Over the years, many Hollywood stars have bravely come forward with their experiences of abuse — whether they be survivors of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse or another form of torment.
“It would start with tickling my back and then go into things that were extremely uncomfortable,” Jessica Simpson detailed being sexually abused as a child in her 2020 memoir, Open Book. “I wanted to tell my parents. I was the victim but somehow I felt in the wrong.”
She added: “We never stayed at my parents’ friends’ house again but we also didn’t talk about what I had said.”
Simpson later confronted her alleged attacker, revealing that she eventually forgave them.
“I would say about eight years ago I confronted her,” the Newlyweds alum said during a July 2020 appearance on the “Gift of Forgiveness” podcast. “I went to her and I just said, ‘I know you know what was going on and I know that you were being abused,’ ‘cause she was being abused by an older guy. And basically, and he was always there at the house as well — he never touched me, but he would abuse her and then she would come to me and do the stuff to me — and so in so many ways I felt bad for her and I was allowing the abuse to happen.”
Former Bachelorette Clare Crawley has also been candid about surviving abuse.
“I grew up going to a Catholic school and I was the victim of a predator,” the California-based hairstylist revealed during a September 2021 appearance on Red Table Talk: The Estefans. “My parents looked at Catholic priests as — they held them on a pedestal.”
Crawley, who briefly served as the season 16 lead of The Bachelorette, added: “My parents did the best they could and reached out for the resources they could at the time and sent me to this priest. I don’t think there was any counseling that was done. It was a one-on-one time to be a predator.”
Scroll down to read the accounts of famous survivors such as Tyra Banks, Jessica Simpson and Mary J. Blige.
If you or someone you know are experiencing domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support. If you have experienced sexual assault, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 for confidential support. To report child abuse, consult the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Child Welfare Information Gateway for state-specific reporting phone numbers.
Over the years, many Hollywood stars have bravely come forward with their experiences of abuse — whether they be survivors of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse or another form of torment.
“It would start with tickling my back and then go into things that were extremely uncomfortable,” Jessica Simpson detailed being sexually abused as a child in her 2020 memoir, Open Book. “I wanted to tell my parents. I was the victim but somehow I felt in the wrong.”
She added: “We never stayed at my parents’ friends’ house again but we also didn’t talk about what I had said.”
Simpson later confronted her alleged attacker, revealing that she eventually forgave them.
“I would say about eight years ago I confronted her,” the Newlyweds alum said during a July 2020 appearance on the “Gift of Forgiveness” podcast. “I went to her and I just said, ‘I know you know what was going on and I know that you were being abused,’ ‘cause she was being abused by an older guy. And basically, and he was always there at the house as well — he never touched me, but he would abuse her and then she would come to me and do the stuff to me — and so in so many ways I felt bad for her and I was allowing the abuse to happen.”
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Former Bachelorette Clare Crawley has also been candid about surviving abuse.
“I grew up going to a Catholic school and I was the victim of a predator,” the California-based hairstylist revealed during a September 2021 appearance on Red Table Talk: The Estefans. “My parents looked at Catholic priests as — they held them on a pedestal.”
Crawley, who briefly served as the season 16 lead of The Bachelorette, added: “My parents did the best they could and reached out for the resources they could at the time and sent me to this priest. I don’t think there was any counseling that was done. It was a one-on-one time to be a predator.”
Scroll down to read the accounts of famous survivors such as Tyra Banks, Jessica Simpson and Mary J. Blige.
If you or someone you know are experiencing domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support. If you have experienced sexual assault, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 for confidential support. To report child abuse, consult the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Child Welfare Information Gateway for state-specific reporting phone numbers.
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Amanza Smith
In December 2022, the Selling Sunset star claimed that she was sexually abused by two members of her family when she was between the ages of 3 and 11. “I put on a very strong face, which comes from the fact that from the time I was three years old, I was sexually abused by somebody very close to me, and you have to pretend like that’s not happening,” she told Mr. Warburton magazine, adding that she didn’t fully understand what happened to her until she had children. “Until God gave me a baby girl, it did not click. It hit me one day when my daughter was almost 2, and I was pregnant with my son. I imagined everything that happened to me happening to her. And it changed everything. Suddenly everything made sense. All of the things I had struggled with in my teens, addiction in my 20s, ways I felt I failed, was not motivated, and felt in some way different from my friends.”
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Marcus Mumford
“Like lots of people … I was sexually abused as a child,” the Mumford & Sons musician told GQ in an August 2022 cover story after sharing the song “Cannibal,” which includes pointed lyrics about the traumatic experience.
“[The abuse was not] by family and not in the church, which might be some people’s assumption,” he shared with the outlet. “But I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years.”
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Mena Suvari
The American Beauty star revealed in her 2021 memoir, The Great Peace, that she was raped by a friend of her older brother when she was 12. “I never was all right again,” Suvari wrote, later revealing that she began dating a 26-year-old when she was just 17 and claiming the relationship was sexually and emotionally abusive. “The whole time I worked on American Beauty, I was grinding on empty: working to perfect my part, submitting to [his] demands for kinky threesomes at least three or four times a week, and pretending in both cases that everything was OK. Except it wasn’t. … Little by little he whittled away the thin layer of self-worth I had left.”
In July 2022, the Six Feet Under alum confessed to The Guardian that her experiences with sexual abuse warped the way she views sex and relationships. “I’ve never wanted to speak negatively about things that can be very healthy for other people. I was not given the choice or the permission to do it, and that’s what was so destructive for me,” Suvari said at the time. “All of that still weighs on me because I never got the opportunity to discover myself in that way.”
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Clare Crawley
“Self love is the act of giving a voice to your truth. … As a child of sexual abuse, my young adult years were spent in unhealthy relationships feeling unworthy of the good ones,” the Bachelor Winter Games alum wrote via Instagram in July 2021. “It was a vicious cycle, because the more I chose the wrong men who treated me poorly, the more I believed I wasn’t good enough.”
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Jessica Simpson
The singer revealed in her 2020 memoir, Open Book, that she was sexually abused at the age of 6 at a family friend’s house. “I wanted to tell my parents. I was the victim but somehow I felt in the wrong,” she wrote. Years later, Simpson turned to alcohol and pills to cope before becoming sober in November 2017.
Simpson previously told Elle in 2008 that she had “definitely experienced abuse in a way that I would tell people to take their heart and run.”
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Rosie O’Donnell
The former View host claimed in the book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View that her father, Edward O’Donnell, sexually abused her when she was a child. “It started very young,” the SMILF actress told author Ramin Setoodeh. “And then when my mother died, it sort of ended in a weird way, because then he was with these five children to take care of. On the whole, it’s not something I like to talk about. Of course, it changes everyone. Any child who is put in that position, especially by someone in the family, you feel completely powerless and stuck, because the person you would tell is the person doing it.”
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Rahul Kohli
The iZombie actor shared his story on Twitter in March 2019, writing, “The longer I keep my secret, the longer I feel like I’m protecting someone who doesn’t deserve it and letting down others who are too afraid to step forward and confront their own past. I was a victim of sexual abuse as a child. We are not alone and we are not to blame.”
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Evan Rachel Wood
The Westworld actress detailed a past abusive relationship in March 2019 as she shared portraits from a photo shoot. “The day of this photoshoot, I was so weakened by an abusive relationship,” she wrote in the caption of the Instagram post. “I was emaciated, severely depressed, and could barely stand. I fell into a pool of tears and was sent home for the day.”
In a follow-up post, she shared a pic of scratch marks on her forearm. “2 years into my abusive relationship I resorted to self harm,” she wrote in that caption, not naming her abuser. “When my abuser would threaten or attack me, I cut my wrist as a way to disarm him. It only made the abuse stop temporarily. At that point I was desperate to stop the relentless abuse and I was too terrified to leave.”
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Robin Givens
During their one-year marriage in 1988, the former sitcom star alleged she was physically attacked — and even raped — by her then-husband, boxing champion Mike Tyson. “He shakes, he pushes, he swings,” she told Barbara Walters in an interview while they were still married. (Tyson later admitted to hitting Givens during a 2009 talk show appearance.)
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Jaslene Gonzalez
The America’s Next Top Model winner claimed she was physically and mentally abused by her ex-boyfriend. “It was such a dark moment in my life,” she said. Their relationship ended before she began filming the CW show.
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Tina Turner
The singer was isolated and physically abused by Ike Turner on a regular basis for most of their 16-year marriage. “I have had, basically, my face bashed in, and I never did anything about it,” she said after their 1978 divorce.
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Tyra Banks
The supermodel allegedly dated a man who emotionally abused her and tried to break her down so he could be in control. She said that one day, she woke up and decided to end the relationship because “when you’re done, you know you’re done,” as she revealed on her talk show in 2009.
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Mary J. Blige
The hip-hop singer’s childhood involved sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend, and she was a witness to domestic abuse. “I still can’t give all of me,” she said of her then-husband, Kendu Isaacs, in a 2008 interview with The Guardian. “I need something to walk away with, just in case he decides to walk out the door.”
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Alanis Morissette
The singer received such intense professional pressure and managerial demands to control her weight while recording her first album that she became anorexic and suffered from bulimia. “I’ve had so many [rock bottom] moments in my life,” she told Elle Canada in 2009.
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Sharon Osbourne
The reality star claimed she suffered abuse at the hands of her now-estranged music mogul father. “He would whack me and he used to yank my hair,” she said on a U.K. talk show in 2007. “As punishment, my dad used to lock me in the unlit coal cupboard in the basement. I still panic in confined spaces to this day.”
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Whitney Houston
During a tumultuous 15-year marriage to bad boy Bobby Brown, the late singer reportedly suffered from spousal abuse and even called the police on her husband after a verbal altercation turned physical.
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Ana Ortiz
When she was in her twenties, the Ugly Betty star was in a romantic relationship that turned physically abusive. “It’s something that is always with me,” she told USA Today in 2008
