Kimberley Anne Minnifield Burke is a native of Roanoke, Alabama. She was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio after her mother remarried when she was nine.

Kimberley attended Lincoln Heights Elementary School and by the age of twelve was gang raped by three boys from her neighborhood. During her childhood she was continuously raped and physically abused. Kimberley began singing in the studio and performing in local bands as a teenager in hopes of escaping the hellish lifestyle she was living.

By the age of sixteen she was a teenage unwed mother. By nineteen she was married.