Brooke Shields revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a Hollywood executive 30 years ago, when she was a model and actor in her 20s.
In her upcoming documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the 57-year-old recalls a dinner with a Hollywood executive that she assumed would result in a movie role. After, however, the unnamed man invited her to call a cab to his hotel room, where he assaulted her. “I didn’t fight,” she says in the documentary, per People. “I just froze.” At the time, she was a recent Princeton graduate struggling to find work during what she describes as the “lowest point” in her career.
“No one is going to believe me,” she recalled thinking of the assault when it happened. “People weren’t believing those stories back then. I thought I would never work again. It’s taken me a long time to process it,” she said. “I’m more angry now than I was able to be then. If you’re afraid, you’re rightfully so. They are scary situations. They don’t have to be violent to be scary.”
Brooke Shields noted that at the time, it was easy for her to “shut” herself “off” given the nature of her career as an actor and model. “I’d always had a sense of disassociation from my body,” she added.
The documentary also dives into her life and career, including the sexualization she experienced from a young age in the entertainment industry; she played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978) and starred in the film The Blue Lagoon, which featured a lot of nudity and was filmed when Shields was only 14 years old.
The two-part documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premieres on Hulu on Monday, April 3.
