Christina Applegate opens up about childhood sexual abuse.
Applegate has written her memoir, You with the sad eyes, sharing the sexual assault, her turbulent relationships and more.
The actress’ mother Nancy Pridy raised her alone after divorcing her father, producer and director Robert. At the age of 5, she was abused by a female babysitter.
“I knew everything was wrong. I felt sick, scared and sad,” she writes in her book, per People. The result was: “I never felt completely comfortable being touched, and that’s still the case. I’ve never felt comfortable with it all my life, really, and it’s all because that girl forced me to do something that I barely understood, but that I knew was embarrassing.”
The actress’s diaries, which she has kept since she was 13, proved useful in writing her memoirs.
“I’ve wanted to write this my whole life,” she told the outlet of her memoir. “The pen on the table afterwards said, ‘Oh, I just wrote all this down, but now I don’t want anyone to read it.'”
Reading about the most painful parts of her life hasn’t been easy, but Applegate thinks she’s strong enough to deal with it.
“To be honest, it’s opened up so many wounds, and it’s okay because I’m a strong girl, I’m going to get through it,” she said. “But it wasn’t like you went to the other side and said, ‘Ah, now it’s over.’ They were things I had never talked about before. The things that happened behind closed doors that only the people closest to me have ever known happened.”
