“I didn’t fight that much.
I just absolutely froze.”
Brooke Shieldshas never shied away from talking about the ways she was sexualized as a child star in Hollywood.
Credit: Craig Barritt/Getty
But now the actress is revealing that she was raped as a young adult.
Shields met with the man in question for dinner, ostensibly to discuss work.
She then returned to his hotel room to wait to call a taxi.
Brooke Shields appears in documentary ‘Pretty Baby,’ which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.Getty Images/Courtesy of Sundance Institute
“And I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for awhile.”
“And 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,” she says.
“So I didn’t fight that much.
I just absolutely froze.
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 didn’t even process the experience as a sexual assault for a long time.
Even when it was 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 says.
“That was what I had to do to my brain,” she admits.
“He said to me, ‘I can trust you and I can’t trust people.’
It’s so cliche, 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.”
The system had never once come to help me.
So I just had to get stronger on my own."
Shields has previously addressed being sexualized from a young age in two memoirs.
But this is the first time she has revealed details of an assault of this nature.
Lena Wilson (Miss Americana) directed the documentary, which will be on Hulu later this year.
Additional reporting by Mike Miller.
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