Brooke Shields Details Struggle After Rape

In documentary, actress says she hopes her account helps others
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 21, 2023 3:30 PM CST
Brooke Shields Details Struggle After Rape
Brooke Shields attends the premiere of a documentary, "Pretty Baby," on Friday in Park City, Utah.   (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

In a new documentary, Brooke Shields says that when she was raped in a hotel room in her 20s, she called on her experience as a sexualized child star. "God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body," she says. "I'd practiced that." Shields gives the account in Pretty Baby, which had its premiere Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, Entertainment Weekly reports. The actress, 57, says it's the first time she's discussed the assault publicly. After years of therapy, Shields said, "I've come to a place, and we've come to a time in our society, where we can talk about these things much more openly." Pretty Baby is scheduled to air on Hulu later in the year, per Yahoo Entertainment.

Shields says in the film that the attack happened soon after she graduated from Princeton, after what she thought was a working dinner with a man in the entertainment industry and they went to his hotel room to call a taxi. When the man, whom she doesn't identify, attacked, Shields said she froze. "I was afraid I'd get choked out or something," she said. "So I didn't fight that much. I didn't." She couldn't mentally process the attack as rape, Shields said, for a long time, even rejecting her security specialist's assurance that that's what happened. She also blamed herself. Shields said she discussed the attack now in hopes of helping others "who might possibly be struggling or trying to survive this," per People. "I'm hoping to be that type of an advocate," she added. (More Brooke Shields stories.)

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