Brooke Shields said she never shared with her children the “pornography” she was exposed to as a child star from their mother.
The actress was just 11 years old when she was forced to seductively kiss then 27-year-old Keith Carradine in the 1978 film Pretty Baby, in which she played a prostitute.
Ms Shields, 57, said she struggled to understand how her mother Toni Shields failed to intervene when she revealed her own daughters Rowan, 19, and Grier, 16, and refused to see.
In a clip from upcoming documentary Pretty Baby, Rowan says: “This is child pornography! Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?’
Miss Shields replies “No” as she is overcome with emotion. Recalling the conversation, she told the Sunday Times Magazine: “It was hard for me not to justify my mum to them, but when they asked I was like, ‘Oh god, I have to admit that.’ But I put it on “I don’t know why she thought it was ok.”
The star’s mother was an alcoholic and died in 2012. Ms Shields, an only child, said she couldn’t be mad at her because her mother was so insecure.
The actress has long shunned blame on her mother – who allowed Shields to pose nude for a Playboy publication at the age of 10, but now Shields has admitted, “I don’t know why she thought it was okay. I don’t know.’
Brooke Shields, 57, reveals shocking details in her new documentary how she dealt with men kissing on a film set as a teenager in 1978 and repeatedly defended her mother, who stood by and let it happen. Pictured: Shields and her mother Teri in 1978
Emotional: Brooke Shields got emotional when confronted with her own childhood exploitation in the first official trailer for her two-part documentary Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson
In the two-part documentary, which will air next month in the US, Ms Shield looks back on her life, including her friendship with Michael Jackson. She denies they dated and opened up about her shock at the sexual assault claims he later faced.
The actress breaks down as she reflects on her childhood in the starlight – she tackles issues from being sexualized as a prepubescent girl to the public shame she felt at losing her virginity as a young adult.
Shields explained to her two daughters that she would never let them see the film, in which she kissed a 27-year-old Carradine while also appearing nude.
Shields’ mother reportedly stood by and watched as it happened while her co-star Carradine assured her it was all “just make-believe.”
The two-part documentary, titled Pretty Baby, premieres April 3 on Hulu.
The documentary, directed by Lana Wilson, takes its name from Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby, a drama about a young sex worker played by Shields in New Orleans in 1917.
In the film, written by Polly Platt, she kisses Carradine while also appearing nude.
At one point, Shields reportedly made a disgusted face and was yelled at by the director. However, her mother never intervened.
“It was… it was hard for me not to justify my mother to them, but when they asked me I was like, ‘Oh god, I have to admit that,'” Shields told the Times when discussing the documentary.
“I mean, I could say, ‘Oh, that was back then,’ or ‘Oh, that was art.’ But I don’t know why she thought it was ok. I don’t know.’
It wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the last time she was sexualized by the media. At 15 she was shooting Blue Lagoon, then came Endless Love. Both featured sex and nudity. And then there were those Calvin Klein denim ads.
When she was 16 and a global star, a family friend and photographer tried to sell nude photos he took of her when she was just 10 years old. Her mother sued and the family went to court, but the photographer won.
Shields, who has written two memoirs, has been approached about documentaries before and always said no. But now that a child is going to college, and with 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.
She recently admitted that even in her books, she wasn’t telling the whole truth when it came to the nude photos of her as a child.
“It was really too much for me,” Shields said. “Writing about it just broke me. It was she I protected.”
Shields, who was just 11 when she portrayed a child prostitute in the controversial film Pretty Baby, admitted she was “amazed” that she “survived some of it”.
Brooke Shields’ character seduces Keith Carradine in a scene from the movie Pretty Baby, 1978
Actress Brooke Shields and mother Teri Shields attend Michaele Vollbracht’s debut fashion show May 4, 1978 benefiting the American Cancer Society
In the documentary, Shields gets emotional while confronting her own childhood.
The trailer, released earlier this year, began with Shields being asked as a teenager what she thought of all the “fuss” made about her as she sat next to her mother, Teri.
In the footage from an old interview, she smiles and replies, “I think it’s fun.”
The older male journalist then tells her that she really is an “exquisite looking young lady” and a “pretty girl”.
Looking back now, Shields recounts that the “entirety” of her life has been bombarded by people who “over and over” called her a “pretty” face.
“And that always seared me,” she confessed.
The mother of two reflected on being chosen for the cover of Time Magazine in 1981 when she was just 16 to represent the ’80s look.
“I was on the cover of Time Magazine as the face of that whole era. Who decides that?’ She asked.
Shields, who was just 11 when she portrayed a child prostitute in the controversial film Pretty Baby, admitted she was “amazed” that she “survived all of it.”
“I found my confidence again and thought, ‘I can have my own opinions,'” she mused, after years of struggling to ‘find’ her ‘own voice’ during her adolescence and early life.
Emotional: Brooke Shields got emotional when confronted with her own childhood exploitation in the first official trailer for her two-part documentary Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson
At 14, when other girls were still decorating their pencil cases, she was the youngest model to ever make the cover of Vogue
At 14, when other girls were still decorating their pencil cases, Shields became the youngest model to ever make the cover of Vogue.
That same year, she began filming racy teen romance Blue Lagoon – in which her character stripped frequently and had sex with her shipwrecked lover, played by Christopher Atkins, then 18.
A body double provided her sex scenes, but, Shields says, the filmmakers encouraged her to pursue a real-life romance with Atkins off-screen.
The following year saw more sex and nudity for them in Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic drama Endless Love, about two high school sweethearts who are forbidden from seeing each other.
And at 15, wrapped in form-fitting denim, she appeared in provocative ads for Calvin Klein Jeans with the lewd slogan, “You want to know what’s between me and my Calvin? Nothing.’
The films and this advertising campaign helped her to international fame.
Shields appeared in the provocative ads for American Apparel and Calvin Klein Jeans – tangled in form-fitting denim – with the salacious tagline, “You want to know what stands between me and my Calvin? Nothing’
A young Brooke Shields in a still used in the trailer for Hulu’s Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields
Known simply as “Brooke” around the world, she became the party girl mascot of New York’s lavish nightclub Studio 54. With those iconic thick eyebrows and long, glossy hair that made her look older than her years, she was one as a teenager Top agent once described as “so beautiful strong men forget to flick their cigar ash”.
Despite her vampire image, Shields later admitted she didn’t have sex until she was 22 — and wished she’d waited longer.
It was a revelation that cruelly dubbed her “America’s Most Famous Virgin.” But her abstinence had undoubtedly helped her escape the worst excesses of Hollywood’s sexual predators.
For years, she credited her fiercely defensive mother Teri, who was also her manager. “If anyone gave me a sideways look, she’d say, ‘I’m going to cut off your butts and make you eat them,'” Shields said in 2019.
But now, just over a year since she gave an interview in which she claimed she was “kind of untouchable … I wasn’t easy prey” — and never had a “#MeToo moment” of my own — she is sing a completely different tune.
In the documentary, the actress reveals that she was raped in a hotel room by an unnamed man from the film industry in her early 20s.
In 2000, she gave an interview to gay magazine The Advocate, in which she said: “There are many women I find very attractive. But that’s not acceptable in this world’
She had met him to discuss potential film projects after graduating from the prestigious Princeton University in 1987.
After dinner, the man – who she says was a friend – invited her to hail a cab from his hotel room, which he then exited. Shields says her “friend” later returned naked and suddenly attacked her.
“He was right with me. It was like wrestling,” she adds.
Shields says she was “frozen” and didn’t fight back for fear of being killed: “God knows I knew how to get out of my body. I had practiced that.”
She claims she left the hotel after the attack, got into a taxi and “cried all the way” to another friend’s apartment.
Shields says she refused to accept what happened to her for years: “I drank wine with dinner. I went into the room. I was just so trusting…” Of her meteoric rise to fame at such a young age.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that when she later lost her virginity to fellow Princeton student Dean Cain (who later played Superman on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman), she said the moment had her plagued by guilt and shame.
In 1994, at the age of almost 30 and with a mediocre film career prompting a move to Broadway, she announced that she had fallen in love with Andre Agassi.
The romance reportedly blossomed when he quit touring a few months after they met and flew to New York on his private jet to comfort her while she was being treated in the hospital for painful bunions.
Her mother – by then sober – found the infamous tennis “punk” too wild and immature, leading to a set-to with Shields at a restaurant where the actress was heard yelling, “Are you dumping him? I will marry him!’
And she did in 1997. But the marriage lasted only two years. Long periods apart — while he played tournaments and she pursued her own career — have been cited as a likely cause of their marriage’s breakdown.
Agassi was also deeply possessive, once getting so angry at her flirtatious performance on an episode of Friends – in which she licked Matt LeBlanc’s finger – that he stormed off the set, drove home and smashed his Wimbledon trophy.
However, there have also been rumors that the couple is simply sexually incompatible and that Shields doesn’t actually like men.
In 2000, she gave an interview to gay magazine The Advocate, in which she said: “There are many women I find very attractive. But that’s not acceptable in this world.’
However, the following year she married television writer Chris Henchy after meeting through a mutual friend. They had two daughters together – Rowan and Grier – after several rounds of IVF.
In 2005, Shields revealed that she had suffered from postnatal depression and had even contemplated suicide. “I finally had a healthy, beautiful girl and couldn’t look at her,” she revealed.
A few weeks later, her Endless Love co-star Tom Cruise — who, as a Scientologist, opposes psychiatry for being abusive — attacked Shields for taking an antidepressant, Paxil, and spitefully asked, “Where’s her career gone? ?
Shields claimed Michael Jackson had repeatedly asked to marry her and adopt a child together, but she insisted they were never more than friends
She shot back and told him to “stick to the fight against aliens” – a reference to the belief among Scientologists that alien parasites live within us all and must be destroyed.
In contrast, the beauty had a good friendship with the late superstar Michael Jackson and was even his “date” for one of Elizabeth Taylor’s weddings.
Jackson told Oprah Winfrey in 1993 that Shields was his girlfriend, repeated that claim in 2001, and told another interviewer, “We dated a lot. Her pictures were all over my wall, in my mirror, on everything.”
Shields, in turn, claimed he had repeatedly asked to marry her and adopt a child together, but she insisted they were never more than friends.
In this new documentary, she describes her relationship with Jackson as “childlike.” And surely that would have pleased a star who recently admitted she didn’t consider sex “my experience” until she was in her 40s.