They owe their freedom to Justin Bieber.
The young woman who escaped her parents’ California house of horrors and called the cops after years of abusive captivity with her siblings credits the “Baby” singer with inspiring her to finally jump out a window and run away.
In a heartbreaking interview broadcast Friday night by ABC News, Jordan Turpin, 21, said she secretly got hold of an old cellphone in 2015 and discovered Bieber’s music videos.
“I don’t know where we would be if we didn’t watch Justin Bieber,” Turpin said. ���I started realizing that there is a different whole world out there . . . I wanted to experience that.”
Three years later, on Jan. 14, 2018, Turpin — one of 13 children born to now-imprisoned David and Louise Turpin — managed to break out of their squalid house in Perris, Calif.
Turpin, then 17, called 911 and recounted the violence routinely inflicted on her and the other kids.
“They chain us. They throw us across — they like to throw us across the room,” she said in a panicked voice, according to a recording played during the hourlong program.
“They pull our hair . . . I have two, my two little sisters right now are chained up.”
When a second dispatcher got on the line, Turpin was unable to provide her family’s address.
“I’ve never been out. I don’t go out much, so I don’t know anything about the streets or anything,” she said.
And when the dispatcher asked, “Does anybody in the house take any kind of medication?” Turpin couldn’t answer that question, either. “I don’t know what medication is,” she said.
During the interview with famed TV journalist Diane Sawyer, Turpin said she knew how important it was to convince the authorities to take her seriously.
“I was telling them everything. We don’t go to school. We live in filth. We starve. And all the stuff,” she said
“I had to make sure that if I left we wouldn’t go back because — and we will get the help we needed — because if we went back there’s no way I would be sitting here right now.”
Her shocking remarks came during a joint interview with older sister Jennifer Turpin, 33, that marked the first time any of the siblings have spoken publicly since they were rescued two hours after Jordan’s 911 call.
At the time, seven of them were legally adults. Everyone except the youngest, then a toddler, was found to be severely malnourished. One girl, then 11, was so skinny that the circumference of her arm was no larger than that of a 4¹/₂ -month-old infant.
Their monstrous parents each pleaded guilty to 14 counts of torture, false imprisonment and related charges in February 2019, and were later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Jennifer Turpin, the eldest of the siblings, recounted how she and the others would be abused for things as innocuous as coloring outside the lines in a coloring book or getting caught in their mother’s room. “I never knew which side I was going to get of her,” she said of her mom.
“If I was going to ask her a question, [is] she going to call me stupid or something . . . and then yank me across the floor? Or [is] she going to be nice and answer my question?”
Their father, Jennifer said, sometimes beat his kids using a belt or stick so viciously that he drew blood. “I was afraid to do one little thing wrong,” she recalled. “If I did one little thing wrong, I was going to be beaten . . . until I bled.”
One time, Jennifer said, her dad lifted her off the floor and slammed her into the wall while “saying that I was the devil.”
“I’m just looking at him like, ‘What did I do?’ ” she said. Jennifer said her parents grew up in West Virginia, where they were both raised as devout members of the same Pentecostal church.
When she was an infant, Jennifer said, the family lived in a nice neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, where her dad worked as an electrical engineer and her mom was a homemaker.
But her mom started undergoing mood swings, Jennifer said, and the house grew filthy with mold, dirt and trash.
Jennifer said she went to public school until her parents withdrew her in third grade, after which the family moved to an isolated home in the tiny, rural community of Rio Vista, Texas.
There, her parents had more kids and began abusing their offspring, quoting from the Bible to justify the violence.
“They loved to point out things in Deuteronomy, saying that, ‘We have the right to do this to you,’ ” she said. They even claimed that “they had the right to even kill us if we didn’t listen.”
In 2007, the parents moved 10 of their kids into a trailer deep behind the house and drove off with their two youngest babies, returning at most once a week with some groceries. “There was a lot of starving,” Jennifer said. “I would have to figure out how to eat. I would either eat ketchup or mustard or ice.”
The family relocated again in 2010 to California, where Jordan began planning her escape — until her mom screamed that they’d be moving to Oklahoma.
“The very next day we were moving. It was literally now or never,” Jennifer said.
Following their rescue, the siblings were hospitalized, after which Jordan and two sisters made their first trip to a public park, “I was so excited because I could smell the grass,” she said,
“I was like, ‘How could heaven be better than this?’ ”
