Teenager Forgives Father For Secretly Filming Her In Bedroom

A teenager from Alabama said she forgives her father for secretly filming her in her bedroom and bathroom, Al.com reported.

Michaela Smith, a senior and cheerleader at Pell City High School, said it was her faith in God that helped her though the ordeal. Her father, Michael Smith, spent a year in jail for recording his daughter four times- three times in her bedroom and once in the bathroom- over the course of several months in 2011. His daughter was 15.

"This man was supposed to protect me from all the bad in the world," Michaela Smith, who was named after her father, told Al.com. "He put that camera in my room and had been using it to look at me for moths. I've never felt so destroyed."

Michaela's mother Rhonda was the one who found the camera one day while her daughter was changing clothes. Not wanting to alarm her daughter, Rhonda told Michaela that she put it there. Rhonda gave the camera to her other daughter, Janet, from a previous marriage. Janet sent it to someone who had knowledge of computer forensics.

Images of Michaela were found on her father's computer. Michael was arrested in November 2011. The judge sentenced Michael to a year in jail of a 15-year split sentence, Al.com reported.

Michaela, a member of the Church of the Highlands at Grants Mill in Birmingham, needed therapy to deal with what her father did. Slowly, she began to see what happened to her as a way to help others in similar situations. She became the leader of a summer camp for troubled teenagers.

"I was starting to realize that without what my father had done, I wouldn't be able to touch the lives of children and others in the way I can now," the cheerleader told Al.com. "It was at that moment I became truly thankful for all that had happened to me."

Michaela's father was released from prison in March, but he is not allowed to have contact with his daughter.

Michaela has forgiven her father, and said his year in prison helped him.

"I am so thankful for the year he spent in prison because it truly saved his life," she told Al.com.