Brooke Shields is “amazed” she “survived” being sexualised from the age of 11.
Brooke Shields is ‘amazed’ she ‘survived’ being sexualised from the age of 11
‘The Blue Lagoon’ actress, 57, who recently revealed she was raped by a man after they had dinner to discuss her film project dreams, tears up as she tells in her two-part documentary ‘Pretty Baby’ how she was “catapulted into the world of adult sexuality” as a child.
She said in a trailer for the film, due out April 3: “That always just seared me…. I was struggling to find my own voice, I wasn’t told it was important to have agency.”
Brooke said the words as those interviewed for her documentary referred to her as “the most photographed woman in the world,” an “iconic American beauty,” “object of desire,” “sexualised child model” and “vulnerable”.
Named after one of her first films, in which she played a child prostitute, the documentary charts her rise to fame before she found her confidence and what she calls in the trailer her “own opinion” and “own voice.”
She adds at the end of the teaser: “Now, it’s like I’m allowed to be a human being.”
Brooke – who has daughters Rowan, 19, and Grier, 16, with her 58-year-old director husband Chris Henchy – also uses the film to reveal how she was raped
after she was trying to get back into acting following her 1987 graduation from Princeton university.
She says in the film about going back to her attacker’s room after they had dinner to discuss her future career: “I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for a while.”
Brooke added she picked up a pair of binoculars in the room and was using them to watch some volleyball players out of the window when he returned naked and launched his assault.
She said: “I put the binoculars down and he’s right on me. Just like, was wrestling.
“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.’”
Brooke added she got in a taxi after the rape and cried all the way on a trip to her friend’s apartment.
She said she told her head of security Gavin de Becker about the incident, who told her: “That’s rape.”
But Brooke said she responded she was not “willing to believe that” and hasn’t detailed the incident publicly until now.
She said she wrote to her attacker years later, but he did not reply.
Brooke added despite his silence she refused to feel like “a victim” and had “wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body and just keep on the path I was on”.
In her role in ‘Pretty Baby’ aged 11, Brooke appeared naked as a child prostitute with a 29-year-old Keith Carradine.
At 15, she appeared in two more films, ‘The Blue Lagoon’ and ‘Endless Love’, that included sex and nudity.
She also did a nude photoshoot at age 10.
Brooke has said she didn’t lose her virginity until the age of 22 due to a lack of self-confidence.
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