m calling my Momma, I’m calling my Grandmomma like ‘What’s going on?’ And they both told me “You know who your dad is, he knows who he is too, whatever.” I even put [out] an ad that was in the National Enquirer, Wendy Williams did something [on my story] and it was just, it was a mess. [But after] that point I decided ‘You know what? I’m not going to the media’…and eventually, I decided I just had to suck it up, ‘this man doesn’t want me,’ you know? It was pathetic but I had to come to the conclusion that I can’t make a person acknowledge, accept, or want me. It just so happened that a couple years after that, he died and the rest is history.”
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