On Friday, Minnesota Public Radio reported that GOP state Rep. Jim Knoblach abruptly suspended his campaign following allegations from his daughter, Laura Knoblach, that he had molested her for 12 years, starting at age 9.
The younger Knoblach, a prominent triathlete who is estranged from her family, recounted that her father “came into her room after she’d gone to bed and climbed in and laid down behind her.”
“He would put his arm around me and not let me get up or get away and he would lick my neck or bite my ear,” she said in an interview with MPR News.
These visits to her room, or similar kissing across her arms and neck and biting her ears while they watched movies on the couch, happened so often throughout her childhood and teenage years it became a defining part of her relationship with her father, she said.
There were other routine behaviors, she said, including more than 30 instances where her father approached her from behind and pressed his body against hers in the kitchen of their home, pinning her against the refrigerator or dishwasher and using his weight and strength to keep her from getting away.
The behavior, she alleges, continued until she was 21, at which point she left her family and moved to Boulder, Colorado.
