My baby’s ill
Ma: Rachel was picture perfect, now needs help
RACHEL DOLEZAL’S mother says it’s beyond illogical for the former NAACP chapter president to publicly question the identity of her birth parents.
“If she has become so ill that she doesn’t know who her real parents are, that’s extremely concerning,” Ruthanne Dolezal, 59, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview at her Montana home.
“I know she is ill,” Ruthanne said. “I want her to get help. I prayed this morning that someone will connect with her and reach her on a level that helps her.”
It was during a TV interview blitz Tuesday that Dolezal, 37, questioned her family tree and again identified as a black woman despite a birth certificate naming Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal as her white mom and dad.
“I’ve never seen pictures of Ruthanne being pregnant with me,” she told interviewer Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC.
“I haven’t had a DNA test,” she said on NBC Nightly News.
“Someone needs to take her up on that bluff,” her father Larry, 64, told The News after watering his garden Wednesday night. “She was born right here in our bedroom.”
The couple shared an exclusive photo dated Nov. 12, 1977, the day of Dolezal’s birth. It showed a newborn baby with chubby cheeks swaddled in a thick blanket on her dad’s lap.
“It was like one nonstop contraction for 21/2 hours,” Ruthanne said of the difficult delivery. “It was very intense.”
Larry said his infant daughter had an orange complexion upon arrival from all the carrots Ruthanne ate during her pregnancy.
“She was kind of a pudgy little baby,” Larry recalled.
“Rolls of fat on her shoulders and legs as a newborn,” Ruthanne agreed.
“She was a beautiful little baby and so healthy. We were very thankful,” added grandmother Peggy Dolezal, who said she visited the day of the birth. Ruthanne denied her “bubbly” little girl started identifying as black by age 5, as Rachel claimed on NBC’s “Today” show.
“I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon,” Dolezal told host Matt Lauer. Ruthanne said that wasn’t true — that Dolezal’s affinity for black culture didn’t take hold until she was 15 and the family began adopting four black and biracial children.
Dolezal’s first-grade teacher from W.F. Morrison Elementary in Troy, Mont., said she couldn’t recall any early signs of Dolezal identifying as a black child, either.
“I didn’t detect it,” Sylvia Maffit, 67, told The News in an exclusive interview Thursday. “She was a very sweet child. I think she’s just been sucked into something that’s gone out of her control. And I really, really want her to get help.”
Dolezal’s parents declined to discuss a felony criminal case now pending against biological son Joshua Dolezal, 39, in Colorado. He’s accused of molesting an underage relative more than a decade ago.
Larry Dolezal is still trying to wrap his head around the separation from his daughter.
“I hope when the dust settles and this is all over, that there will be some reconciliation,” he said.