Charlize Theron Reveals Details About the Death of Her Abusive Dad
Charlize Theron 44, opened up in a recent interview to NPR on some personal details on her abusive father's death.
Her mother actually shot her abusive father in self-defense because he was abusing her when Charlize was only 15-years-old.
So who exactly was Theron's father? Her dad's name was Charles Theron. He was born to Elizabeth Johanna Theron Beets and Daniel Theron in South Africa in 1947, but not much else is known about his personal life. He got married to Gerda Maritz and the two had one daughter, Charlize, whom they raised on a farm in Benoni, South Africa. However, living with Charles proved to be beyond stressful.
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Charlize Theron Speaks to NPR
She told NPR,"My father was a very sick man. My father was an alcoholic all my life. I only knew him one way, and that was as an alcoholic. ... It was a pretty hopeless situation."
Charlize said that he came home wasted with a gun and he nearly killed her and her mom, Gerda.
She explained: "My father was so drunk that he shouldn't have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun. My mom and I were in my bedroom leaning against the door, because he was trying to push through the door."
"So both of us were leaning against the door from the inside to have him not be able to push through," she continued. "He took a step back and just shot through the door three times. None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defense, she ended the threat."
Gerda acted in self-defense against her then-husband to save herself and her daughter, no charges were brought against her.
Charlize Theron Talks About Her Dad
Charlize pointed out, that what happened that night wasn't nearly as scarring as the abuse that she and her mom had to deal with every day.
"Our family was just kind of stuck in it. And the day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night. I think our family was an incredibly unhealthy one. And all of it, I think, scarred us in a way.”
Charlize and Her Mom Gerda are True Survivors
In a 2017 interview with Howard Stern, Charlize confessed that she wanted to keep the whole thing a secret and pretend like nothing ever happened. She said: “I didn’t tell anybody — I didn’t want to tell anybody. Whenever anybody asked me, I said my dad died in a car accident. Who wants to tell that story? Nobody wants to tell that story.”
This all changed after Charlize started seeking therapy in her twenties. She eventually discovered that she was actually okay with her father's passing and that the real root of her problems involved the "everyday nightmare" of growing up with an alcoholic.
As for Greda, Charlize shared that her mom was a tough survivor.
