13yo girl snoops through her mom’s locked cabinet, finds adoption papers signed when she was 6: ‘Up until this point, my dad was my dad’

Finding something unexpected while snooping through a parent’s belongings can be unsettling, but one teenager stumbled across a discovery that changed her view of her family forever. TikTok user Bailey, who posts under the handle @heyitsbailey08, alleged in a video that she was 13 when she found out that the man she had always known as her father wasn’t her biological dad.

Bailey says she was home alone and bored when she decided to look through her mother’s desk. After unlocking a cabinet, she apparently came across adoption papers that revealed she had been legally adopted by the man who raised her. The documents also reportedly showed that the adoption had not been finalized until she was six years old.

“Up until this point, my dad was my dad, and I didn’t know any different. My parents got married when I was around one. I had never really questioned the story because at thirteen you just don’t think about certain things,” she says. Looking back, she alleges some details might have raised questions, including the fact that both her parents had brown eyes while hers were blue. But even after learning about dominant and recessive traits in sixth-grade science, she never suspected anything.

Where’s her real dad?

Bailey also recalled that her mother had become pregnant at 16, while the man she knew as her father was eight years older. At the time, however, none of these details seemed particularly unusual to her. Finding the paperwork was what finally made her question everything. After discovering the documents, Bailey said she called her mother at work in a panic and grilled her about what the discovery.

Her mother reportedly explained that she had become pregnant while still in high school, and that Bailey’s biological father was dating another woman at the time. He had allegedly cheated on his girlfriend with Bailey’s mother, but when he learned about the pregnancy, he was preparing to leave for college on a football scholarship and wanted nothing to do with the baby.

According to Bailey, her biological father initially refused to sign the adoption papers for years because he was concerned he might change his mind. Bailey claimed that her mother “never talked to him about it again until she got married to my dad, and then she started reaching out to him so that my dad could legally adopt me.”

The paperwork was reportedly completed sometime in 1996, when her biological father decided he wouldn’t change his mind. Learning the truth, Bailey wanted to meet her biological father, so her mother purportedly reached out to him. However, she claimed that he was initially reluctant because no one in his family knew Bailey existed. She eventually met him at 18, but the story took another turn.

“I did not end up meeting him until I was eighteen years old. And, uh, long story short, he ended up not being my biological father, but I proceeded to think that he was for four more years where we had some part of a relationship,” Bailey said. She ended the video by encouraging viewers to return for a second part, where she plans to explain what happened next.

Bailey’s experience also reflects a significant part of adoption in the United States: stepparent adoption. According to a 2025 report from the National Council for Adoption, stepparent adoptions accounted for roughly half of all private domestic adoptions in 2022. These adoptions allow a parent’s spouse to legally become a child’s parent, as happened when the man who raised Bailey officially adopted her.