Brooke Shields Excuses Her Mother for Putting Her in Nude Photoshoots as a Child: ‘She Had a Crazy Justification for Things’

Brooke Shields reflected on her relationship with her mother and former manager, Teri Shields, and her notorious lawsuit against photographer Garry Gross during a Tuesday appearance on “The Howard Stern Show.” The appearance follows the release of her Hulu documentary “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.”

“She had this like crazy justification for things,” the actress said of her mother putting her in nude photoshoots at a young age. “She believed that as long as she was in my personal life, keeping me safe and virginal and pure and all that, that she was sparing me.”

Shields, who participated in a nude photoshoot for the Playboy Press publication Sugar ‘n’ Spice at 10 years old in 1975, sued Gross in an effort to keep the pictures hidden. But they were eventually published years later.

“He waited till I was famous to do it, too, which was just gross,” Shields said.

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“You know nowadays, the norm is different. If you went to court now, they would say, ‘This is kiddie porn, there’s no way this guy’s allowed to release it,'” Stern posed, incredulously. “But back then, they were like, ‘F–k you.'”

“Yeah, I lost, and the prosecuting attorney was just such a prick,” Shields recalled. “He was making lewd gestures to me [in court], and nobody was seeing it. It was so surreal.”

Years later, Shields made the tough decision to fire her mother as her manager in the 1990s, a process she details in the Hulu documentary.

“You have guilt and fear and sadness because you know she could play the martyr and say, ‘You see everybody leaves me.’ She was sort of raging and couldn’t believe I left her in a such a violent way,” Shields explained. “I had tried doing it systematic desensitization but it wasn’t going to work with her, nothing was ever not extreme with her. And then she said to Lisa, my best friend from high school, she’s like, ‘Brooke, you’re not going to believe what she said, your mom looked at me and said: But that took balls.'”

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“She saw the fighter in me, and although she was angry, I think she was like, ‘All right, she’s not a wimp, the kid,’ and she had to give me props because it was really a ballsy thing,” Shields added. “I gutted her office, I took everything overnight, and it was a very difficult thing for her to witness happening.”

Watch a segment from the interview in the video above.

“Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” is streaming on Hulu now.