The three surviving Dionne quintuplets say they and their siblings were sexually abused by their father for years.
The sisters - Annette, Cecile and Yvonne - made the allegation over the weekend during a television interview on Radio-Canada."I think we've come to a point where we had to liberate ourselves from the past and turn the page," said Annette Dionne, when asked why she had waited so long to break her silence.
"It is a long time," added her sister Cecile. "But that's normal for something so deep."
The Dionne sisters, born in Corbeil, Ontario, in 1934, were believed to be the first quintuplets known to have survived infancy.
Their survival and upbringing made them the stuff of three Hollywood movies and the sensation of Depression-era Canada.
They were taken away from their parents and made wards of the Ontario government, which put them on display for as many as 6,000 people a day who came to watch them play behind a one-way screen. Two of the sisters died as adults.
Their father, Oliva, fought a nine-year battle to regain custody of his daughters.
They never told their mother about the abuse "so as not to aggravate the situation," Annette Dionne said.
But the quints' siblings denied their father, who is dead, was a sexual abuser.
"We assert that we had good parents and that to our knowledge our father was certainly not a sexual abuser," Therese Callahan said.