Lauryn “Pumpkin” Shannon and her sister, Alana Thompson, were guests this week on the Dumb Blonde podcast.
And they both cited some VERY troubling allegations during the revealing, personal and emotional interview.
During this appearance, the veteran reality stars ran down an account of their challenging childhoods… which Pumpkin claimed was made a true nightmare due to the physical and mental abuse inflicted on her by Sugar Bear, the long-time live-in boyfriend of their famous mother, June Shannon.
“What a lot of people didn’t see on [Here Comes Honey Boo Boo] was a lot of abuse, physically from Sugar Bear,” Lauryn said on air.
“Physical and mental,” she added.
Lauren is 22 years old.
She has four children … and she also has custody of 17-year old Alana — the star of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a TLC program that ran from 2012 through 2017 and which documented her life as a child beauty pageant contestant — after their mother essentially ran out on them two years ago amid a substance abuse binge.
“[When I was] 14, he threw a set of keys at my eyes, and my retina had become detached,” Pumpkin said on this podcast of the man known as Sugar Bear.
“So I had to get a buckle put on the back of my eye and stuff like that. It just started to get progressively worse.”
The incident — which occurred in 2012 — was explained away on an Here Comes Honey Boo Boo episode as a “freak accident,” during which Sugar Bear said he threw the keys to Pumpkin and she simply missed them.
Here is a screen shot from that episode:
Lauryn also says that producers and crew members were aware of this abuse.
“We were actually filming one day and our sound girl was bent over and…Mama and [Sugar Bear] had gotten into it,” she detailed of another outburt.
“Well, he took a lotion bottle and, like, baseball slings it through a f**king window.
“And the sound girl is sitting there…it went over her head and it would have took her head off. It would have seriously hurt her.”
Thankfully, the mother of four says that Alana was spared when it came to the alleged abuse from Sugar Bear.
“She may not have seen it but I saw a lot of the physical abuse from him,” Pumpkin continued.
“He was always angry at me for some reason. The abuse was pretty f**king bad.
“It was very hidden [from the public]. The show tried to cover it up.”
June and Sugar Bear (the biological father of Alana’s) were engaged for 16 months before calling it quits in September 2014.
On this podcast, Alana said their mother was well aware of Sugar Bear’s violent side.
In 2017, Mama June confessed on social media and in a series of interviews that Sugar Bear had been abusive toward Pumpkin — even mentioning that Pumpkin’s aforementioned eye injury came at the hands of her then-lover.
“It’s time the world sees him for what he is,” June told Page Six in 2017. “[Pumpkin’s] eye buckle was caused by him … because he got mad. So many emotional and physical scars with the kids.”
“There were several things that happened on ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ that was kind of like covered up,” June seven said on The Wendy Williams Show later that year.
For his part, Sugar Bear denied these allegations shortly after they were first made in public.
Alana insists she was never abused in any of these ways by her father — but also sadly says he never wanted a relationship with her.
“He never really wanted anything to do with me, still to this day doesn’t want anything to do with me, just because I’m not a boy,” the teenager said on the podcast.
“I’m at the point now that, he’s acted like this for so long, that I’m over it but at first it definitely hurt me.”
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