BANG Showbiz English
Brooke Shields “blamed herself” when she was sexually assaulted in Hollywood more than 30 years ago.
The 57-year-old model mistakenly believed she was having a meeting about a part in a movie when she was invited to a hotel room in the 1990s but thought no-one would believe her if she told of the attack and since opening up about the incident in her new Hulu documentary ‘Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby’, explained that it is a “miracle” she survived the trauma.
She told this week’s edition of PEOPLE: “People weren’t believing those stories back then. I thought I would never work again. Doing the documentary, you see it all together, and it’s a miracle that I survived. It’s taken me a long time to process it. I’m more angry now than I was able to be then. If you’re afraid, you’re rightfully so. They are scary situations. They don’t have to be violent to be scary. I thought I was getting a movie job, I didn’t fight, I just froze.
“I kept saying, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Why did I go up with him? I shouldn’t have had that drink at dinner.'”
The ‘Suddenly Susan’ star – who has daughters Rowan, 16, and 16-year-old Grier with husband Chris Henchy but was initially married to married to tennis champion Andre Agassi from 1997 to 1999 – went on to add that she has always had a “disassociation” with her own sexuality and was able to put herself into a “fight-or-flight” mode after the alleged attack as she admitted it was “easier” to shut off the whole ordeal because of her career.
She added: “It was really easy to disassociate because by then it was old hat. And because it was a fight-or-flight type of choice. Fight was not an option, so you just leave your body. ‘You’re not there. It didn’t happen. It was really easy to disassociate because by then it was old hat,” she recalls. “And because it was a fight-or-flight type of choice. Fight was not an option, so you just leave your body. ‘You’re not there. It didn’t happen.
“I was mostly a cover girl, so it’s all here. And it was just easier to shut myself off. I was good at it.”
‘Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby’ streams on Hulu from April 3.
