Chrissy Metz Says She Was Physically Abused By Her Stepfather As A Teen

Chrissy Metz says she was “a tough cookie” growing up, but that didn’t stop her stepfather from abusing her.

The “This Is Us” actress, in People magazine’s April cover story, talks about her hard teenage years and her upcoming memoir, This Is Me, which hits bookstores March 27. In an excerpt from the book, Metz tells how she was 8 when her biological father left her mother. Her stepfather, who she called Trigger, came into her life a few years later.

“I don’t remember why Trigger hit me the first time,” Metz writes of her childhood in Gainesville, Florida. “He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much. He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong. I remember being on the kitchen floor after he knocked me over, and I was begging to know what I did. He just shoved me hard with his foot.”

Metz, now 37, said her stepfather loved his two biological children, but not her. She said he constantly body shamed her, and began weighing her when she was 14.

“He’d get the scale from the bathroom and clang it hard on the kitchen floor. ‘Well, get on the damn thing!’ Trigger would yell. ‘This is what you need to know,’” Metz said.

“My body seemed to offend him, but he couldn’t help but stare, especially when I was eating. He joked about putting a lock on the refrigerator. We had lived with a lack of food for so long that when it was there, I felt like I had to eat it before it disappeared,” she continued. “Food was my only happiness.”

Head over to People to read the article on Metz.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.