The ‘shunning’

During the “shunning,” as Heigl referred to that onslaught of backlash in the late aughts, the anxiety she had struggled with since her teenage years began to spiral. She had married Kelley in December 2007 and they adopted their daughter Naleigh from South Korea in 2009, increasingly spending time at the ranch they built together near Park City, Utah. But as the public narrative continued to spin out, Heigl couldn’t escape her thoughts.

“I think my family, my mother, my husband, my friends were scared. And I regret deeply that I scared them like that. But I just couldn’t control it. I had no tools,” she said, adding that mental health issues were rarely discussed in her family.

Kelley remembers being “very worried” despite Heigl’s thick skin and outwardly confident persona.

“I can’t imagine what all of that pressure did to her over the years, dealing with celebrity, dealing with people saying things about her that are not true,” he said. “It would be hard for anybody to process that, especially when it’s unjust and a lot of it’s negative.”

In 2015, the year before she became pregnant with their son, Joshua Jr., Heigl’s anxiety spiked again, but it wasn’t until another flare-up a year after his birth that she began regularly seeing a therapist, got diagnosed and put on medication.

“I asked my mom and my husband to find me somewhere to go that could help me because I felt like I would rather be dead,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much anxiety I was living with until I got so bad that I had to really seek help. You can do a lot of inner soul work, but I’m a big fan of Zoloft.”

She’s helped maintain her balance by staying firmly rooted in Utah except when she’s filming. It’s where she and Kelley have chosen to raise their children: Naleigh, 12; Adalaide, 8, adopted in 2012; and Joshua Jr., 4.