NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 12: Brooke Shields attends MoMA’s Twelfth Annual Film Benefit presented by CHANEL honoring Laura Dern on November 12, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for MoMA)
Craig Barritt/Getty
Brooke Shields has never shied away from speaking out about how she was sexualized as a child star in Hollywood. But now the actress reveals she was raped as a young adult.
In the new documentary Pretty Baby, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, Shields didn’t name her attacker, but instead detailed the events of a sexual assault that happened shortly after graduating from college at Princeton, when she was struggling to find work to be found after their early success. Shields met the man in question for dinner, ostensibly to discuss work. Then she returned to his hotel room and waited to hail a cab.
“He said, ‘Come back to the hotel and I’ll call a cab,'” Shields explains in the film. “And I’m going up to the hotel room and he’s gone for a while.”
Shields, uncomfortable in a room that wasn’t hers, decided to use the binoculars the man had left in the room and watched some volleyball players out the window. “The door opens, the person comes out naked, and I have the binoculars and I say ‘S—‘,” she continues. “And I put down the binoculars and he was right on top of me. Just like wrestling.”
Shields continued with her account, explaining that she did not try to run away because she feared it would provoke further physical violence. “I was afraid I would suffocate or something,” she says. “So I didn’t fight that much. I did not. I just froze. I thought saying ‘no’ should have been enough and I just thought ‘live and get out’ and I just closed it God knows I knew how to get out of my body. I had practiced that… I took the elevator down and got my own taxi. I just cried all the way to my boyfriend’s place.
For a long time, the actress did not even process the experience as a sexual assault. Even when her security specialist Gavin de Becker pointed it out to her. “He said, ‘That’s rape.’ And I said, ‘I’m not ready to believe that,'” she says.
The story goes on
Shields had already been sexually objectified by Hollywood when she appeared nude in the 1978 film Pretty Baby (which lends the documentary its title) and kissed 29-year-old Keith Carradine when she was just 11. By age 15, she was appearing in two more films, Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, which involved sex and nudity, as well as her iconic Calvin Klein jeans commercials, which touted, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” “
Pretty babe Brooke Shields
Getty Images/Courtesy of Sundance Institute Brooke Shields stars in the documentary Pretty Baby, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Despite this history, Shields couldn’t help but feel that she was in some way responsible for her own attack. “I had to do that with my brain,” she admits. “He said to me, ‘I can trust you and I can’t trust people.’ It’s so cliche, it’s pathetic. I kind of felt like I was sending a message, and so the message got caught. I had wine at dinner. I went upstairs to the room. I was just so trusting.”
She then goes on to say that she wrote her attacker a letter saying he had broken a “huge trust” in him, but that he was turned away.
“I just threw up my hands 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 have prepared for or not,'” concludes you . “I wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body and just stay on the path I was on. The system had never come to my rescue once. So I just had to get stronger on my own.”
Shields has previously addressed sexualization at a young age in two memoirs. But this is the first time she has revealed details of an attack of this type.
Lena Wilson (Miss Americana) directed the documentary, which will premiere on Hulu later this year.
Additional reporting by Mike Miller.
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