Brooke Shields is opening up about being sexually assaulted by a powerful Hollywood executive over 30 years ago.
The actress, now 57, recalled how she thought at the time, “No one is going to believe me,” as she spoke to People in a new interview.
Shields added, “People weren’t believing those stories back then. I thought I would never work again.”
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The model also discussed the assault in her upcoming two-part documentary, “Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby”, set to premiere April 3 on Hulu.
She told People of speaking out in the doc, “Doing the documentary, you see it all together, and it’s a miracle that I survived.
“It’s taken me a long time to process it,” Shields continued of the assault that happened when she was in her 20s.
“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.”
Shields recalled being at the “lowest point of my career” at the time, with her unable to find much work as a recent Princeton University graduate.
She said of the dinner with the exec, “I thought I was getting a movie, a job,” with her saying how she blamed herself for going up to his hotel room to call a cab.
“I didn’t fight,” she said in the doc. “I just froze.”
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Shields, who only told her close friend and former security consultant, Gavin de Becker, of the assault, added of blaming herself, “I kept saying, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Why did I go up with him? I shouldn’t have had that drink at dinner.'”
“It was really easy to disassociate because by then it was old hat,” she went on. “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.'”
