Sally opens up about sexual abuse
When it came time to pen her recently released memoir, In Pieces, actress SALLY FIELD (71) was an open book. The Hello, My Name Is Doris star makes several personal revelations in the autobiography, including the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather. Sally writes that JOCK MAHONEY – who was married to her mother, actress MARGARET FIELD – often summoned her to his bedroom and the abuse continued until she was 14. “It would’ve been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn’t. He could be magical,” she writes of the actor, who died in 1989 aged 70.
It wasn’t until decades later that she told her mother – who at the time was battling terminal cancer and died in 2011 aged 89 – about the abuse.
The two-time Oscar winner claims that in many ways her five-year relationship with Smokey and the Bandit costar Burt Reynolds was an attempt to heal the scars caused by the abuse. She describes their relationship as confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful.
“I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she reveals. Although she says that her revelation would hurt him, she finds solace in the fact that Burt – who died earlier this month aged 82 – will never read her confession.