Brooke Shields admits in her new documentary “Pretty Baby” that she was raped as a teenager.
Shields, 57, did not identify her claimed assailant in the two-part documentary, which aired on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. However, she described the assault, which she claims occurred shortly after she graduated from Princeton University in 1987.
She remembers having supper with the man to explore employment options. She reported feeling immediately uneasy after accepting his offer to return to his hotel room to order a taxi.
He said, “Return to the hotel, and I’ll call a cab for you.” Shields narrated. “As I ascend to my hotel room, he vanishes for a while.”
She recalled snatching the man’s binoculars as a distraction as he left the room to observe a group of volleyball players outside the hotel window.
She stated, “The door opens, a naked person walks out, and I’m like, ‘S–t’ with binoculars.” “And as I put down the binoculars, he was right on me. Just like, was wrestling.”
She stated that she believed she might be “choked out or something” if she fought back, so she “completely froze.”
She continued, “I thought one ‘no’ should’ve been enough, and I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,’ and I blocked it out.” “God knows I knew how to separate myself from my body. I had rehearsed that.”
She stated that she departed the hotel room by hailing her own cab and sobbing the entire way to her friend’s residence.
She was unable to comprehend the incident at the moment. Even when her own security expert allegedly warned her, “That’s rape,” she reportedly said, “I’m not willing to believe that.”
The actress from “Blue Lagoon” is not alone in how she dealt with her experience. A 2015 survey of university students in the United States discovered that sixty percent did not recognise being raped, instead characterizing the encounter as “bad sex” or “miscommunication.”
“Women who have an experience that legally would be rape, instead label what happened to them as something that is not a crime, such as a miscommunication,” Heather Littleton, a psychologist at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, told the Guardian in 2021.
The documentary by Shields examines the sexualization she endured during her busy modeling and acting career. The title is derived from the 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” in which Shields, then 11 years old, kisses Keith Carradine, then 29 years old.
When Shields starred in a Calvin Klein ad as a teenager with the phrase “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
Regarding the sexualization of young girls, she told the Guardian in 2021, “I believe it has been done since the dawn of time, and it will continue.”
“There is something extremely alluring about youth,” she continued. “I think it just has different forms, and it’s how you survive it and whether you choose to be victimized by it. It’s not in my nature to be a victim.”
In a recent episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” she recalled the perceptive questions posed by journalists at the beginning of her career, citing the late Barbara Walters in particular.
“She asked me what my measurements were and asked me to stand up,” Shields said on the show. “As I stood up, she seemed to compare herself to this young girl. And I thought, “This is wrong.” “I do not comprehend what this is.”
“However, I merely behaved and smiled,” she continued, adding that she “felt so exploited in so many ways.”
Shields, who previously disclosed she was a virgin until the age of 22, acknowledged she had a touch of guilt for being “so open” because the term “world’s most famous virgin” followed her about.
The actress added on her podcast last year, “I think it was a bit of a mistake for me to be so open about my virginity because it never left me alone.”
Lana Wilson, who directed Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” documentary, is scheduled to release “Pretty Baby” later this year.
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