Demi Moore is talking about her struggles with ex-husband Ashton Kutcher and the effects their relationship had on her three daughters.
“The addiction and the co-dependency… like my addiction to Ashton — that was probably almost more devastating because it took me seriously away emotionally,” Moore, 56, said on Monday’s Red Table Talk on Facebook Watch.
Moore sat down with hosts Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris, the actress and two of her three daughters: Rumer and Tallulah Willis, spoke about her spiral into addiction after almost 20 years of sobriety.
Tallulah, 25, spoke about the repercussions her mother’s addiction had on her after her older sisters, Rumer, 31, and Scout, 28, moved out.
“Watching the behavior with Ashton, those years, because everyone had left the house and it was just me living there. I felt very forgotten and I feel like I developed and nurtured a narrative where she didn’t love me and I truly believed it,” Tallulah said. “I know that she does, 100 percent but in that moment you’re hurt.”
“It was like the sun went down and a monster would come. I remember there was just the anxiety that would come up in my body when I could sense her eyes shutting a little more or the way she was speaking or she would be a lot more affectionate with me if she wasn't sober,” she adds. “It was jarring and very weird. There were moments where I would get angry and I recall being very upset and kind of treating her like a child and speaking to her like a child and being like, ‘Please get away from me.' And she got very angry. It would happen in front of friends. It was not the mom that we had grown up with.”
For Rumer, though, she says she felt “so angry” for “so much of that time” because “I felt like something that was mine had been taken away.”
“I think also when she wanted to have another baby and then it wasn’t happening, and there was so much focus on that, it was like, ‘Oh, we're not enough,'” Rumer explains. “Part of the reason I moved out of the house, I think after you had a miscarriage, I was just like, ‘Why are you so desperate to have another kid?' And I couldn’t’ stand the idea.”
“But then I found these pictures and I was like, ‘Oh my god.' I saw how big her stomach was and I was like, ‘Oh my god. I was so insensitive,'” Rumer continues. “I never once went to you and said, ‘I'm sorry. Are you OK?'”
Rumer went on to say, “You had always chosen us. You always chose us first and made that a priority… Being around a woman as your mother who is this, like, infallible woman who can take on anything, even my dad… Always together, always in control. [And then] not being in control around a man. Like, who is this person? I'm like, ‘I don’t know who this is and they are supposed to be my rock.'”
