The model and actor’s shocking memoir tells how shame and denial prevented her from telling anyone she was raped when she was 12, which led to another abusive relationship – with an older man – and years of drug addiction
– firmly positioned her as a teenage sex object, though her brutal sexualisation had begun far earlier. When we speak on Zoom – Suvari in her office at home in Los Angeles – she has her hair pushed back from her makeup-free face, looking defiantly anti-Hollywood.
She found modelling and acting gave her a way to express her feelings, but also taught her the only thing that mattered was the way she looked, and that if she looked “sexy”, that was even better. At her first modelling shoot, she says, “everyone was raving about how I looked 18. But I was 12.” Her voice rises in anger. “What was communicated to me was that I was an adult, therefore I can act like an adult.
She says he would ask her to pick up other women to have threesomes with, including those she met on set. She bumped into one much later in a Whole Foods store, after she had become famous, and felt mortified. Another time, she ran into one of the women, and went over to her. “I said, ‘I want you to know that I never wanted to do any of those things’. She was surprised. She said, ‘Oh, he told me you wanted to do that’.
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