Selma Blair started drinking when she was just seven years old and has been raped “multiple times” when she was drunk.
The 49-year-old actress recalls how hitting the bottle from a young age was a “huge relief” because it provided a “coping mechanism” for her anxiety, and her alcohol abuse escalated in her teens and early 20s.
She told People magazine: “I don’t know if I would’ve survived childhood without alcoholism. That’s why it’s such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning. Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism.”
And in her extract from her upcoming memoir, ‘Mean Baby’, she wrote: “The first time I got drunk it was a revelation. 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 of drinking, the ‘Cruel Intentions’ star didn’t get drink but would take “quick sips” whenever her “anxiety would alight”.
She added: “I usually barely even got tipsy. I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret.”
Selma also told of a traumatizing incident during a college spring break trip when she was raped after a day of drinking – and admitted it wasn’t the only time she’s been sexually assaulted when 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. 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.”
Apart from telling her therapist, the ‘Cruel Intentions’ star – who has been sober since 2016 – hadn’t previously spoken about being raped many times but writing it down in her book has helped her to heal.
She said: “Writing that stopped me dead in my tracks. 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.”