This post deals with sensitive topics like addiction, suicide ideation, infertility, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. Read with caution and take care of yourself ❤️.
1. In her memoir, Finding Me, Viola Davis shared her experience growing up in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She explained, “We were ‘po.’ That’s a level lower than poor."
She added that food stamps were never enough to feed her family and that none of the toilets in their home worked — she became "very skilled at filling up a bucket and pouring it into the toilet to flush it." She said that they would also go "unwashed" and could never go into their kitchen because "the rats had taken over." The apartment building she lived in had even caught fire several times.
2. In his recent memoir, Pageboy, Elliot Page recounted the time at a party where a famous actor said he'd "fuck [Elliot] to make [him] realize [he wasn't] gay."
“I've had some version of that happen many times throughout my life," Elliot said in an interview with People. "A lot of queer and trans people deal with it incessantly. These moments that we often like don't talk about or we're supposed to just brush off, when actually it's very awful. I put that story in the book because it’s about highlighting the reality, the shit we deal with and what gets sent to us constantly, particularly in environments that are predominantly cis and heterosexual. How we navigate that world where you either have more extreme, overt moments like that. Or you have the more, like, subtle jokes. [In Hollywood] these are very powerful people. They're the ones choosing what stories are being told and creating content for people to see all around the world."
3. In her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy revealed that when her series Sam and Cat got canceled she was offered $300,000 as a “thank you gift” as long as she never spoke publicly about her experience at Nickelodeon.
She turned down the "hush money" but admitted to second-guessing her decision. She wrote, “Nickelodeon is offering me three hundred thousand dollars in hush money to not talk publicly about my experience on the show? My personal experience of The Creator’s abuse? This is a network with shows made for children. Shouldn’t they have some sort of moral compass? Shouldn’t they at least try to report to some sort of ethical standard?”
4. In her memoir, Hello Molly!, Molly Shannon told the gut-wrenching story of the car accident that killed her mother, cousin, and younger sister.
"The car was mangled badly on impact," she wrote. "A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, 'Where are my girls?... She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn't. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words...My baby sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed instantly. Since Mary and I were in the very back of the station wagon, we just had a concussion and a broken arm, respectively. Katie was buried in the wreckage."
5. In his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry shared that his relationship with alcohol began when he was just a teenager. "I had never been happier than in that moment," he wrote about the first time he drank.
He also shared that his substance abuse began after he hurt his neck in a jet-ski accident while filming Fools Rush In. An on-set doctor gave him Vicodin to relieve his pain. "As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me," he wrote. "And it’s been that click that I’ve been chasing the rest of my life."
6. In his memoir, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, Danny Trejo revealed that he met the infamous Charles Manson in prison and got hypnotized by him.
Back in 1961, when Danny was only 17, he was arrested and brought to the Los Angeles County jail, where Manson was also being held. He shared that in exchange for protection, Manson told his jail mates that he would take them through a guided meditation that would get them high without actually using any drugs.
So, they sat down, closed their eyes, and the meditation began. "For 15 minutes, in great detail, he walked us through the process of copping the dope, finding a place to fix, cooking the heroin in a spoon, drawing it into a needle, and sticking it in our veins."
7. In his book Will, Will Smith shared that because of his method-acting for Six Degrees of Separation, he actually fell in love with his costar Stockard Channing. At the time, he had just welcomed a new baby with his then-wife, Sheree Zampino.
He also explained that his marriage to Sheree was off to a "rocky start" because he found himself "desperately yearning to see and speak" to Stockard.
8. In his memoir, We Were Dreamers, Simu Liu opened up about the complicated relationship he had with his parents, who reportedly left him in China with his grandparents when they moved to Canada. Although he was reunited with his parents when he was four years old, Simu said that choice led to their strained relationship. He also shared details about the physical and emotional abuse he faced from both his mother and father.
“My parents have come a long way since the events of this chapter, and we all look back on this time with complicated feelings of guilt and remorse," he wrote. "Our hope is that families like ours will read our story and understand where we went wrong so that they can make a different choice, a choice to listen and to be kinder to one another."
9. In his book, Spare, Prince Harry revealed that for years he had trouble grieving his mother Princess Diana's death and even believed that she'd faked the car crash and escaped.
Years later, when he finally came to terms with her passing, he asked a driver to replicate the route that Diana took that led to the crash. The drive didn't give him the closure he wanted and he called it “a very bad idea.”
10. In her memoir, unSweetined, Jodie Sweetin recalled dealing with her drug and alcohol addiction as a teenager. She revealed that she was "high as a kite" after snorting meth in a bathroom stall during the 2004 premiere of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's movie New York Minute.
She also said in 1996 she had gotten so drunk at Candace Cameron Bure's wedding that she vomited and had to be carried out. She added, "I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14. That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do."
11. In his book, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, Tom Felton recounted the time his team held an intervention and suggested he go to rehab for his alcohol abuse. Then, while he was there he "escaped" less than 24 hours after checking in.
“All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me,” he wrote. “I was, I realize now, completely sober for the first time in ages and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I’d let it all out, and I couldn’t yell anymore.”
12. In his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono opened up about being the target to several death threats throughout the years. Authorities allegedly warned him that the IRA might attack his family due to his "pro-peace" political stance. He also detailed learning that his family was the target of a Dublin gangster. "[The gangster’s] people had been casing our houses for several months and developed an elaborate plan," he wrote.
After U2 released the song "Pride," which is a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bono said that he was reportedly asked to not sing the verse about King's assassination in concert because of threats from far-right groups. He decided to sing it, but said he was fearful he would be shot. "I then realized the gravity of the situation," he added. "It was a slim possibility but just in case."
13. In his book, Lucky Man: A Memoir, Michael J. Fox revealed that he almost died while filming Back to the Future Part III. Michael was nearly strangled to death during a stunt that required him to hang by a rope around his neck.
He explained that practices of the stunt had gone smoothly, but once it came time for shooting, he couldn't get his hands in the right place in time before the rope cut off his airway. He swung from the rope "unconscious" for "several seconds" before receiving help.
14. In her second book, You Got Anything Stronger?, Gabrielle Union shared the heartbreak she felt when she found out her partner Dwyane Wade was having a child with someone else, during the time she was dealing with her own fertility struggles.
"To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience, the experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to, left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind," she wrote.
15. In her first memoir, Little Girl Lost, Drew Barrymore revealed that the first time she'd ever tried smoking weed was when she was only 10 years old.
She said, "When I was ten and a half I was sitting in the back seat of a car driven by a friend’s mother. She started smoking pot. I’d wanted to try marijuana for a long time, but I was afraid that if I asked, she’d say, 'No way, Drew. You’re too young.' However, she offered me some and I said, 'Sure, I’ll try it.'"
16. In her book, Mean Baby, Selma Blair wrote that she struggled with alcohol addiction for years and revealed that the first time she got "very drunk" was at a Passover celebration when she was only seven years old. "When I drank, I didn’t know what drama I would find, but I knew it was drama that I would feel," she said. "I needed it. I looked forward to it. It was always my way out."
She also wrote that alcohol put her in a dark place, and caused her to attempt suicide several times. After one attempt, she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous sessions. "With the introduction of AA, I felt hope for the first time in my life," she wrote.
17. In her memoir, Melissa Explains It All, Melissa Joan Hart revealed that while she was on Sabrina The Teenage Witch she was also experimenting with weed, mushrooms, ecstasy, and mescaline. She went on to say that she had never "snorted or shot anything into [her] body."
She added, "The one time I was offered coke, which happened to be by Paris Hilton, I turned it down." She even tells a story about the "third or fourth time" she dropped ecstasy and she ended up partying at the Playboy Mansion in LA and showed up hungover to a Maxim photoshoot the next morning.
18. In his memoir, Miss Memory Lane, Colton Haynes revealed that he almost lost his role on Teen Wolf after MTV found out he'd done a photo shoot for gay magazine, XY, as a teenager.
Before publicly coming out as gay in 2016, Colton was urged to stay silent about his sexuality. He even recalled an instance where a producer told him not to come out, or else he would lose jobs. He said, “It didn’t matter who was on my team, the message I got was always the same: ‘You will not work if you are yourself.’” However, Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis fought to have Colton on the show.
19. In her memoir, Troublemaker, Leah Remini revealed that children are constantly left on their own in Scientology. She explained, "In Scientology, minors are considered spiritual beings and not children in need of protection and guidance. You are the only one responsible for the condition of your life, regardless of your age. The Sea Org members believed that their kids could make up their own minds."
She said that some children were even forced out of their own homes, "As a result, these kids could no longer live with their parents... Even if that meant they ended up practically squatting, or sleeping in a stranger's apartment, their parents felt that it was the child's decision to make."
Leah also said that she'd witnessed several babies, including her sister Shannon, be neglected in the Sea Org's "nursery." She added, "'Nursery' was a charitable term for the motel room in the Quality Inn filled with cribs of crying, neglected babies, flies, and the smell of dirty diapers. The only ventilation came from a huge fan by the window... The person in charge was a kid like me, just some random teenage Sea Org member on post, who was hardly qualified to be taking care of children. Shannon was crying and soaked with urine in her crib...The neglect was overwhelming."
20. In her memoir, Making a Scene, Constance Wu opened up about a time in her 20s when she was raped by a man she'd been on a few dates with. She added that she "didn’t fight back because [she] didn’t want to make a scene."
She said she spent several years denying to herself that it ever happened, and wrote that "hearing rape survivors’ stories didn’t seem to trigger me…it pissed me off in a way that I thought was activism." More than a decade later, Constance said she finally came to terms with what happened while on the plane coming back from filming Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore. "I was angry at myself for forgetting, angrier than I was at him for raping me," she wrote.
21. Finally, in her memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny, Holly Madison shared the details of her first night living in the Playboy Mansion. She learned that having sex with Hugh Hefner was a requirement to live there and he even offered her a quaalude, saying, "In the '70s they used to call these pills 'thigh openers.'" She refused the drug but still got drunk.
Tina Jordan, Hugh's No. 1 girlfriend at the time, brought Holly into his bedroom, which she explained was "like an episode of Hoarders." She recalled hardcore porn being played on two TV screens as Hugh masturbated to other girlfriends acting out lesbian scenes. Holly remembered being pushed towards Hugh as a girlfriend urged him to "be with the new girl." She wrote, "It was so brief that I can't even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine."
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
If you or someone you know has experienced anti-LGBTQ violence or harassment, you can contact the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs hotline at 1-212-714-1141.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.