Dax Shepard’s Shocking Admission: ‘I Was Molested As A Child’
Actor Dax Shepard admitted today that he was molested as a child, which he says played a significant role in his later struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction.
On The Jason Ellis Show today, actor Dax Shepard discussed his childhood trauma and how it shaped his adult life. Sober since 2004, Shepard admits it hasn’t been easy to talk about even though he characterizes the molestation as “minimal.”
“Yeah I was molested, by an 18-year-old dude in my neighborhood,” said Dax Shepard, reports USA Today. “It was minimal, it wasn’t anything like what you recounted, but even at that, it took me 12 years to tell anyone that.”
According to Shepard being molested was a significant factor in his personal struggle with addiction. Shepard says it took him around 12 years to admit the abuse to anyone, and admitting it to himself was the hardest part of all.
“It took me 12 years to tell anyone, and then all that time I was like ‘It’s my fault’ as generic as that is, I’m like ‘it’s my fault and I’m gay and I must have manifested this because I’m secretly gay’ I had all these insane thoughts for eleven or twelve years,” Shepard told The Jason Ellis Show today.
After admitting for the first time that he was molested as a child, Dax Shepard continued, describing how the abuse played a role in his later struggles with addiction. Shepard reportedly attributed the abuse to his alcoholism and drug use after his mother told him about a statistic linking molestation with substance abuse.
“If you’ve been molested, you only have a 20 percent chance of not being an addict,” said Dax Shepard.
Shepard says at first he just thought he “liked to have a good time” and didn’t see his alcoholism or drug use as a problem, but once his mother – a court-appointed advocate for foster kids- told him about the statistic linking sexual molestation to substance abuse, Shepard says it all made sense.
Previously, Dax Shepard has been relatively open about his struggles with addiction, reports Us Weekly, describing his previous hard-partying lifestyle in interviews with various outlets.
“I just loved to get f—ked up, drinking cocaine, opiates marijuana, diet pills, pain pills, everything. Mostly my love was Jack Daniel’s and cocaine,” Shepard said, discussing his struggles with addiction.
.@DaxShepard1 Reveals That He Was Molested As a Child, Blames Experience for Addiction https://t.co/BPFj91pVrV pic.twitter.com/0GhDXLgAX1
— TheWrap (@TheWrap) April 18, 2016
After dating actress Kristen Bell, Shepard reportedly worried that his hard-partying past might come back to haunt him, he’d only been sober for around three years when he started dating the Veronica Mars star.
“All the things I’d done were terrifying to her, and she had a hard time believing I would ever be able to stay married and monogamous and a father and all those things. For the first year and a half we were together, that was what we battled over almost weekly,” Dax Shepard told Playboy in an interview back in 2012.
According to USA Today, Shepard’s shocking admission that he was molested as a child is the first time the former Parenthood star has admitted to being molested, despite being open about his struggles with addiction in the past. Today’s admission came on the Jason Ellis Show, hosted by Jason Ellis who himself had previously admitted to being molested by his father.
According to Shepard, during the time before he’d told anyone about being molested, he was tortured by “insane” thoughts about how the abuse was his fault. Reportedly, Dax Shepard was only 7-years-old when he was molested by a neighborhood “dude” around 11 years older than he was.
The trauma he endured after being molested led him to drugs and alcoholism, Shepard says, a lifestyle so rowdy he admits that he was lucky that he didn’t go to jail.
[Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images]
