The unfortunate mom, Nadean, said that her son, Chris, was just 11 years old when their live-in nanny changed the boy’s life. The 22-year-old woman, Marisa, was reportedly hired by Nadean to care for her son in the family home. Per reports, the nanny was also recommended by Nadean’s sister-in-law, who had also employed her. Marisa moved in with the family, and Nadean came to think of her as a daughter. But, behind closed doors, Marisa was reportedly grooming young Chris. “It was a game called ‘are you nervous,’ and the object of that game was she’d place her hands somewhere on my body and I’d say if I was nervous or not and things escalated from there,” the now-17-year-old Chris said.
Unfortunately, the woman se-ually assaulted the 11-year-old boy and even gave birth to his baby. After the se-ual abuse began, Chris said it continued to happen almost every night. It didn’t stop until he was 14 years old, according to reports. “She said that she loved me. She said that she wanted to date, but she couldn’t let anyone know because it was obviously wrong,” Chris explained. “You have to lie or else I’m gonna have to go away,” he said Marisa told him. Then came the news that she was pregnant. “I was a little bit freaked because I was confused,” Chris recalled. Marisa gave birth to a baby boy named Bentley as she continued to live with the family, telling Chris’s mother that another man, her boyfriend, was her child’s father. Chris eventually surmised the courage to tell his mother the truth, and Nadean notified the authorities. A DNA test confirmed that Chris was Bentley’s father. “When the results came back, I went and threw up,” Nadean admitted, saying she felt like a failure.
“How did I let this woman manipulate me and my family in such a way that she could do this and I was blind to it?” Nearly three years after giving birth to the boy’s child, Marisa was arrested. She was charged with multiple counts of se-ual battery and faced life in prison. Initially, she told detectives Chris had forced himself on her. But, in a phone call with the boy, which investigators recorded, she admitted that wasn’t true. With the evidence stacked against her, Marissa took a plea deal. At 28 years old, five years after giving birth to Chris’s baby, she was sentenced. A 17-year-old Chris sat in a courtroom to watch as she was handed 20 years in prison for what she did to him. Upon her release, she will have to complete 10 years of probation and will need to register as a se* offender, meaning she will spend the rest of her life adhering to a series of strict conditions.
According to court records, Marisa now has three children. In court, her public defender pointed to the former nanny’s troubled past, which included an abusive childhood, absent parents, being homeless, and only receiving her high school diploma while in jail, but Nadean said it was no excuse for the damage she caused, changing the course of Chris’s entire life. Chris’s mom says Marisa is a predator who manipulated her family and stole Chris’s innocence. “We’re talking about a child that was 11,” Nadean said. “Not even a teenager. Eleven.” Nadean is now urging other parents to be vigilant, to start digging when something doesn’t seem right, and not to assume that women won’t victimize children, particularly those entrusted with protecting them. “We don’t think about females being predators, usually,” Nadean explained. “I didn’t — and it cost me.” And, it cost Chris too — but it wasn’t all bad.
