THIS IS MY TRUTH
Actress Brooke Shields opens up about being sexualised as a child star and raped in her 20’s in a new hard-hitting documentary
SHE played a child sex worker at the age of 11 and romped naked on a tropical island at 14. A year later she posed provocatively in a jeans ad and uttered the line that helped cement her status as one of the hottest young things in Hollywood: “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
Back then the world was a different place and sexualising kids had few taboos – and Brooke Shields was probably the most exploited of all.
Now, at the age of 57, her early years in the spotlight is the subject of the hard-hitting documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, named after the 1978 movie co-starring Susan Sarandon and Keith Carradine in which Brooke plays a sex worker.
The film examines how Tinseltown and the fashion world cashed in on her sultry looks and talent and how it affected her life. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premiered at the recent Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim – and Brooke was there, looking striking in a black cashmere dress, bomber jacket and cowboy boots.
The film, set to air on streaming service Hulu later this year, delves into her role in Pretty Baby; her teensploitation movies such as 1980’s Blue Lagoon and 1981’s Endless Love; her nude-photo scandals; and her complicated relationship with her late mother and former manager, Teri.
Friends of Brooke’s such as fellow former child star Drew Barrymore, actor Judd Nelson and singer Lionel Richie along with experts also discuss the toxic nature of the entertainment business, which allowed young girls such as Brooke to be hypersexualised.
Brooke, who starred in a soap advert when she was just 11 months old, was pushed to be a breadwinner to take care of herself and her mom, who suffered from alcoholism.
“We both used that system to have a better life,” she admits in the film. But the biggest bombshell is her confession that she was raped in her early twenties.
It’s the first time the two-time Golden Globe nominee has spoken of the ordeal, which happened when she was trying to get back into acting after graduating from Princeton University in 1987. She tells how she went to dinner with an industry bigwig (whose identity she doesn’t reveal) to talk about potential projects.
Afterwards he convinced her to return to his hotel, saying he’d call her a taxi from there.
“I go up to the hotel room and he disappears for a while,” she says. He re
turned naked and was “right on me, just like, he was wrestling”. She was too frightened to fight back, she adds. “I was afraid I’d get choked out or something. “I just absolutely froze. I thought one ‘no’ should’ve been enough, and I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,’ and I just shut it out. God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practised that.” When it was over, she left, got a taxi and “cried all the way to my friend’s apartment”. Afterwards she blamed herself for the assault. “He said to me, ‘I can trust you and I can’t trust people.’ It’s so cliché it’s practically pathetic. I believed somehow that I put out a message and that was how the message was received. I drank wine at dinner. I went up to the room. I just was so trusting.” Years later Brooke wrote her attacker a letter in which she confronted him, but he simply ignored it. “I just threw my
BELOW LEFT: With her late mom, Teri, in 2007. As a child Brooke was the breadwinner, supporting Teri, who was an alcoholic. BELOW RIGHT: With her husband, Chris Henchy, and their daughters, Grier (left) and Rowan, in 2020. hands up and said, ‘ You know what, I refuse to be a victim because this is something that happens no matter who you are or what you think you’re prepared for.’
“I wanted to erase the whole thing. The system had never once come to help me. So I just had to get stronger on my own.”
And she did.
THIRTY-FIVE years of therapy have made Brooke “stronger, sexier and more empowered than ever”, she says. She now understands that underpinning everything she did was her need to keep her mother alive, the Suddenly Susan star says. “Because it was just the two of us alone in the world.”
Teri, who died in 2012 aged 79 of dementia-related complications, was a working-class girl from New Jersey who reinvented herself as a New York socialite – and she shamelessly used her only child to support her lifestyle.
“She had this baby who looked this way, and that’s how we survived,” Brooke says. “My looking a certain way paid the bills.”
Brooke admits she didn’t really mind. “I loved the approval and I loved working and I loved being on a set.”
But there were many questionable things Teri consented to on her daughter’s behalf, or even set up herself – such as commissioning a photographer to take nude pictures of then-10-year-old Brooke for Playboy publication Sugar ’n Spice.
Teri was also criticised for allowing her child to take on the risqué Blue Lagoon role at 14. She and co-star Christopher Atkins (then 18) were required to be naked and have steamy sex romps.
The movie was a box-office smash but the nudity caused plenty of controversy, although Brooke says she wasn’t “personally scathed by it”.
“It was a different era, the ’70s,” she told UK newspaper the Guardian.
But in an episode on her podcast last year, in which she invited Christopher as her guest, she said the movie would never be allowed to be made today.
Christopher agreed. “Animals were hurt. We were spearing fish and all kinds of crazy things. Children are naked running down a beach. Couldn’t do that now.”
‘MY MOM HAD A BABY WHO LOOKED A CERTAIN WAY AND THAT PAID THE BILLS’
BROOKE was married to tennis star Andre Agassi (52) for two tumultuous years in the ’90s before falling for movie producer and writer Chris Henchy (58). The pair, who wed in 2001, have two daughters, Rowan (19) and Grier (16).
After her complicated relationship with her mom, which she writes about in her 2014 memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, she’s careful about making mistakes with her own kids.
“I’ve done so much work on myself in therapy that I focus on the things I want to replicate, rather than the things I don’t.
“I’m also careful about my drinking because I know alcoholism is in my blood.”
Her marriage to Chris is a happy one and she leaned on him heavily – both figuratively and literally – when she shattered her femur in 2021 during a visit to the gym.
The Chalet Girl actress felt helpless, she told People magazine. “For the first time in my entire life I thought, ‘I can’t power through this’.”
But she found a way with the help of her family. “We have to believe in ourselves and encourage one another. There’s no other way to get through life, period.”
And it’s this attitude that was behind her decision in 2021 to launch Beginning Is Now, an online platform for women over 40 to seek wisdom, draw strength and find humour in one another.
“If there’s one thing I want it’s for women to give themselves the permission to feel good about themselves,” she says.
ATATTOO on her arm is her way of feeling close to the husband who was ripped suddenly from her life nearly a year ago. The inkwork is of one of her favourite pictures of him: his fingers are covering one eye, his hands are adorned with rings and he’s wearing chains around his neck.
She thinks of him every time she sees the image, remembering the loving father he was, the caring husband, the driven musician, the caring soul who worked hard to cultivate and support new talent.
Her two children are also constant reminders of him, Bianca Naidoo says, and of the family unit they once cherished.
Yet, while Riky Rick’s death has left a gaping hole in their lives, the 40-year-old mom of two is working hard to preserve his legacy and it’s helping to fill the void.
She’s involved with organising Cotton Fest, the festival the rapper founded in 2019 to celebrate up-and-coming artists, which will be held in Johannesburg on 4 February.
Bianca has also helped to revamp Legends Barbershop, Riky’s salon franchise.
“We’ve been able to celebrate his 35 years of life,” she says.
“I’m grateful to my family and for being able to do the first Cotton Fest in Cape Town [in December last year]. I’m grateful for an amazing team that understand his vision, and who respect and understand me.”
Despite her heartache and workload, Bianca greets us with a warm hug and a big smile when she welcomes us to her home in Waterfall, Midrand.
She’s just collected kids Jordan (14) and Maik (8) from school and her phone won’t stop ringing with calls about Cotton Fest.
“Things have been hectic,” she tells us, “but we’re going to have a nice chat now.”
Riky’s presence lives on in the home, which is adorned with portraits of the late producer, TV personality and hiphop superstar who’d been battling depression and died by suicide last year.
The past year has been a roller-coaster, says Bianca, who was also her husband’s manager. She says she’s taking each day as it comes.
“I’ve decided
this year I’m not going to put pressure on myself,” she says. “I’m trying to figure out a lot of things and I want to ensure I make Riky proud. I want to be a great mom and support our kids.
“It’s a lot of learning, this new normal. Trying to understand and deal with grief.”
BIANCA met Riky, whose real name was Rikhado Makhado, in 2013 on a night out with friends shortly before he became a household name. “It was so casual,” she recalls. “We hardly spoke that night.”
Still, she was taken with the handsome musician so she asked a friend to pass her phone number onto him.
“And then we chatted over the phone. I don’t know if he was scared [to make the first move].
“I guess he was just doing the right thing. I’m a shy and private person. I think he did it out of respect and it worked out.”
She was drawn to his “infectious aura,” Bianca says. “I’ve said this quite often before: I know the fact that Riky and I were put together was God’s work. It was meant to be. “I feel like we were part of the same tree. There were just so many things that made sense. It was just right.”
At the time she was a single mom to Jordan, her daughter from a previous relationship, and Riky “just slipped into our lives”.
When their son, Maik, was born they became “the most amazing family unit”, she says.
That family unit was something she will always cherish because no matter how busy Riky was, he was always aware that he was a father and husband first.
“Whenever there was a gap to do family stuff, he’d always find time to do it,” Bianca says.
“He made all the effort in the world to make sure he was present, even when he was tired. He worked a lot, but he’d always do activities with the kids.
“Maik learned so much from Riky because he was so present. I’m so grateful for that.”
The family loved cooking together, she says, adding with a sad laugh, “He was a better cook than I am.”
The day he died was the worst one of her life. “I don’t know how I got through that. There were just too many things that I had to process.
“Having to tell the kids. I don’t even know how I was feeling. I can’t even remember if I was numb.
“Survival mode kicked in, not for myself, but for the children and everyone else around me.”
The toughest conversation was telling Jordan and Maik that they’d never see the most important man in their life again.
“I tried to be open and honest with my children because I wanted them to know what had happened from me,” she says.
Six months after Riky’s passing, she told the SABC how the day before Riky died, she’d had the “most beautiful conversation” with her husband.
“We spoke about everything, just life, us, the kids, and the way he was feeling.
“That conversation gave me a lot of peace because any questions or doubts were spoken about in the conversation we had.”
She also spoke to Riky a few hours before he died.
“His last words to me were ‘I’m on my way home and love you’. I went to bed and when I woke up two hours later and realised that he wasn’t home, I didn’t get concerned right away, because sometimes he’d stay late in the studio.”
When she still couldn’t get hold of him after dropping the kids at school the next morning, she started to panic. And eventually the terrible truth was discovered.
‘SURVIVAL MODE KICKED IN, NOT FOR MYSELF, BUT FOR THE CHILDREN’
CLOSE friends and family have helped her and the kids navigate the grieving process, Bianca says, but it’s been tough. “I miss everything about him. The kids are constant reminders of him, but in everything I do, he is there.”
Special days – the kids’ birthdays, their wedding anniversary, Father’s Day, Christmas, New Year – have been especially painful as they’re a reminder of Riky’s absence.
“I’m grateful I’ve been able to get through the hard days,” she says. “It’s been very difficult, but we’re always looking at God and making it through. It’s just hard not to feel like it could be so different if he was still here.”
But when she looks at her children and sees their resilience, she realises it’s all part of the healing process.
“The kids have taught me so much. If they can keep going, who am I to not try?”
THERE are many things she’s just had to learn to accept: if she goes into a bar she’ll invariably be asked for her ID and if she goes shopping for new clothes she’ll be directed to the kids’ department because everything in the adult section will be far too big for her. As viewers of her reality TV show I Am Shauna Rae know, life is much more complicated for 23-year-old American Shauna Rae Lesnick than it is for her friends.
Standing just 1,21m tall, she’s roughly the same height as an eight-year-old and this leads to all kinds of humiliating problems and misunderstandings.
But the stares and judgemental comments Shauna from Long Island, New York, has had to put up with most of her life are nothing compared to the outcry she faced recently after she went public with the new guy she’s been dating.
On paper, Shauna and Dan Swygart (26) seem like the perfect match.
They’re similar ages, share the same quirky sense of humour and enjoy outdoor activities.
But when the tall, strapping Welsh blogger recently made an appearance on her reality TV show (on TLC, DStv channel 135) all that viewers could talk about was the radical difference in their heights.
Some even went so far as to label Dan “a creep” for dating someone who looks like a child.
The criticism was so harsh it prompted the couple to decide to put the brakes on their budding relationship.
In a candid Instagram video, Dan expressed his disappointment at how everything has panned out.
“Me and Shauna are just good friends, we’re getting to know each other. But I think it’s absolutely disgusting, the attitude of some people,” he said.
“She’s been through so much in life. How dare you take away her right to have a connection, a friendship, a relationship with someone else? Who are you to say that she can’t have that?”
FROM the time she was a baby, Shauna was already fighting the odds. Diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of six months, she had to undergo surgery followed by three years of chemotherapy before she was declared cancer-free.
It was at pre-school that she first noticed she was much shorter than her classmates. At age five she underwent tests and doctors discovered that the chemo had rendered her pituitary gland, the part of the brain that regulates growth and metabolism, dormant.
She was diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism and started taking growth hormones at age eight which allowed her to achieve an additional 20cm of growth.
But at 16 she was devastated when doctors curtailed her treatment, telling her she wouldn’t grow any further as she had reached full puberty and the growth plates in her bones had fused.
“I had reached the finish line, you could say,” she says. “It was a very difficult time. It probably was the lowest time of my life because I always imagined that I would be tall. And getting that news, it just kind of was like a hammer crashing into glass.
“I kind of isolated myself in a way so I could find myself and be happy with who I am, because at the time I wasn’t happy with who I was. I started doing online school and I just really focused on me and what I wanted to do and who I was as a person and bettering myself.”
Because of what she’s gone through, her mom, Patricia, and her stepdad, Mark Schrankel, are very protective of Shauna, especially when it comes to men. From a young age Shauna says they’ve drilled it into her that some men are attracted to her purely because of her child-like appearance. When she introduces potential partners to them, they have lots of questions, she says. “They are looking at body language, evaluating the situation and trying to understand the personality that they’re dealing with.” During a confessional on her show, Shauna opened up about her dating woes. “I attract creeps, a**holes, you know, the typical bad- boypicture situation and idiots.” She says she’s had men treat her like a specimen in a lab and talk to her like she’s in Grade 3. Shauna doesn’t elaborate about her previous relationships except to say she’s dated seven people and that when it comes to physical intimacy, “all the boxes have been ticked”. But she was craving something more. “I tend to find guys that are just one-dimensional and don’t actually have any depth to the conversation. A deeper connection is what I’m looking for,” she says. Shauna thought she might have found what she was yearning for when Dan showed up. After watching season 1 of her show, he sent her flowers along with a message telling her how inspired he felt by her emotional strength.
The pair went on several dates, had a sushi-making evening at her home where she introduced him to her parents, went paddleboarding and were even talking about travelling the world together.
But now, with Dan having returned home to Britain, it remains to be seen if they can develop their friendship into something more – or if all the criticism has scared him off.
In an interview with New York Post last year, Shauna said she’s tired of being overlooked and underestimated.
“If you look at me, you see an eightyear-old,” she said.
“But I think if you take the time to look at the details in my face, in my hands, the maturity in my body and I think if you take the time to actually talk to me, you really understand that I’m a 23-year-old.”
She’s even resorted to getting four tattoos, which she says help her in situations where people struggle to believe she’s really an adult. Shauna is currently working towards getting her driver’s licence – she drives a car that uses hand controls because she’s too short to reach the pedals.
She dreams of being an actress and hopes her reality series will serve as her springboard to stardom.
The pint-size dynamo is also busy working on a fashion line for short people. “I grew up not fitting into a section. I know what it’s like to buy clothes and [have] it not fit you in one way, but fit you in another,” she says.
But more than anything, Shauna wants the world to see her for what she really is. “It’s painful when society doesn’t accept you for who you are,” she says.
“I want people to not question me when I say who I am.
“I’m okay with showing proof, if necessary. But if you’re a typical regular Joe off the street, then you need to take me at my word.”