Earlier this month, Dax Shepard revealed a secret he had held onto for more than 10 years of his childhood: that he had been molested at the age of seven by an 18-year-old "dude in my neighbourhood."
"It was minimal... but even at that, it took me 12 years to tell anyone," he revealed on Sirius XM’s "The Jason Ellis Show."
The event had a long-term effect on the 41-year-old father of two who never forgot the incident. He blamed himself and thought, "I must have manifested this because I’m secretly gay. I had all these insane thoughts for 11 years or 12 years."
On the show, Shepard, who has been open about his issues with addiction, had been talking about his mom's work when he made the revelation. In her retirement, the actor's mom is a court-appointed advocate for children in foster care.
To be certified for that role, she attends workshops about the various issues the kids face and she shared a statistic with her son.
“If you’ve been molested, you only have a 20 per cent chance of not being an addict,” he said on the show. “And I was like, ‘Hmm, interesting,’ because in my mind I just like to have a f$%*ing great time. But when you hear a statistic like that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.'”
In an interview with "Playboy," the actor talked about life in his 20s: "Mostly my love was Jack Daniel's and cocaine... I lived for going down the rabbit hole of meeting weird people. Of course, come Monday I would be tallying up all the different situations, and each one was progressively more dangerous. I got lucky in that I didn’t go to jail."
Other celebrities who have gone public with being the victims of childhood sexual abuse include Tyler Perry, who was sexually abused by four adults, and musician Scott Weiland, who was raped at the age of 12 by a high school senior.
"I think that everyone who's been abused, there is a string to the puppet master, and they're holding you hostage to your behaviours and what you do," Perry told Oprah back in 2010. "At some point, you have to be responsible for them. What I started to do is untie the strings and chase them down to where they came from. And I was able to free myself and understand that even though these things happened to me, it was not me."
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