Selma Blair discusses being raped multiple times in new memoir
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Selma Blair is gearing up to release her new memoir, Mean Baby, and in it she talks about some traumatic moments from her past including multiple times she was raped.
In excerpts from the book which were published in People magazine on Wednesday (May 11), the Cruel Intentions actor has opened up about her problems with alcoholism – which started at the age of seven – and how after a day of binge-drinking, she was raped by at least one if not two people.
“I don’t know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did,” Blair writes in the book, according to People. “I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn’t. I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words ‘Please. Stop.’ Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed.”
Blair told People that until now she had only shared these experiences with her therapist, but she thinks writing about it will help her heal from that trauma.
“I had so much shame and blame,” she told the publication. “I’m grateful I felt safe enough to put it on the page. And then can work on it with a therapist and with other writing, and really relieve that burden of shame on myself.”
Blair also writes in Mean Baby about how she was sexually assaulted by a teacher at a school she attended when she was in her teens.
Viewing him as a friend and someone she could trust, Blair thought he was “the greatest man” she had ever met. But she said she couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen next. “I trusted authority. I was just a teenager,” she writes.
She claims he sexually assaulted her in his office when she went to say goodbye a day before a winter break.
“We embraced. It felt too long and too still and too quiet,” she says in the book. She then claims he kissed her put his hands inside of her underwear. “He didn’t rape me,” she writes. “He didn’t threaten me. But he broke me. Nothing ever happened again, but I never felt safe.”
Elsewhere in the book, Blair, who has been sober since 2016, explains how she began drinking at the age of seven, describing getting drunk for the first time at Passover as “a revelation”.
“As I took small sips of the Manischewitz I was allowed throughout the seder a light flooded through me, filling me up with the warmth of God. But the year I was seven, when we basically had Manischewitz on tap and no one was paying attention to my consumption level, I put it together: the feeling was not God but fermentation.”
The actor – who has starred in films such as Hellboy, A Guy Thing, The Fog, and Legally Blonde – added that during her early years she often didn’t get drunk but instead would take “quick sips whenever my anxiety would alight”.
“I usually barely even got tipsy. I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret.”
Blair has previously discussed her personal struggles, speaking publicly in 2018 about her battle with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
In a lengthy statement on Instagram, Blair said: “I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things,” before explaining she was “overwhelmed” by the news at first.
Mean Baby is released on May 17. You can pre-order it here.
