After having kept her troubling secret for some two decades, Katie Knowles suddenly went public: she had been repeatedly raped by her own father over years of her childhood, she revealed.

The business owner and influencer, 35, who married veteran TV presenter Nick last year, astonished friends and followers by opening up about the sustained sexual abuse she had suffered.

It's understood even members of her inner family had no idea that she was planning to out her own father as her rapist.

In a video posted to Instagram last Saturday, she said: 'I have never spoken about this publicly, other than to friends, family and even then not everyone. I was raped by my dad for years, years and years.'

The decision to make this most personal of information public marked an extraordinary step for the mother-of-two who had previously only ever alluded to having a 'very difficult' relationship with her father, who died in 2008 when she was just 18.

Now the Daily Mail can reveal that Katie's bold decision to go public appears to have been the culmination of a prolonged period of reflection during which she sought to find out about the man who stole her childhood.

Katie spent weeks combing through and inquiring about old pictures of her father earlier this year prior to her decision to go public as she uncovered how he had had an apparently traumatic childhood.

So who was her rapist father?

David Eugene Dadzie was a mixed race boy, born in Islington, north London, in May 1949 to a Yorkshire-born British mother and a father who had come to Britain from Lagos in Nigeria.

The family lived in Erith, south-east London but he would soon be sent to a strict boarding school miles from home.

When Dadzie was still a young child he won a place at a Catholic boys school which had a history of taking in less well off children from London - and he attended Salesian College, in the Temple Cowley area of Oxford, as a boarder.

Katie shared pictures of her father as a schoolboy in uniform just last month, asking members of a Facebook group for alumni of the school for information about him.

Other snaps show Dadzie, who is understood to have been a boarder, alongside two other pupils, all wearing choir boy cassocks and surplices, with their hands held in prayer.

But life at the school does not appear to have been easy, with Katie writing alongside her post that her father has previously told her himself his time there was 'horrible'.

'Priests beat you, they were called n*gs because of their vestments and I think there was a priest called Flash – maybe because of how quickly he slapped you around the head,' she said.

Users in the comments section confirmed this brutal impression of life at the college.

Calling the institution 'nasty' and 'violent', they claimed boys were beaten with a cane, slipper or a priest's bare hands, often without warning – and on one occasion, in the face until they bled.

Katie's posts about her monster father also show her reflecting on the discrimination he is likely to have faced as a half-Nigerian boy in 1950s Britain.

Katie shared an old newspaper cutting of him from when he was a child with her some 100,000 Instagram followers - and her thoughts about it.

The clipping – which described Dadzie, in outdated language, as one of a pair of 'coloured children' – pictured him as a five-year-old, eating ice cream with a friend, at a park in Erith.

In reference to his mixed-race heritage, the caption attempted a clumsy allusion to the slang of the US Deep South followed by a glaring example of what would now be called 'othering'. It reads: 'This sho' is good…And just like any other children, they just loved their ice cream.'

Katie wrote of the cutting: 'I found this photo of my dad in an old newspaper last night. His name printed there. His little face eating an ice cream. A moment from his childhood, frozen in time.

'And yet the words around it are unbelievably racist. Reading them in black and white was shocking, upsetting, and strangely moving all at once.'

And then she gave her followers a clue to the more complex feelings she had for her father.

She continued: 'My dad died when I was 18, and we had a really difficult relationship. There are things that could never be resolved.

'So seeing him like this – as a five-year-old boy, just another child eating ice cream – made me feel sad & proud.'

It feels curious that she would allude to being proud of her father just a short time before letting the world know about how monstrous he eventually became - but it shows perhaps her processing complex feelings about him before doing so.

She went on: '1950 wasn't that long ago. It's within living memory. And while I've been fortunate not to experience racism like that myself, I have no doubt that he did. That he carried things I never fully understood when I was younger.

'Looking at this now, in a world where politics, resentment, and division seem to be escalating again, it makes me feel uneasy. Worried, even.

'For my children. For anyone who looks different. For the kind of world we're creating together.

'But it also reminds me how far we've come – and how important it is that we keep moving forward, with empathy, curiosity, and kindness.'

Soon after this spell of reflection on how to reconcile the cruelty her father experienced as a child with his subsequent terrible actions he inflicted on her, her thinking appears to have reached a kind of boiling point. She would make her extraordinary revelation about Dadzie just weeks later.

In her powerful Instagram video, she said: 'There are times when it comes up but I have had a lot of therapy to get to be being as balanced as I can be about it now, and "can be" is the important bit…. It's not all men, but it is. It is men. It is men who commit the majority of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

'In my case it was a man. It's almost always in sexual abuse like that, someone that you know or a family member or a partner, or an ex-partner. Almost always.'

She also posted a second video in which she reflected on her feelings about being subject to the male gaze in contexts like trips to the gym - and the wider implications of toxic masculinity.

Katie then shared another video the following day thanking her followers for their sympathetic responses to her intimate revelations.

'The amount of women saying "me too" and sharing their stories was sad, but of those women, the amount that said how much they appreciated me speaking about my experiences was the silver lining,' she said.

As Katie's experience shows, abuse can occur in the most seemingly secure of settings – in apparently ordinary family homes.

Dadzie was already a divorcee when he met her mother, Elizabeth, in the 1980s, after a spell working in London computing firm Sperry Univac. He was almost twice her age - he was 40, she was 21 - when they married in Berkshire in 1989.

Katie was born the following year, in Slough, as was her brother Anthony a year later, in 1991 – but their parents later split.

She has not revealed when the abuse began or how it was conducted but it's understood the rest of her family were completely unaware it was taking place and only found out years after Dadzie's death in 2008.

In the absence of a father, Katie's 18-year-old half-brother Freddie joined her full brother Anthony in walking her down the aisle for her lavish wedding to Nick last year.

She wrote on Instagram at the time: 'The best day of my entire life and my favourite song!! And to do it with my brothers by my side.'

Katie appears particularly close with her mother and maternal grandmother, Doreen Richards, who she has previously said on social media are 'my world'.

In stark contrast she appears to have little ongoing connection to her father's side of her family, Her paternal grandmother, Barbara Chase, passed away three years before Katie was even born – and her grandfather, Anthony Dadzie, whose name her brother shares, died when she was around 11.

Katie now lives in a detached four-bedroom house in Windsor with Nick and her daughters, 11, and eight, from her first marriage.

Her loved ones are all also in Berkshire, with several, including her grandmother, living just streets away, while Anthony, her mother and Freddie are not much further, in Ascot.

She was previously married to a local cafe owner, who, in somewhat of an echo of her parents' 19-year age gap, is 33 years her senior – while Nick is 28 years older than her.

Katie runs a small web design firm called WebKatie, which she started in October last year after teaching herself to code.

And over the years, she appears to have worked hard in her other business endeavours to nurture, in both other women and herself, an empowering relationship with sexuality.

The entrepreneur founded a gorgeous lingerie brand in 2022 called Boa Boa, which is sold in clothing store Next and has previously been featured in Cosmopolitan magazine.

She often models for the photo shoots herself and emphasises the small firm's values of self-love on its social media pages, which have around 5,000 followers across all platforms.

'Lingerie that feels like self-care. You deserve it all – the fit, the comfort, the confidence,' one caption reads.

Nick, 63, best known for presenting BBC renovation programme DIY SOS, has four children from three relationships.

He shares his daughter and son with his ex-wife Gillian Brown, another son with dancer Paula Beckett, and a third son, who was born in 2014, with his ex-wife Jessica Rose Moor.

Katie previously shared she first got to know Nick after her two children befriended his son.

Katie has also previously -published a romance novel called The Edge Of Desire – and has a new book, in the 'romantasy', or romance and fantasy genre, set for release this year.

Her existing X-rated book is about a woman in a 'toxic' love triangle with a 'dominant magnetic billionaire' and a 'steady, kind, warm' man, who could help her 'finally stop running'.

And, in wording which appears differently in light of her what we now know, the novel's listing says it is aimed at those who want to read about 'possessive, morally grey men'.

For anyone affected by the issues in this story, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available 24 hours a day on 0808 2000 247 and their live chat is online 10am-10pm Monday-Friday.