Demi & daughters open up about her past
Demi Moore reveals that her obsession with her ex was all-consuming and drove a wedge between her and her daughters
SHE’S lived the life of a quintessential Hollywood star, equal parts glitz and glamour and drama and despair. Parental neglect, sexual abuse, drugs, booze, threesomes, a destructive marriage – Demi Moore has been there, done that and lived to tell the tale, which she unpacks in jaw-dropping detail in her explosive new bestselling memoir, Inside Out.
But perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the effect her trauma had on her three daughters, Rumer (31), Scout (28) and Tallulah (25).
During a recent candid discussion on web series Red Table Talk, hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, Demi’s eldest and youngest kids become emotional as they reveal how they often felt their mom wasn’t there for them, especially during her third marriage to actor Ashton Kutcher.
“So much of that time, especially with Ashton, I was so angry because I felt like something that was mine had been taken away,” says Rumer, who’s also an actress and appeared in the recent Tarantino movie Once upon a Time in Hollywood.
Tallulah agrees, saying seeing her mom with the Two and a Half Men star made her feel unloved.
“Watching the behaviour with Ashton during those years . . . everyone had left the house and it was just me living there and I felt very forgotten.
“I feel like I developed and nurtured a narrative where she didn’t love me and I truly believed it. I know that she does, 100%, but in that moment you’re hurt.”
Demi (57) acknowledges this, calling her marriage to Ashton – who was 15 years her junior – an addiction.
“It was probably more devastating [than drugs or alcohol] because it took me seriously away, emotionally,” she tells the table, which includes Jada’s mom, Adrienne Banfield- Jones, and daughter, Willow Smith.
Demi and Ashton were together from 2005 to 2011 before things fell apart due to his infidelity. During that time Demi also suffered a devastating miscarriage.
For Rumer that was a particularly difficult time. “When she wanted to have another baby and then it wasn’t happening, and there was so much focus on that, it was like ‘Oh well, we’re not enough’.”
Tallulah adds she felt she didn’t know her mom very well.
“I felt like she made a choice to hold back certain things, like sharing about her past, and I think it always made me feel very far away from her. I knew she had a career, she met my dad [actor Bruce Willis], she grew up in New Mexico, but it was like that was it.”
Watching their mom’s struggle with alcohol and at times drugs – issues that had started in her teens – was also traumatic for the girls and led to bouts of estrangement. Speaking about the times her mom would drink, Tallulah says, “It was like the sun went down and a monster came out”.
“Anxiety would come up in my body when I could sense that her eyes were shutting a little bit more, and the way she was speaking. She’d be a lot more affectionate with me if she wasn’t sober. I recall being very upset and kind of treating her like a child.”
THINGS reached a tipping point when Demi suffered a near-fatal overdose in 2012 after spiralling back into booze and pills when her marriage to Ashton crashed and burned. She collapsed at a party after inhaling nitrous oxide and smoking synthetic dagga. She was rushed to hospital where doctors confirmed she’d had a seizure.
In her book, Demi describes having an out-of-body experience.
“Everything went blurry and I could see myself from above. I was floating out of my body into swirling colours and it seemed like maybe this was my chance: I could leave the pain and shame of my life behind.”
In the resulting fallout her daughters and their dad refused to speak to her for a year. Realising she was at rock bottom, she entered rehab and has been sober since.
In another surprise confession, Tallulah says on Jada’s show she sometimes felt intimidated by her mom. “I don’t think my mom was raised – she was forged. And the strength that comes from that is intimidating and it’s scary.”
‘Everything went blurry and I could see myself from above’
“I realise I did them a disservice by not letting them see me as weak,” Demi admits. “I think we need to show them not just our strength but how we process to get through disappointment, upset, hurt.”
A glance at Demi’s life certainly backs up this sentiment. Here’s someone who beat some serious odds to become one of the most successful Hollywood actresses of her generation – a mixture of raw sexuality and talent that made her box-office gold.
To say she had a difficult upbringing is an understatement. She was raised by her mom, Virginia Guynes, and stepdad, Dan Guynes. Her mother was an alcoholic with a long arrest record for drunk driving and arson.
Dan also drank too much and struggled to keep a job. The family moved around a lot but it was often too late to evade debt collectors and there was plenty of strife in Virginia and Dan’s marriage.
Demi was 12 when her mom first attempted suicide. “I remember using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother had tried to swallow out of her mouth,” she writes in her memoir.
“It was a life-changing moment that ended my childhood.”
At 15 she was raped by a man three times her age. Afterwards she recalls him asking her how it felt “to be whored by your mother for $500”.
The man, a friend of her mother, claimed Virginia had pimped her own daughter out. “It was rape and a devastating betrayal,” Demi says.
In an appearance on the TV show Good Morning America, the raven-haired star is asked by host Diane Sawyer if she believed the man’s claim she’d been “sold” to him.
“I think in my deep heart, no. I don’t think it was a straightforward transaction. But she gave him access and put me in harm’s way.”
In 1990 she broke off contact with her mother after Virginia walked out of a rehab stint that Demi had paid for. They remained estranged before reconciling shortly before Virginia’s death in 1998 at age 54.
SOON after her rape ordeal Demi dropped out of high school and left home to seek her fortune. She signed up for acting auditions without any formal training. “I mean, I was figuring it out, like, by the seat of my pants. The school of ‘fake it till you make it’. My confidence was more of an ‘I don’t have anything to lose’ mentality,” she said on TV show Good Morning America.
She got her lucky break at 19 in the soapie General Hospital. But she knew she was in over her head and that’s when she really started abusing alcohol and later cocaine, she says.
“I don’t have an off switch. I don’t have the thing that says, ‘This is enough’.”
Fame really came calling when she starred in the 1985 cult classic St Elmo’s Fire in a part she knew only too well – that of a reckless party girl. “The irony wasn’t lost on me.” Before filming, the producer and director insisted she go to rehab – something Demi describes as a “profound gift they gave me”. She stayed sober and fell off the wagon only about 20 years later when her marriage to Ashton disintegrated.
She says she can remember the exact moment she went back on the booze. “I was on holiday with Ashton and he said, ‘I don’t know if alcoholism is a thing. I think it’s about moderation’.”
Part of her relapse was “trying to fit the mould of the woman he wanted his wife to be”, she says.
“I made my own story up, that he wanted somebody he could have wine with and that he could do stuff with.”
This “stuff ” included threesomes. In the book she claims Ashton asked her for three-in-a-bed action – something she agreed to in order to seem like a cool wife. “I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be.”
But she calls two of the threesomes mistakes.
She also claims he slept with a wannabe starlet named Brittney Jones in 2010. Brittney famously stated she’d had sex “on Ashton’s sofa” at his house while Demi was out of town.
“Because we had brought a third party into our relationship, Ashton said that
blurred the lines and, to some extent, justified what he’d done,” Demi says.
UNSURPRISINGLY, Ashton and his second wife, Mila Kunis, who wed in 2015 and are now parents to daughter Wyatt (5) and son Dimitri (2), aren’t exactly thrilled with all Demi’s revelations.
“The unwanted attention has been hard to deal with. They have no interest in being dragged into the spotlight or reliving the past,” a source told E! News.
“Demi was always very private so it came as a surprise that she wanted to air her dirty laundry and have so much focus on her personal life,” the source said.
“Mila and Ashton are just riding out the media attention and know it will die down soon.”
For Demi, the book was a cathartic process and something she had to do.
“I think my desire was to really get to a place where I’m okay to really be seen – when there isn’t anything left to protect,” she told talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres.
“And being able to really step in and accept yourself for all that you are and have compassion for the self-judgment of all that you’re not.”
She centred the book, which took her nine years to write, on the fundamental question, “How did I get here?”
She dedicated it to her late mother and to her daughters, who are back in her life.
“They’re very supportive of Demi, they love that she wrote the book,” a source told American magazine People.
“Demi feels bad about the years when she wasn’t healthy. She really tries to make up for it now. Her daughters are amazing and she’s involved in their everyday lives.”
Scout says she’s proud of her mom for “doing the internal work that she didn’t have the time to do for so long because she was just in survival mode”.
At the same time, she says the book did bring up uncomfortable memories for her and her sisters, who’ve all dealt with substance abuse and body-image issues of their own. But they’re all trying to do better. “Myself, Rumer and Mom are doing a spiritual psychology course which teaches soul-centred living,” Scout told the New York Times.
Yet perhaps Rumer puts it best when she says the book was really a chance for her and her sisters to get to know their mother as a person.
“We grew up thinking our parents are these immovable gods of Olympus. Obviously as we grow older we start to realise how much our parents are just people – with their good parts and their bad.”
‘I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be’
SOURCES: PEOPLE.COM, DAILYMAIL.CO.UK, THESUN.CO.UK, METRO.CO.UK, GOODMORNINGAMERICA.COM, NYTIMES.COM