"I thought I was getting a movie, a job," says Brooke Shields of the fateful night more than 30 years ago that she dined with an unnamed Hollywood exec. She needed it, having been unable to land much work at the time. Instead, she ended up being sexually assaulted, the actor revealed for the first time on Wednesday. In an interview with People ahead of the two-part Hulu documentary, Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, premiering April 3, Shields recounts accepting the exec's invitation to head up to his hotel room to call a cab. That's when the assault happened. "I didn't fight. I just froze."
She says she long faulted herself—for agreeing to going to his room, for having a drink at dinner. She says she made the decision to tell a single person, friend Gavin de Becker. "No one is going to believe me," Shields recalled thinking. "People weren't believing those stories back then. I thought I would never work again." The 57-year-old says "it's taken me a long time to process it" and "it's a miracle that I survived." She hopes that by speaking up now, she can help others who are processing their own trauma on their own timelines.
Rolling Stone reports the documentary also "finds Shields confronting the childhood sexual exploitation underpinning her early career": from her role in Pretty Baby at age 11 to the legal battle she and her mother waged against Gary Gross, who had taken nudes of a then-10-year-old Shields during a modeling job with her mother's consent. Gross prevailed, but the upshot of the documentary, per director Lana Wilson, is that Shields "gradually gained agency over her own life." (If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE or visit rainn.org.)
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