The article discusses child abuse, sexual abuse and suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, contact the Suicide and Crisis Line by call or text at 988. Even if it feels like it, you are not alone.

Last Friday (Aug. 23), Rory Feek’s oldest daughter, Heidi, shared an Instagram Stories slide telling her followers that she and her sister Hopie are pursuing legal action against their father regarding their younger sister, Indiana.

“We no longer believe Indiana is safe under our father’s care,” her statement reads in part.

It’s not the first time Heidi has sounded alarm bells about Indiana, who is 10 years old and has Down syndrome. After Feek’s July 14 wedding in Greycliff, Mont. — which Heidi and Hopie did not attend — she posted a handful of frantic Stories indicating that Indiana had been left with an unfamiliar family while Feek and his new wife Rebecca went on their honeymoon.

In her latest post, she reiterates that she believes this family is part of “an organization known for its troubling history of child abuse.”

Greycliff is the Montana branch of Homestead Heritage: A farming-based, Christian community whose home base is in the Waco, Texas, area. The community has a lengthy track record of sexual and domestic abuse allegations, and multiple members have been convicted of sex crimes against minors.

What Is Homestead Heritage?

• Homestead Heritage was founded by Blair Adams and his wife Regina, who opened a small church in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1973.
• The group underwent several moves, both as their numbers grew and as their focus shifted to living off the land. They are currently based in Elm Mott, Texas, an unincorporated community just north of Waco.
• The community’s theology incorporates a number of Christian traditions, including a heavy Anabaptist influence.
• Key lifestyle tenants of the group include agrarian living, adult baptism, home birth and home education.
• The compound is a popular tourist stop, featuring wares such as tools, cloth and pottery, as well as a restaurant.

Why Are Fans Following Rory Feek’s Love Story?

To many, Heidi’s concerns might come as a shock. Feek took fans inside every heartwarming moment of his wedding, from the romantic song he played to surprise his bride, to the sweet smile on 10-year-old Indiana’s face as she saw her dad re-marry.

Fans have been rooting for Feek — formerly one-half of the husband-and-wife duo Joey + Rory — in the years since Joey’s death, when Indiana was just 2 years old. His new marriage, to Indiana’s schoolteacher Rebecca, has felt like the happy ending the singer deserves after years of heartache, healing and single fatherhood.

But Heidi and her sister Hopie — both in their mid-30s, and who have been staples of Indiana’s life since she was born — have a different side of the story to share.

Heidi tells Taste of Country that her concern for Indiana didn’t start with the wedding. She says that her father has been progressively limiting contact between Indiana and her two sisters over the past few years, a rift that was galvanized when Heidi and Hopie asked him to attend family counseling with them.

“Over time, he cut Indy off from us more and more until now we have no contact,” Hopie adds. “… First, he stopped letting us FaceTime with her because he ‘had a flip phone,’ but now we know he has an iPhone.”

“Then he stopped letting her come and spend the night in Alabama, which had been a staple of her entire life, and now we can’t even talk to her on the phone.”

Heidi says that she and Hopie suffered abuse and neglect as children, citing the time she broke her leg on a playground at 5 years old and her dad delayed getting her medical attention for 24 hours.

Rory Feek declined to be interviewed for this story. However, he wrote about this particular incident in his 2017 memoir This Life I Live. In the book, he says he called a nurse hotline after Heidi fell on the playground, and that a medical professional told him that if she didn’t have a fever or any swelling, she was “probably okay.” He said the family’s financial situation made him hesitant to seek emergency care.

But Heidi remembers her dad minimizing her pain that day: “He told me to ‘quit crying.’ That night he made me go with him to set up for a gig while I stood in agony, unable to cry for 24 hours,’” she recalls.

She also says that Feek exposed her and Hopie to people who hurt them and did nothing to stop the mistreatment. At around 8 years old, Heidi accidentally spilled a bottle of perfume belonging to Feek’s at-the-time girlfriend.

“She beat me severely, until the bruises were visible beyond my shorts,” she says. “Rory continued his relationship with her for years after, and on multiple occasions, Hopie and I were woken up in the middle of the night on school nights and dragged to the girlfriend’s house where Rory would plead to be let in after a breakup, using us as tools to garner sympathy.”

The sisters claim Indiana has already suffered injury while visiting a Homestead community. During a trip Feek and Indiana made to the group’s Waco home base property a few years ago, Heidi says that her younger sister came home with a serious leg injury.

“[The trip] was a total disaster,” Heidi says. “Indy was terribly injured from an accident that took place while riding a horse carriage driven by children. They returned early, with Indy literally scarred by the experience.”

More People Close to the Feeks Are Speaking Out About

Julie Zamboldi, a close family friend who was by Joey’s side when she died, also confirmed to Taste of Country that Indiana was injured in that accident in Texas.

• Julie was the president of Joey + Rory’s fan club.
• After Joey’s death, she remained close with Rory, occasionally making trips to Tennessee to help him organize his concerts and festivals.
• She began distancing herself from Rory Feek in around 2021, as tensions mounted between the singer and his two older daughters.

She had never questioned Feek’s parental judgment over Indiana before, but she says she was troubled when he began to separate himself and Indiana from Heidi and Hopie.

“Myself, as a parent, if [my child] said, ‘I wanna have a better relationship, will you go to counseling with me?’ I would definitely say yes,” Julie continues. “… I don’t know why he wouldn’t.”

A centerpiece of the Feek farm during this time was the one-room schoolhouse, where Indiana and a small group of other local children got their education. Emily* — one of the parents of those children — told Taste of Country that children had a good experience at the school, though the education was “concerning:” Kids never got report cards, and they were never officially registered with the school.

She says she was also concerned about safety. People not employed by the school or farm often had unfettered access to the property, she remembers, such as camera crews who were there to film movie and video projects.

“You’re talking about over a hundred people on the land, and the kids were outside playing, and people were walking around being curious about what the schoolhouse was like,” she recalls.

Members of Homestead Heritage began visiting the property “a couple of years ago,” Emily says, but the schoolhouse parents never formally met them.

“We just never put two and two together,” she explains. “He never actually said to us, ‘They’re from Homestead Heritage,’ but they were dealing with Rory and working out business deals and stuff for the last probably three years … but nobody ever thought anything of it.”

Julie also recalls that Homestead Heritage’s presence quietly grew in Feek’s life over a period of years.

“I had looked at the news clips and stuff. I don’t know if I’d put together that that was the place from Texas. I don’t know if I’d put together that that was where [Indiana] got hurt,” she remembers.

Though Julie hadn’t been back to the farm for a couple of years by the time Rory and Rebecca got married, she was surprised that she didn’t receive an invitation to the wedding. When her husband showed her a photo of the wedding party, she was even more surprised at all the unfamiliar faces.

“I was like, ‘I know half a dozen of these people. Who are the rest?’ Because it’s a picture of, I would say, over a hundred people,” she says. “Those are the people standing up for them. [Feek and Rebecca] are dressed like them now. It was just a big surprise to me.”

“When did this relationship become all of this?” she wonders.

What Are People Close to Homestead Heritage Saying?

In August of 2024, Taste of Country spoke to two people who grew up at Homestead, Joseph and Shalomae, and consulted with multiple other contacts who chose not to be quoted directly.

Multiple sources pointed out several powerful Homestead members in that same wedding photograph, including the Brandstadt family — the family Heidi believes Indiana stayed with after the wedding. A text exchange obtained by Heidi and a family member who attended the ceremony supports her claim.

Feek and Rebecca were married by Howard Wheeler, a prominent member of the Homestead community. (Wheeler also performed this wedding ceremony between two Homestead members in October 2023).

Joseph, who grew up in the community and left at the age of 19 in 2009, said that it would be irregular for Wheeler to perform a marriage between two people not closely tied to Homestead.

“Absolutely. The whole thing is incredibly bizarre,” he says.

Both he and Shalomae shared stories attesting to different difficulties Homestead children might face. Shalomae’s parents officially joined in 2008, when she was about 8 years old, and she says that she suffered sexual abuse when her brother started touching her inappropriately.

When she brought it up to her mother, she was asked to keep it a secret, “because he could get in big trouble.” She never told anyone else about the abuse, because she thought it was normal — a misbelief that she says is linked to a systemic lack of sex education.

“I didn’t know where babies came from until I was 14 and I had a phone I wasn’t supposed to have, and I used the internet at an Olive Garden to Google it,” she recalls.

Homestead Heritage Has Been at the Center of More Sex Abuse Allegations

• In 2012, the Texas Observer published a lengthy investigation into a series of allegations of child abuse, domestic abuse and coverups within the group.
• This articled detailed the stories of three Homestead Heritage members who were convicted of sexually assaulting minors.
• They are Bill DeLong, Joseph Ratliff and Andrew DeLong, all of whom were convicted in the 2000s or early 2010s.
• In 2011, another Homesteader named Richard Santa Maria was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a minor; he was ultimately convicted of that crime.
• In the summer of 2024, Timothy Vidaurreta — another Homestead member — was arrested and charged with aggravated criminal sex abuse.

Shalomae was a child when DeLong was convicted, but she was a part of the group. She doesn’t remember him — or any of the other sex abuse allegations and convictions — coming up much.

“Those things were swept under the rug,” she says.

Sometimes if a member transgressed, they would be named and shamed in front of the church, then disfellowshipped. But the most sinister crimes, including sex abuse against children, weren’t spoken of at all.

Both Shalomae and Joseph said they didn’t receive medical checkups as kids at Homestead, explaining that the group waited until emergencies to seek medical care. Joseph said that a doctor joined Homestead when he was in his teens, and when he cut his arm, that doctor stitched up the cut. “But I don’t know what would have happened if the doctor hadn’t joined,” he says.

In his experience, kids with special needs — like Indiana Feek — were taken “very good care of” in terms of physical and social wellness. But mental health issues were treated as “sin,” and community members were expected to address “the pent-up issues that lead to” conditions like depression and anxiety, rather than seek treatment.

Joseph’s Family Has Been Touched By Tragedy at Homestead

Joseph’s niece Naomi died at Homestead in July 2021 at 18 years old. By that point, he’d left the group, but his brother Peter stayed, choosing to raise his seven kids — Naomi included — there.

A sheriff’s report obtained by Taste of Country pronounced her death a suicide, after she hung herself from a shower rail with an electrical cord. It indicates that Peter told responding officers his daughter “suffered from depression, but had never received any treatment or medication,” and had been “a frequent cutter until approximately a year ago.”

Peter was “absolutely devastated” when he first called with the news of Naomi’s death, Joseph says. But when Joseph arrived in Texas, less than a week later, he says that Peter told him Naomi had access to all the mental health help she needed — a different story than the one indicated in the sheriff’s report. He says Peter also no longer believed that suicide was his daughter’s cause of death.

“He kind of had his defenses up, and he said, ‘Listen, we found out what happened. It was TikTok.’ And I was like, ‘What?'” Joseph says. Peter went on to say that he’d read an article about the blackout challenge — a social media trend that had caused a string of deaths that year — and now believed it was to blame, despite the fact that he knew Naomi did not have the TikTok app installed on her phone.

“I said, ‘Who told you about this article?’ He said, ‘Dan Lancaster.’ His minister,” Joseph continues.

Joseph stresses that he doesn’t know what factors played into Naomi’s death. He still remembers her as the “brightest, sparkiest, spunkiest little kid” that he said goodbye to when he left the group all those years earlier. And although he knows that children and teens go through different phases and stages, he doesn’t believe a TikTok challenge is what killed her.

“It’s just bulls–t. It’s bulls–t. No one’s ever shown me any evidence,” he says, hinting that Homestead may have intentionally wanted to steer the family, and the police, away from a suicide ruling.

“They want the world to be the place where teen suicides happen, not their doorstep,” Joseph continues. “…The whole narrative around [Naomi’s death] is really messy, and I think it’s messy on purpose.”

Children Who Grow Up at Homestead Often Struggle to Adjust to the Outside World

Children at Homestead are isolated from the world outside the group. Shalomae says she didn’t receive a high school diploma, and after she left, she struggled to find a job — both because of credential hurdles and because of the “anxiety” that came from stepping outside the tight-knit community where she’d spent her whole life.

Joseph also describes a “cliff edge” that kids face growing up. They know that, between ages 18-20, they have to choose between formally joining the group — via baptism — or leaving their lives and families behind. Homestead’s method of separating from the outside world often translates into families being ripped apart, despite the group’s stated emphasis on family.

“The way they would put it is, you can’t be a part of the kingdom of God and part of the kingdom of the world,” Joseph explains. “But what that actually looks like in reality is families being split along those dividing lines.”

“Where if you don’t want to go join a cult in Texas, you can’t have anything to do with anybody who is,” he continues. “It’s that ‘us versus them’ mentality, which is always the case with cults … but when families end up on either side of that line, that’s just incredibly sad.”

What Does Indiana Feek Stand to Lose If She Loses Her Sisters?

Back at the Feek’s Tennessee property, Emily — the schoolhouse parent — says it’s abundantly clear just how much Indiana suffers from being separated from her sisters.

“Indiana’s heartbroken,” she says, remembering times at the schoolhouse when the young girl came up to her, asking where Hopie and Heidi are. She says she’s also heard a recording of Indiana crying over missing them.

“With his history of being abusive to us, we can’t move forward without professional help,” adds Hopie, speaking of the impasse she faces with her father. “I still hope he reconsiders, because I still love him.”

Many of the people who spoke with Taste of Country underscored that they ultimately want to support the Feek family.

“I wanna say, just so you know this, that I love the Feeks. I love Rory. I love his sisters. I love his kids,” Julie says, her voice cracking with emotion.

“It really saddens me that Indiana — because Heidi and Hopie were such a big part of Indiana’s life, and she’s lost her mom, and then her sisters would be the next best thing, other than her dad. That’s my biggest [reason] for talking to you. They need to be able to be together,” she adds.

Julie says the “sisterhood” Indiana has with Heidi and Hopie is sacred, especially since Joey’s death. Julie was at Joey’s side during her final days, and she says her late friend would be devastated to see the rift that’s opened up in the family.

“If Joey were here, none of this would be going on,” she concludes. “She would never stand for this.”

*Name changed in order to protect confidentiality.

Carena Liptak is an Associate Editor and staff writer at Taste of Country. She specializes in breaking country music news, interviews and lists. In particular, she’s got a soft spot for sad songs — check out her roundup of the 50 Saddest Country Songs of All Time!