Aswad Ayinde, the award-winning music video director, has been sentenced to 50 years in prison, having been found guilty on a second count of raping his own daughter. This in addition to a 40 year term imposed in 2011 for raping another of his seven daughters.
Ayinde, 55, will now face trial for raping three of his other daughters, one of whom faced the ordeals from as young as 8 years old. Reports suggest he fathered six children as a consequence of the assaults, which carried on until he and his wife separated. Mrs Beverly Ayinde testified that the depraved father also starved and beat her girls using wooden boards and steel-toed boots for ‘minor transgressions.’
Ayinde allegedly told his wife he was trying to create a ‘pure family bloodline’ by impregnating his daughters. He even claimed during a pre-trial hearing before the first trial that the world was going to end, and it was just going to be him and his offspring and that he was ‘chosen’. He managed to keep his crimes concealed by delivering the babies himself at home, failing to register the births or deaths of two that did not survive and home-schooling the others.
Mrs Ayinde told the court that her husband kept her in a state of fear for her life. “As time went on, he was god-like. I had to call him, ‘my god.’ He equated himself to Jesus Christ … He would sit us all down and lecture us about his greatness and his power … At another point, he equated himself to Prince and Michael Jackson,” she told jurors.
Ayinde won an MTV award for directing The Fugees’ Killing Me Softly in 1996.
