‘I’m More Angry Now’: Brooke Shields Discusses Her Sexual Assault and Learning to Process It
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Brooke Shields opened up about the time she was sexually assaulted by an unnamed Hollywood executive, admitting to People, “I’m more angry now than I was able to be then.”
Shields publicly reveals the assault for the first time in her new two-part documentary, Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will arrive on Hulu on April 3. The assault occurred over 30 years ago, at a time when Shields was struggling to find work as an actress. After dinner with a Hollywood executive, whom she thought might have a role for her, the executive invited her to call for a cab from his hotel room, where she says he assaulted her.
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In the movie, Shields says, “I just absolutely froze. My one ‘no’ should have been enough. And I just thought, ‘Stay alive, and get out.’ And I just shut it out. And god knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practiced that.”
Now, speaking with People, Shields said, “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.”
Shields added, “I’d always had a sense of dissociation from my body. From my sexuality… And it was just easier to shut myself off. I was good at it.” Because of that, Shields admitted, it took a long time for her to “process” the assault. In speaking about it now, she said she hopes to help “people not feel alone.”
“Everybody processes their own trauma on a different timeline,” she said. “I want to be an advocate for women to be able to speak their truth.”
Along with opening up about the assault, the new documentary finds Shields confronting the childhood sexual exploitation underpinning her early career. This includes her heavily sexualized roles in films like Pretty Baby (she was just 11 and played an exploited child living in a brothel) and movies she made as a teenager, like Blue Lagoon and Endless Love. The film also delves into a harrowing legal battle that ensued after Shields and her mother sued the photographer (and one-time family friend) Garry Gross, who was trying to sell some nude photos he’d taken of Shields when she was 10 for a modeling job tied to Playboy Press; Gross ultimately won the right to keep doing what he wanted with the pictures.
The doc’s director, Lana Wilson, noted that the film is ultimately a story about Shields’ perseverance: “I saw someone who gradually gained agency over her own life,” she told People. “Brooke was open, game for anything, fearless. The only concern she voiced at that first meeting was that this wouldn’t be deep enough.”
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