Shields opens up in new doc
Brooke Shields reveals that she was the victim of a sexual assault in a new documentary about her life that premiered Friday afternoon at the Sundance Film Festival. She doesn’t name the man who she said raped her, but she described the circumstances: It took place soon after she graduated college with someone she knew professionally and had met for dinner to discuss work. The assault happened when she went to his hotel room to call a cab.
“I didn’t fight that much. I just absolutely froze,” she says in the film. “I thought my one ‘no’ should have been enough.” Later, when she told her friend, security specialist
Gavin de Becker, about what happened, he said, “That’s rape.”
It is just one of many revelations in “Pretty Baby,” a look at Shields’ life up until now including her rise to fame, her complicated relationship with her mother Teri Shields, and how the media commodified her sexualization at a young age while shaming her at the same time.
The film will be on Hulu later this year.
Directed by Lana Wilson, the documentary takes its name from Louis Malle’s 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” a drama about a young sex worker, played by an 11-year-old Shields, in New Orleans in 1917. In the film, she kisses a 29year-old Keith Carradine and also appears nude.
Shields, who has written two memoirs, has been approached about documentaries before and always said no. But now 57, with a kid going off to college, the encouragement of her friend Ali
Wentworth and a generally good feeling about where she is in life after years of therapy, Shields felt the time was right.
As Wilson said, “She was ready to go there,” including speaking about her time at Princeton, her friendship with Michael Jackson, her turbulent relationship with Andre Agassi and the time her old “Endless Love” co-star Tom Cruise went on a publicity tour to criticize her use of antidepressants for post-partum depression. He’d later apologize.
Wilson was fresh off the Taylor Swift documentary “Miss Americana” when she got a call from her agent asking if she wanted to meet Shields about the potential project.
“I wasn’t certain at first because I had just come off another project about a celebrity,” Wilson said. “But I was curious at the same time.”
Wilson spent four very long days interviewing Shields for “Pretty Baby.”
“I’m very lucky she was game for it,” Wilson said.