[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Brooke Shields opened up a couple of tough time in her life for the very first time.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the 57-year-old actress revealed in her new documentary Pretty Baby, which premiered on the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, that she was sexually assaulted shortly after graduating from faculty at Princeton in 1987. Without naming her rapist, Brooke recalled within the doc that she was trying to enter again into the Hollywood scene after faculty and was struggling to search out work, so she met with a person for dinner to debate some potential tasks. Following the assembly, the unidentified attacker satisfied The Blue Lagoon star to go to his lodge, so he might name her a cab to take her residence:
“He said, ‘Come back to the hotel and I’ll call a cab.’ And I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for awhile.”
Becoming uncomfortable with the state of affairs, Brooke stated she tried to distract herself and took the binoculars the person left within the room to be able to watch a number of the volleyball gamers out the window. But issues took a flip when he all of a sudden stepped again into the room – bare:
“The door opens, the person comes out naked, and I’ve got the binoculars and I’m like, ‘S**t.’ And I put the binoculars down and he’s right on me. Just like, was wrestling.”
During the horrific assault, Brooke defined that she didn’t attempt to run away or struggle again as a result of she was afraid he would grow to be bodily violent:
“I was afraid I’d get choked out or something. So I didn’t fight that much. I didn’t. I just absolutely froze. I thought one ‘No’ should’ve been enough, and I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,’ and I just shut it out. God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practiced that…”
When it was over, the mannequin left the room, went down the elevator, grabbed a cab, and “just cried all the way to my friend’s apartment.” So, so terrible. And for a very long time, Brooke admitted she couldn’t course of the truth that she was raped – even when her safety specialist Gavin de Becker pointed it out to her:
“He stated, ‘That’s rape.’ And I stated, ‘I’m not keen to consider that.’
She continued:
“That was what I had to do to my brain. He said to me, ‘I can trust you and I can’t trust people.’ It’s so cliché, it’s practically pathetic. I believed somehow I put out a message and that was how the message was received. I drank wine at dinner. I went up to the room. I just was so trusting.”
While Brooke by no means confronted the person in individual, she shared that she wrote him a letter years later – which went ignored by him:
“I just threw my hands up and said, ‘You know what, I refuse to be a victim because this is something that happens no matter who you are and no matter what you think you’re prepared for or not.’ I wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body and just keep on the path I was on. The system had never once come to help me. So, I just had to get stronger on my own.”
Sending our love and help to Brooke after she opened up about this painful and traumatic second in her life.
If you or somebody you understand has skilled sexual violence and wish to study extra about sources, take into account testing https://www.rainn.org/resources.
[Image via MEGA/WENN]