Nollywood actress Laide Bakare has broken a long silence over the custody of her two sons, alleging that the wife of their father told a child in the house to harm the boys in a way their father would not see.
She made the claims in a video shared online on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, and said she had stayed quiet until the situation began to feel threatening.
“Sometimes you don’t take your problems to social media or the public; that is what people say, and that is the right and sensible thing to do. But at some point, when it gets scary and threatening, you can’t always tell if you can find help.”
Bakare said she and the boys’ father separated after disagreements, and that he has refused to let the children stay with her.
“This is a sad reality for me because my boys are not with me, and I am not happy about that. The bone of contention, and my worry, is my kids being with another woman who is not treating them well.”
The heart of her allegation is a conversation she says she captured by accident. She claimed her phone fell during a call and kept recording inside the father’s house, where nobody knew she was still on the line.
“I heard the wife of my children’s father telling one of the boys in the house, ‘Don’t beat them where their father will come and see marks on their bodies, you’d rather strangle them. Take them by their neck.’”
She said she has taken the complaint to their father more than once.
“So many times, I have complained about this to their father, but he refuses to act on it because he is so much in love with his wife, and he will take my kids away from me as a sort of punishment.”
Bakare also described the stepmother as two-faced.
“This particular stepmother is a hypocrite; she has two faces. She behaves nicely when she sees you, but inside she is a devil.”
Her request was wanting the boys out of that house. The two sons are from her marriage to Alhaji Mutairu Atanda Orilowo, which reports date to 2012. That union later collapsed. She has a daughter, Simi, from an earlier marriage to US-based businessman Olumide Okufulure. In 2023 she publicly called both former husbands deadbeat fathers.
As of publication, neither the boys’ father nor his wife had responded to the allegation. The clip has drawn messages of sympathy online, with some fans urging her to take the recording to court.