Selma Blair started drinking when she was just seven years old and was raped “several times” while drunk.
The 49-year-old actress recalls how hitting the bottle at a young age was a ‘huge relief’ as it provided her with a ‘coping mechanism’ for her anxiety, and her alcohol abuse subsided. is intensified in the teens and early twenties.
She told People magazine: “I don’t know if I would have survived childhood without alcoholism. That’s why it’s such a problem for a lot of people. It’s really a huge comfort, a huge relief at the beginning. Maybe even the first years for me because I started very young with that as a comfort, as a coping mechanism.”
And in her excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, ‘Mean Baby’, she wrote: “The first time I got drunk was an eye opener. I’ve always loved Passover. As I took small sips of Manischewitz, I was treated throughout the seder to a light that flooded me, filling me with the warmth of God.
“But the year I was seven, when we basically had Manischewitz under pressure and no one was paying attention to my level of drinking, I put it right: the feeling was not God but the fermentation. I thought to myself, “Well, this is a huge disappointment, but since it turns out that I can get the warmth of the Lord from a bottle, thank God there is one here.
“I got drunk that night. Very drunk. Eventually I was put in my sister Katie’s bed with her. In the morning I couldn’t remember how I got there.”
During his early years of drinking, the ‘Cruel Intentions’ star didn’t drink but drank “quick sips” whenever “his anxiety kicked in.”
She added: “Usually I hardly got drunk. I became an expert alcoholic, able to hide my secret.”
Selma also recounted a traumatic incident on a college trip over spring break when she was raped after a day of drinking – and admitted it wasn’t the only time she was sexually assaulted then that she was drunk.
She wrote: “I don’t know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did.
“I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn’t. been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words “Please. Stop.” Only that time was violent. I came out of every event calm and shameful.”
Besides telling her therapist about it, the ‘Cruel Intentions’ star – who has been sober since 2016 – had never spoken about being repeatedly raped, but writing it down in her book has helped to heal.
She said: “Writing that stopped me dead. My sense of trauma was greater than I thought. I hadn’t realized that the assault was so central to my life. I had so much shame and of blame. I’m grateful that I felt safe enough to put it on the page. And then I can work on it with a therapist and with other writing, and really ease that burden of shame on myself.”
