HOW MENA SURVIVED ABUSE
THE ACTRESS SPENT YEARS IN THE GRIP OF SEXUAL ABUSERS AND DRUG ADDICTION. NOW HAPPILY MARRIED AND A NEW MUM, SHE’S FINALLY SHARING HER STORY
Performance was a way of life for Mena Suvari, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. “Every time I would walk onto a set, every time I was interviewed … I was acting the whole time,” says the 42-year-old. “It was another role for me to play – that I was OK.”
In reality, she was anything but. “Between the ages of 12 and 20,” she reveals, “I was the victim of repeated sexual abuse.” The nightmare began in Year 6 when she was raped by a friend of one of her older brothers. Later, starting out in Hollywood, she became involved with a series of older men who abused her. She numbed the pain with hard drugs – and never shared the secrets of her traumatic past. “I turned to any form of self-medicating I could find, just to get by,” she says. “I was just trying to survive.” But now, in a new memoir, The Great Peace, she’s sharing her harrowing story for the first time. She hopes she can help others who feel as “completely and utterly alone” as she once did. “For the first time, I gave myself permission,” she says, “and found the voice that I wished I had.”
A bright and precocious child, Suvari, the youngest of four (she has three older brothers), grew up in an opulent home in Newport, Rhode Island, with little parental oversight from her father, Ando Suvari, a psychiatrist who had emigrated from Estonia, and mother, Candice, a nurse 30 years his junior. “I did not grow up in a family where we talked about things,” she says. “My father was 60 when he had me, and I never really felt like I got to know him, and that led me to feel more alone and misunderstood.”
After her family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when she was 12, she felt even more lost and untethered – the new kid “just trying to fit in”. That’s when she met “KJ” (a pseudonym), a 15-year-old friend of one of her brothers. “He took an interest in me and ended up pursuing me,” she says. After repeatedly pressuring her to have sex, he brought her to the guest room above his family’s garage one day and raped her. “Part of me died that day,” says Suvari, who was then a month shy of 13. “He used me, had fun with me and then disposed of me. He called me a ‘whore’. I never got to have a healthy expression of [sex]. My choice was lost. And that, compiled with already not feeling seen and
“I was tired of hiding these things my whole life. I’d like to just be me” SUVARI
heard, established a concept I would have of myself. That that was my value.” She blamed herself that she “had allowed it to happen”, a lasting shame that battered her sense of self-worth. The pattern was set. Make it work. Just survive.
At 15, Suvari moved with her parents to Los Angeles, where she hoped to parlay the modelling she had begun at 12 (“It was fun and a great outlet”) into acting gigs. And when her manager, someone she considered her friend and protector, wanted to have a sexual relationship with her, she didn’t feel entitled to protest. “By this time my family had pretty much fallen apart,” Suvari says. “My mother had moved out and wanted to find herself, and my father was in decline mentally and physically. I didn’t feel like I had any other options or was worthy of a life that was any different.”
She found escape in the rave music scene and late-night clubbing. Drugs were everywhere. “The feeling was, ‘Why not, try it.’ Whatever was around,” she says. Pot. Meth. Mescaline. Ecstasy. Acid. “I was looking to not feel anything.”
The next few years were a blur of drugs and desperation. Just before she turned 17, she met and moved in with “Tyler”, who was 9 years her senior. He abused her, sexually and
emotionally, during their three-year relationship, insisting she participate in threesomes and encouraging her to bring other women home. “I remember thinking maybe this is how relationships are: the screaming, the name-calling, the abuse,” says Suvari. “I felt like I had brought it all on in some way. Like I deserved all that. From KJ to Tyler, it was a process of destruction.”
Thankfully, her film work, then beginning to take off, provided her with some solace. In 1998 she landed the role of the sweet choir girl Heather in American Pie, a box office phenomenon that rocketed her to fame. “Before that I had been sitting on the floor of the apartment with Tyler, and we were filing for unemployment insurance,” she recalls.
American Beauty followed, and playing Angela, the fantasy girl of a suburban father played by Kevin Spacey, came naturally. “You want me to be the object of someone’s affection, someone older than me?” she thought. “I’ve already been playing that role.” Making the movie, she says, “truly saved my life at that moment. It was a beautiful experience, being given the opportunity to work, the ability to express myself. Right when I needed it to save me.”
Yet it wasn’t until she broke free from Tyler in 1999 that she felt she was on the path to stability. She quit drugs over time and began to find healing through therapy. There were more challenges along the way – including two marriages that ended in divorce – but she was slowly learning to “forgive myself ” and move forward.
She wasn’t expecting to find love again when, in 2016, she met Mike Hope, who worked in the props department on the set of her Hallmark movie I’ll Be Home for Christmas. “There’s something so beautiful about his spirit – it’s alive and electric,” she says. “It was the first time
I felt I wanted to have a family with someone.” They married in August 2018. As she finished writing her memoir – sometimes through tears – she learned she was pregnant. Their son Christopher Alexander Hope is now 4 months old.
Next up, Suvari will be filming Reagan, opposite Dennis Quaid (in which she plays the 40th president’s first wife, Jane Wyman). She also devotes time to outreach, speaking with teen runaways and survivors of abuse. “There were many times I thought I wouldn’t make it,” she says.
“If I can take what happened to me and share it with someone else and maybe warn them, then I want to do that, because I did not have that person.”
She’s also determined to be that person for her son. “I never felt like I had a mother figure, so I don’t always know how to be one,” she admits (her current relationship with her own mum is “a work in progress”). But, with help from Christopher, she’s learning. “He’s an awesome little person, a gift,” she says. “I still work to accept that something this beautiful happened to me, to feel good enough – but I don’t have time to feel bad for myself. It’s not about me anymore.”
“I was tired of hiding these things my whole life. I’d like to just be me” SUVARI
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732