Silke Jasso
Brooke Shields has been pretty open about the ways that she was sexualized as a child star in Hollywood. Now, the actress has revealed that she was actually raped as a young adult. In a new documentary, Pretty Baby, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Shields didn’t name her attacker but detailed the scary events of a sexual assault.
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The assault occurred shortly after she had graduated college at Princeton, while she was struggling to find work after her early success. She had met with a man in question for dinner, in order to discuss work. When she returned to his hotel room to wait to call a taxi, the incident occurred.
“He said, ‘Come back to the hotel and I’ll call a cab,'” Shields explained. “And I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for a while.” The actress stated that she felt uncomfortable in that room, and decided to use binoculars that the man had left in the room to watch some volleyball players out the window.
The door opens, the person comes out naked, and I’ve got the binoculars and I’m like, ‘S—,'” she stated. “And I put the binoculars down and he’s right on me. Just like, wrestling.” She went on to explain that she didn’t try to run away due to being scared that it would provoke further physical violence.
“I was afraid I’d get choked out or something,” she noted. “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…. I went down in the elevator, and I got my own cab. I just cried all the way to my friend’s apartment.”
The actress revealed that she didn’t process the experience as a sexual assault for a very long time. Even when It was loudly pointed out to her by her security specialist Gavin de Becker. “He said, ‘That’s rape.’ And I said, ‘I’m not willing to believe that,'” she stated.
Before the event, she had already been sexually objectified by Hollywood after appearing nude and kissing 29-year-old Keith Caradine in the 1978 film Pretty Baby when she was just 11 years old. As a teen, she went on to appear in two more films, Endless Love and Blue Lagoon, which included sex and nudity.
After realizing that it was indeed sexual assault, the actress couldn’t help but feel that it was her fault in some sort of way. “That’s what I had to do to my brain,” she noted. “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 was just so trusting.”
She went on to say that she wrote her attacker a letter saying that he had destroyed a “huge trust in him,” but apparently the letter was dismissed.
“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,'” she said. “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.”
The documentary, directed by Lena Wilson, is set to hit Hulu later this year.
Yeah, so you can protect his name while all the fakers go after Bill Cosby. He must white. Beatty, Hefner and the gang are never blamed for anything.
KC wow! You intentionally fail to say that some of the women who accused Bill Crosby were also black! Enough of this racist BS. Enough!