A woman in her 50s has finally confirmed the identity of her biological father – a man who raped her mother when she was just 16.

Rebecca (not her real name) had long known it was highly possible that her real father was the man who had raped her mother, especially as it had been the word around town where she lived as a girl.

Wanting to put to rest her lurking doubts and find closure after all these years, she filed a court case against the man and the judge ordered a DNA test to be taken.

It came back positive, and last week, the court ordered that an amendment be made in the records of the public registry, where Rebecca’s father had been marked as “unknown”.

Although there was no mention of rape in the judgment handed down by Mr Justice Robert Mangion, before she passed away Rebecca’s mother had filed an affidavit which clearly pointed to rape.

When I saw him coming in, I told him to move out of my way so I could leave, but he did not allow me to, and I ended up on the floor

In her account to the court, her mother said she had been helping out at the man’s family business ever since she was eight and continued to do so into her teenage years, earning one lira a week.

One day, when she was 16, she was helping the man’s sister with the washing. The sister left the room and he walked in, closing the door behind him.

“When I saw him coming in, I told him to move out of my way so I could leave, but he did not allow me to, and I ended up on the floor,” the mother recounted in her affidavit. “I remember I was wearing trousers and a short-sleeved top, but he managed to remove my trousers and underpants and I began to scream.

“He gagged me and told me to be quiet.

 “I can remember it very vividly: I was in so much pain,” she recalled, adding that she was too young, however, to understand what the man had done.

She went home feeling unwell and returned sometime later. She did not speak to the man, she said, because she did not realise the gravity of the incident.

At the time, the man was dating a woman and eventually married her, despite his father’s objections.

A month after the ordeal, Rebecca’s mother started to feel sick, and three months later, she was putting on weight, her sister remarking that her belly was growing. When the family doctor came to examine her one day, he told her mother she was pregnant, and her mother started crying and hitting herself.

The man’s sister then went to the house and warned them to keep the news away from her parents. So Rebecca’s mother was taken to Gozo, where one evening she gave birth to “a beautiful girl”– and immediately came under pressure to give the baby up for adoption. She refused.

The baby was registered under ‘father unknown’, though word had got out about the truth of the matter.

In court, the man insisted he was not the father. He testified that he could not remember having sex with the teenager and that his father and three brothers had been in the same house at the time.

But the judge insisted that a DNA test be done.

The man was ordered to pay all the court fees related to the case.