Brooke Shields is talking out for the primary time about a sexual assault she skilled in her early 20s. The actress and mannequin shares her story in Lana Wilson’s new two-part documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, which premiered as we speak on the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Although Shields doesn’t determine her assaulter within the movie, she confirms it was somebody she knew and was pleasant with. “This is the first time I’ve ever spoken about what happened,” Shields says as she tearfully recounts her story.
At the time the assault occurred, the previous youngster star was trying to re-start her performing profession after stepping away from the highlight to attend Princeton University. But her re-entry into Hollywood proved harder than anticipated. That was when her assaulter first reached out. “I had heard there was a movie being made, and I was in consideration,” Shields remembers within the movie. “It was the first time since college that any interested was sort of expressed [in me].”
“We had a dinner,” she continues. “I thought it was a work meeting. I had met this person before, and he was always nice to me.” But the temper of the assembly abruptly modified halfway via the meal, and she or he rapidly started trying to make an exit. “I said, ‘I have to get a cab,’ and he said, ‘Come back to the hotel — I’ll call you a cab.'”
Following him as much as his resort room, Shields remembers being left alone for a interval of time and feeling unsure what to do. “I don’t want to go over to the phone, because it’s not my phone,” she says. “I don’t want to sit down, because I’m not staying.” While searching on the view of the seashore with a pair of binoculars, her assaulter re-emerged. “The door opens, and the person comes out naked,” she says. “I put the binoculars back and he was right on me.”
“It was like wrestling,” Shields describes, including that she was too petrified of being choked or hit to consider preventing again. “I just absolutely froze. I thought: ‘My one ‘No’ should have been enough. Stay alive and get out.'”
During the assault, Shields says that she “disassociated” herself from her physique, an expertise she’d had earlier in her profession on the set of the 1981 Franco Zeffirelli movie Endless Love. While filming a love scene for that romance, Shields — who was 15 when the movie was shot — remembers the late Italian director grabbing her toe and twisting it to seize the look of “ecstasy” that he wished on digital camera.
“It was more angst than anything because he was hurting me,” Shields says in Pretty Baby. “I didn’t want to appear stupid our untalented, so I just disassociated. It’s like you’re [instantly] zooming out: seeing a situation, but you’re not connected to it. You instantly become. a vapor of yourself around something that’s happening.” (Zeffirelli additionally directed the 1968 movie model of Romeo & Juliet that featured a short nude scene with the movie’s then-underage stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. Both actors are actually suing Paramount over the scene.
When the assault ended, Shields remembers her still-nude attacker not even acknowledging what occurred. “The next thing I know, the door is open and the person says, ‘I’ll see you around.’ I just said ‘Yeah,’ and walked out, went down in the elevator and got my own cab. I cried all the way to my friend’s apartment.”
According to Shields, she later confronted her assaulter in a letter fairly than talk about the incident publicly. “I said, ‘That was a huge trust that was just blown up. How dare you? I’m better than that. I’m better than you are. That’s the way I dealt with things. I wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body and just keep on the path that I was on. The system had never once come to help me. So I just had to get stronger on my own.”
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter previous to the Sundance premiere of Pretty Baby, Shields mentioned that she initially wasn’t positive if she’d share her story when she sat right down to be interviewed by Wilson for the movie. “I had no idea I was going to say it,” she defined, including that the tenor of the #MeToo instances made her notice now can be the proper time to talk up. “I feel as a mother of two young girls that I hope that just by even hearing my incident that I can add myself to becoming an advocate. Because this is something that does happen every day, and it should not be happening. I felt that I had arrived at a place where I could talk about it. It’s taken me a long time.”
Premiering on Hulu later this 12 months, Pretty Baby options Shields reflecting on a lot of her high-profile relationships, together with with Michael Jackson, who she says was by no means a romantic companion regardless of the extreme public scrutiny of their years-long friendship. “We met when I was 13 and we hung out,” she remembers within the movie. “It was very childlike.”
“We were just really friends,” Shields continues. “But he always wanted to be sort of seen with me. If he would pick a restaurant, I would say, ‘How did [the paparazzi] know we were here?’ And then at one point, he said that we should adopt a child and raise a child together.”
The actress additionally signifies that Jackson lied when he instructed Oprah Winfrey that he and Shields had been relationship throughout a well-known TV interview in 1993. “I called him [afterwards] and said, ‘What are you doing?'” she remembers. “‘I’m currently with my boyfriend in New York City! What are you doing?’ I eventually lost touch with him.”
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premieres on Hulu later this 12 months.
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