US President Barack Obama's former nanny has been revealed as a gay transgender man who made him laugh by trying on his mother's lipstick, a report has said.
According to Mail Online, “Evie” cared for the eight-year-old boy she called Barry when his mother Ann Dunham moved to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in the late 1960s.
Openly gay, she would leave the house dressed in full drag - but was very careful that Obama never saw her, the report said.
“He was so young and I never let him see me wearing women's clothes,” Evie was quoted as saying. “But he did see me trying on his mother's lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up.”
The nanny, who turned to prostitution after the family left and now lives in a slum, met the US president’s mother at a cocktail party in 1969.
Dunham, who had moved to the country two years earlier with her second husband Lolo Soetoro, sampled Evie's beef steak and fried rice and was so impressed that she offered her a job, Mail Online said.
It did not take long before she was also Obama’s carer, playing with him and bringing him to and from school.
Neighbours recalled they often saw Evie, who believes she is really a woman, leave the house in the evening fully made up and dressed in drag, the report said.
But when the family left in the early 1970s, things started going downhill, Mail Online reports. Three years later she became a sex worker.
At the time security guards would often rounded up “banshees” or “warias”, as they are known locally, load them into trucks, and bring them to a field where they were kicked, hit and otherwise abused.
Evie told Mail Online she and her friends would scatter into dark alleys to escape the swinging batons.
One particularly beautiful girl, Susi, jumped into a canal strewn with garbage.
When things quieted, those who ran went back to look for her. “We searched all night,” said Evie. “Finally ... we found her. It was horrible. Her body swollen, face bashed in.”
Evie decided, then and there, to live the rest of her life as a man.
Now 66, she tells Mail Online: “I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn't want to die like that. So I decided to just accept it. I've been living like this, a man, ever since.”
Several longtime residents of Obama's old Menteng neighbourhood confirmed Turdi had worked there as Barack's nanny for two years, also caring for his baby sister Maya, the report said.
Evie, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, now lives in a closet-sized hut in a tightly packed slum in Jakarta, collecting and scrubbing dirty laundry to pay for food.
She told Mail Online that she did not know the boy she helped raise had won the 2008 US presidential election until she saw a picture of the family in local newspapers and on TV and blurted out that she knew him.
Her friends at first laughed and thought she was crazy, but those who live in the family's old neighbourhood confirmed it is true, the report said.
“Many neighbours would remember Turdi. She was popular here at that time,” said Rudy Yara, who still lives across the street from Obama's former house.
“She was a nice person and was always patient and caring in keeping young Barry.”
Evie told Mail Online she hopes her former charge will use his power to fight for people like her. Obama named Amanda Simpson, the first openly transgender appointee, as a senior technical adviser in the Commerce Department in 2010.
For Evie, who's now just trying to earn enough to survive each day on Jakarta's streets, the election victory itself was enough to give her a reason - for the first time in a long time - to feel proud.
“Now when people call me scum,” she says, “I can just say: 'But I was the nanny for the President of the United States!' “ - IOL