Selma Blair Opens Up About Decades-Long Alcohol Addiction Starting at Age 7 and Multiple Rapes

Hilary Lewis
·4 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Selma Blair hasn’t been shy about sharing details of her personal struggles, speaking publicly about her battle with multiple sclerosis since she was diagnosed in 2018, but she reveals new, shocking experiences from her past in her new memoir, Mean Baby.

In the book, excerpts of which were published in People magazine on Wednesday, Blair explains how she began drinking at the age of 7.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

“The first time I got drunk it was a revelation,” she writes, according to People. “I always liked Passover. 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. I thought ‘Well this is a huge disappointment, but since it turns out I can get the warmth of the Lord from a bottle, thank God there’s one right here.’ I got drunk that night. Very drunk. Eventually, I was put in my sister Katie’s bed with her. In the morning, I didn’t remember how I’d gotten there.”

In her early years, Blair, who has been sober since 2016, writes that 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,” she writes.

But she drank more in her teens and 20s and after a day of binge-drinking on a college spring break trip, 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,” she writes. “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. 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.”

Speaking with People, Blair explains how she had only shared the multiple rapes with her therapist but writing about it, she thinks, will help her heal from that trauma.

“Writing that stopped me dead in my tracks,” she says. “My sense of trauma was bigger than I knew. I did not realize that assault was so central in my life. I had so much shame and blame. 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 about how she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by one of the deans of the Cranbrook boarding school she attended in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Viewing him as a trusted mentor and friend, Blair writes, “I thought he was the greatest man I had ever met. Handsome. Tall. So generous. I’m sure you can see where this is all going. But at that time, I couldn’t have predicted it. I trusted authority. I was just a teenager.”

The day before winter break freshman year, she went to his office to say goodbye, and he crossed a line.

“We embraced. It felt too long and too still and too quiet,” she writes. “His hand went to the small of my back, tracing the space just above my tailbone. His lips were on my mouth. Please, I thought. Please don’t go under my pants, my dress-code-approved Ralph Lauren khakis into which I’d carefully tucked a plaid shirt Please. You are a grown-up and I love you; please do not put your hand inside my pants. But he did. It was a simple thing. He didn’t rape me. He didn’t threaten me. But he broke me. Nothing ever happened again, but I never felt safe.”

Blair says she hopes her book helps others. “It’s a lot,” she tells People. “I wrote the book for my son … and for people trying to find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes.”

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

Click here to read the full article.