When appearing on the popular BBC show Dragons’ Den, contestants hope for a lot of things: financial investment, exposure, and success. For one woman, she got far more than she bargained for and found her son’s half-sibling.
Early last year, Zoe Chapman, 39, appeared on Dragons’ Den in an effort to win £50,000 in funding for her award-winning product, Kiddiwhizz, a unisex compact toilet.
It’s an invention that was years in the making when she found herself looking after both her young son and her father, who heartbreakingly required end-of-life care. Both required a handheld portable toilet, something that, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t seem to find.
At the time, Zoe was too busy to create the product herself, but years later, following the death of her father and shortly before the 2020 global lockdown, she underwent spinal surgery and asked herself what it was she wished she’d always done.
She realised she wanted to create a portable toilet, and so one year later, in 2021, she did.
Zoe quickly went on to win awards and, in 2022, caught the attention of Dragons’ Den, who liked the story behind her business and asked her to apply for their show. By 2023, she appeared on the show with the series of events that came after, changing her life forever.
Sitting down with The Independent, Zoe recalled the weeks after her appearance, admitting the show ‘saved my business and changed everything for me.’
‘The show aired earlier this year, and that’s when I started doing interviews. From there, an online group for single mums called Frolo asked me to write a blog post on my experience,’ she said.
Her blog post gained a lot of attention, but the most important set of eyes belonged to a woman named Jess*, who immediately emailed Zoe something that left the single mum wondering if she was ‘delusional’.
‘I know this is going to sound really weird,’ Jess wrote, ‘but I’ve seen your story, and I think our children have the same dad,’ Zoe said.
The businesswoman told the news outlet that she got pregnant when she was 27 to a man she initially believed was treating her ‘properly’ but soon became ‘domineering’ and ‘obsessive’.
She said after seeing the ‘red flags’ she left him but was already pregnant. Zoe told the publication he demanded she get an abortion, but she wanted a baby, so they ultimately broke up, and he had nothing to do with her son.
Jess told Zoe she had a three-year-old daughter. While initially confused by the message, as soon as Jess said the name of their children’s father, she knew it was true, and so the women organised to meet.
‘When she read my story, she said the similarities stood out to her straight away,’ she told the news outlet. ‘My son’s father had done exactly the same thing to her. He’d told Jess he wanted her to get an abortion and used my son as an example of a child he already had and didn’t look after. She said there were even more of us.’
Zoe continued to say they introduced their children shortly after meeting and the kids ‘were obsessed with each other’ and while they have different ethnicities, ‘you would assume’ the pair were related.
In the months since the two women and their children have met multiple times and the brother and sister have been allowed sleepovers occasionally.
She told the publication: ‘If I hadn’t done Dragons’ Den, I would never have found out.’
Adding that despite the difficulties she has faced in her life, she thinks she is ‘really lucky.’
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*Jess is not her real name.
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