Julianne Hough Opens Up About Sexual Abuse She Suffered as a 4-Year-Old: “Nobody Did Anything”

Trigger Warning: This article contains themes of child and sexual abuse that may disturb some readers.

Julianne Hough recently opened up about how a neighbor sexually molested her when she was just four years old. On Thursday, August 15th broadcast of The Jamie Kern Lima Show, Hough discussed the traumatic event. As reported by Us Weekly, she confessed, "My first experience was when I was about 4 years old. [It was] a neighbor in our cul-de-sac."

She recounted, "I’ve actually never said that out loud to someone in an interview before. That was a very confusing time, because growing up in the Mormon culture, everything needs to be perfect." She stressed that there were "not a lot of repercussions for what had happened." Hough added, "And by the way, I'm not the only one in my family that has gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with. Nobody did anything."

The actress shared that she didn't inform her parents about the event until later in her life as she 'forgot' about it. However, she did address other things that happened during her childhood, when she was about fifteen. Although she 'blocked out' the incident growing up, she admitted that her current healing process brought back memories she had previously repressed. "I forgot about it. Then other things happened later in my childhood and at about 15...I started sharing those things but I forgot about the neighbor thing. It wasn’t until I started doing the work recently. That’s why I blocked out from 10-15 because I had completely disassociated from that happening."

Additionally, in a 2013 cover story for Cosmopolitan, Hough discussed her experiences in a London dance school with her brother Derek, revealing that she was "abused mentally [and] physically" when she was 10 years old. On The Jamie Kern Lima Show, she shared that the event "reinforced giving [her] power to other people," taught her not to trust anybody, and made her tone down her "effervescence of beauty because that was the attractive part" of her. 

Later when she confided in her parents about the abuse she endured as a teenager. Hough revealed, "At the time, when I was younger, I think they also didn't know what to do. And we're also in a position of not feeling capable or also feeling helpless. And so, I think now that we’ve had these conversations, they’ve also said those things." The actress argued that after her divorce from Brooks Laich in 2020, she had a chance to reconnect with her parents. "During my divorce, I really reconnected with my parents and they showed up for me...And I needed that. I reclaimed my parental relationship with them and I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me. And that was the most healing [thing]."