The tables have turned
Moore’s kids open up about her drug use in new interview with Pinkett Smith
Among the traits setting Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk apart from other talk shows is its ability to address any given subject from a multi-generational perspective. Pinkett Smith leads the Facebook Watch show while seated alongside her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and teenage daughter Willow, making it an apt setting for the guests of Monday’s episode to work out some mother-daughter issues of their own.
Demi Moore and her daughters Rumer and Tallulah Willis, two of her three children with Bruce Willis, joined Pinkett Smith and her family for an intimate discussion of Moore’s drug addiction.
It’s a topic that Moore delves into at length in her bestselling memoir, Inside Out. This is what we learned.
1 As children, Rumer and Tallulah rarely witnessed their mother’s vulnerability.
Early on in the episode, Tallulah mentions feeling as though Moore had always “made a choice to hold back certain things” from her kids and refrained from “sharing about her past” in a way that added distance between the two generations. Tallulah never knew much about Moore’s addiction, nor about the fact that, as Moore reveals in Inside Out, the actress was raped at 15 by a man who had
allegedly paid Moore’s mother $500. “I don’t think my mom was raised; she was forged,” Tallulah says, echoing her comment in a recent New York Times profile of Moore. “I realize I did them a disservice by not letting them see me as weak,” Moore says to Pinkett Smith. “I think we need to show them not just our strength but how we process to get through disappointment, upset, hurt.”
2 Moore relapsed during her marriage to Ashton Kutcher. Inside Out begins with Moore’s recollection of a moment when, estranged from all of her loved ones after relapsing, she realized she was alone. Tallulah remembers feeling confused when Moore, who had been sober for roughly 20 years at that point, relapsed in the early 2000s: “I had no idea what was going on,”
Tallulah says. “She’d been sober my entire childhood, and then she drank ... All of the adults around us, in an effort to ‘protect’ us, were protecting her. If she wasn’t sober, they would tell us she was. There was a complete lack of trust.” Moore continued to struggle throughout her marriage to Kutcher, compounded by the fact that, early in their marriage, she suffered a miscarriage.
3 Moore’s children didn’t speak to her for three years. Both daughters touch upon how their relationships with
Moore worsened during her relapse. Rumer, who had once called 911 to save her mother’s life, also attributes some of the anger she felt toward Moore’s repeated attempts to have another child. “It was like, ‘Oh, we’re not enough?’” she remembers. “Part of the reason I moved out of the house was because after you had a miscarriage, I was like, ‘Why are you so desperate to have another kid?’ I couldn’t stand the idea, but then I saw these pictures. I saw how big her stomach was and was like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so insensitive.’”
4
Rumer and Tallulah also struggled with substance abuse.
Rumer says she began to abuse alcohol when she stopped speaking to her mother and, at one point, “started getting anxiety attacks about how bad I was going to feel the next day.” Tallulah, who felt neglected by both parents, abused drugs to the point where her other sister, Scout, once found her passed out from a mixture of cocaine and codeine. “I had no regard for my life,” Tallulah says. “I had no care. So my dad got involved, and he threatened to send me to AA meetings as a punishment, which didn’t really make any sense.”
5
Moore distanced herself from her mother to protect her children.
Moore’s mother, who battled alcohol addiction, tried to kill herself throughout Moore’s childhood. After one suicide attempt, as Pinkett Smith narrates in the episode, a young Moore dug pills out of her mother’s mouth. The two shared a tumultuous relationship that worsened when Moore’s mother sold stories about her daughter and grandchildren to the tabloids. “When I distanced myself from my mother, it was completely justified,” Moore says. “I was protecting my children from her behaviour. But there was a point when I decided who she was, and in that moment, when I decided who she was, I realized that I had limited her from ever becoming anything else.
The Washington Post