Jennifer Gerson

Reporter

Published

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Rep. Debbie Dingell doesn’t want to talk about this, but I’m here in her office because she says she needs to.

Dingell grew up in Michigan and had what she describes as a “comfortable childhood.” Her father owned a business. Her mother was a member of Michigan’s famous Fisher family, whose company became part of what is now General Motors.

But her father also was addicted to prescription drugs and suffered from mental illness.

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“He was paranoid. You just never knew what his mood was going to be and so he would just — trigger.”

It all came to a head on what Dingell described as “the night that I just really was convinced we were all going to die.”

Dingell’s fat

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