By Jai Singh

It is with a heavy heart and sadness that I share this about my own mother. It’s something I never thought I would need to do but I have taken this decision after her public attacks. There has been so much twisted about the events that took place and I need to set the record straight.

I came to Lighthouse in 2007 mainly because I needed help with my life and family. One of the first things I asked Chris Nash and Paul S. Waugh was “can you help me help my mum?” Because I had seen her struggle all my life. I invested my own money, there was never any demand or expectation Rani would ever have financial resources and the personal help she received from Paul S. Waugh was done on an informal capacity and was never done with any financial expectation of her. Rani was never happy about me becoming a Partner at Lighthouse from day one and finding father figures because she always wanted to control and possess my brother and I, which is very common especially in single-parent families. 

Then 12 years later in 2019, after being helped to heal from so much of the damage, neglect and abuse from Rani which she herself acknowledged, I took the decision to ask Rani to raise a loan on her 2 recently-inherited flats and use some of that money to invest in myself, my brother and in Rani herself. 

For context, after my dad, Harinder Singh left when I was 7, Rani was severely depressed for over 2 decades and suffering constant nervous breakdowns. I by default became the man of the house and from a young age helped her to understand how to pay bills and how to manage. It was my brother Sukh Singh who suggested we come off state benefits after 14 years. Rani struggled to earn anything from that time and it was Sukh and I who held up her journalism career with the BBC who she’s only worked for very sporadically as a freelance reporter. We helped her use her equipment, helped her edit and write articles, gave her ideas and she would never have published 2 books without our daily help. 

During my entire time at Lighthouse Rani would constantly be unhappy at the amount of time we were spending away from her, she would use guilt trips to demand our attention and help and often we would come back exhausted just from spending a few days with her. It seriously affected our work and my ability to produce an income and I never had a chance to truly heal from the damage from my upbringing because she was always in my psyche even having recurring nightmares about being back in the family home. Paul S. Waugh has spent thousands of hours to help me personally through my abuse and neglect and often works around the clock all hours just to keep us going. If anything he’s invested way more time, money and effort here than he has ever received!! 

I realise now that even her investment in us was also done as a form of control and we set an agreement to pay her back between 2-5 years which would have ended in 2024. Sadly through Covid and the relentless attacks our business received in 2021 onwards which culminated in the Daily Mail article, we were unable to pay her back having already set aside and paid her thousands in repayments while compromising our own finances and our personal wellbeing. She was unrelenting in her demands, despite knowing the fragile state we were in. Rani has hardly produced any financial value through her life and we asked her to get a job to help make the payments herself, to apply for a bounceback loan from the government and help us in our time of need but she just kept on reminding us of our commitment and I became seriously unwell because of the guilt trips and manipulation. Once she realised we couldn’t pay anymore, despite our best efforts and having supported her her whole life, she turned on us. I asked for her help with the Daily Mail article given her media background but she then decided to go to them herself because, as I now realise, the only thing she really cared about was money and now, destroying me, those who have supported me and everything that we have worked so hard and sacrificed for. The irony is that she is destroying the very investment she is trying to recoup. This page details some of the facts and inaccuracies in that article. 

I gave Rani 30 years of my life trying to help her, I lost my childhood, my humanity, my ability to function as a human being. I came to Lighthouse to get help and yes she did invest in me but she used that as a stick to beat me with which just damaged me further. Even now I hope and pray one day we could reconcile. 

By Sukh Singh 

When I read the Daily Mail article for the first time and saw that ‘remortgaged her family home to help raise over £200,000 for her two sons to invest in the group’ I was hurt, angry and disappointed. What felt like a knife in the back was the fact that Jai and I had asked our mother for her help, because we were being attacked viciously online. I knew Rani had always had a problem with Paul, with Lighthouse, but to become part of a malicious smear campaign against us that’s designed to destroy our lives and businesses? I couldn’t believe it. 

The power of a son’s loyalty to their parents, especially their mother, can be devastating and self-destructive, if misplaced in a toxic parent. I’ve had to reconcile that my own birth mother is part of this hate-fuelled campaign and even writing this has been something I’ve really not wanted to do. I’ve lived with a constant threat and fear that if I do something to upset or hurt Rani in any way, that either she would come after me with hell’s fury or that she would end up severely harming herself, because she threatened to end her life so much to Jai and I when we were younger. I cannot live in that fear for the rest of my life. Toxic Families and toxic parents are a real issue. This is not uncommon, this is affecting children and grown up-children who still live in fear of what their parents can do to them and I hope by Jai and I doing this, other families can heal from damaged caused to them.

When I first decided to get mentored in 2009, I had no idea of the level of help I needed. I thought I just lacked direction and confidence, but I could feel something was deeply missing. Over the years, very reluctantly, myself and my mentors unpeeled the psychological damage caused by Rani along with the absence of my birth father, Harinder. We literally had to go through family therapy outside of Lighthouse, in our 30s, just to ensure that Jai and I could move out of our childhood home and not find Rani going into a nervous breakdown (like she did when we were children) because she was so terrified of losing us – her possessions. It took three years and we were further behind than when we started, with our therapist agreeing to the demands that Rani made; to no longer talk about herself as a part of the problem in our family and to not address her psychological damage from her family. The fact we invested over £7,000 in therapy with Chloe that caused me and my brother incredible stress, pain and confusion is just one of many crucial facts omitted from the Daily Mail article.

Over the last 12 years where Paul has literally sat down with Rani many times, to help her and us as a family – off his own back in a personal capacity. I don’t know of any senior person at any company who would extend themselves so much to support the family of a Partner in that business. Let alone over 12 years. Let alone when that parent was hateful and trying to sabotage the business and destroy the people in it! We even got to one point where Rani negotiated with Paul time where Jai and I could dedicate to supporting her to write her book. She literally expected us to be her PAs for months on end, while we were building our business and then complained to us that we looked exhausted and lacked an income…

I have come to accept that my mother values her reputation, her own secrets, and money, more than my life. I’ve also come to realise that nothing I can ever do with my life will ever be good enough for her, unless I totally submit to her will and/or give her all the money she wants to live a comfortable life. I’ve tried to keep quiet and get on with my life, hoping she would see sense and let us get on with our lives but I am seriously concerned that the Rani Singh today is a far cry from a reasonable, caring human being who can see any sense. I fear for her future and her fate. It’s only through Christ that I am developing the strength to forgive and to have compassion for this badly broken human being. Now I hope through this work we are doing to address the lies and manipulation she and others are guilty of, that she may see some sense, stop her abuse and that we as a family can one day heal. If you are reading this Rani I am praying for you.