Brooke Shields Describes Rape at Hollywood Meeting Early in Career: “My One ‘No’ Should Have Been Enough”

For the first time, Brooke Shields has come forward about being raped as a young actress. Shields describes the moment in harrowing detail in her upcoming Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this weekend.

In the tell-all documentary, which was directed by Lana Wilson (Miss Americana) and will air in two parts on Hulu at a later date, Shields recalls a period of professional rejections after she graduated from Princeton in 1987 when she was 22 years old, after she had made headlines as a teenage sex symbol for her modeling and her roles in films like Pretty Baby and Blue Lagoon. So when she heard there was a movie being made, and that her name was being considered, she eagerly agreed to what she thought was a work meeting with a man—whom Shields never names—who was involved in making the film. But, she says, what happened instead was that she was lured to this man’s hotel room and forced to have sex with him against her will.

“This is the first time I’ve ever spoken about what happened,” Shields, who is now 57, tells the camera in a talking head interview. “We had dinner, and I thought it was a work meeting. I had met this person before and he was always nice to me.”

It soon became clear that the man was not interested in talking about the film, or in Shields’s professional career. Shields tried to get a cab to go home, but the man insisted that she follow him to his hotel room, and he would call her a cab from there.

“I go up to the hotel room and he disappears for a while,” Shields says. “I don’t want to go over to the phone, because it’s not my phone. I don’t want to sit down, because I’m not staying. I decided to look at the binoculars, and bide my time. So I look at the binoculars and watch the volleyball players.”

Then Shields describes the assault. “The door opens, and the person comes out naked. I’ve got the binoculars, and I’m like, ‘Shit.’ I put the binoculars down, and he was right on me,” Shields says. “It was like it was wrestling. I was afraid I would get choked out or something. I played the scene out in my head—the run away, the pull back, and the beat the shit out of. So I didn’t fight that much. I didn’t. I just absolutely froze. I thought my one ‘no’ should have been enough. I thought, ‘Stay alive, and get out.'”

Shields continued, “I just shut it out. God knows, I knew how to be dissociated from my body. I had practiced that. The next thing is, the doors open, and the person says, ‘Oh, I’ll see you around.’ No clothes on. I walked out, went down the elevator, and got my own cab. I cried all the way to my friend’s apartment.” When her friend told her she had just been raped, she says she responded, “I’m not willing to believe that.”

That friend, Gavin De Becker, who also worked on Shields’ security team, recalls feeling heartbroken on Shields’s behalf, and adamant that though Shields blamed herself at the time, it wasn’t her fault. “She was crying,” De Becker tells the camera firmly, speaking about the sexual assault incident as it was described to him. “There’s no way that can be misinterpreted. She was not looking for a sexual experience.”

Shields herself recalls the twisted ways she blamed herself: “I believe somehow I put out a message, and that was how the message was received. I drank wine at dinner. I went up to the room. I just was so trusting.”

Later, however, Shields says she wrote a letter to her perpetrator. “I said, ‘That was a huge trust that was blown, disintegrated, and destroyed. How dare you, I’m better than that. I’m better than you are, actually.'” Shields says the letter was dismissed by the person completely, and eventually, she dropped the issue. “I wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body, and just keep on the path that I was on, she said. “The system had never once come to help me, so I just had to get stronger on my own.”

In the documentary, Shields is careful not to name names or reveal any identifying personal information about the person who sexually assaulted her. But the scene she describes sounds similar to the scenes described by the eight women who came forward in a 2017 New York Times exposé, accusing now-convicted sexual predator Harvey Weinstein of rape. In that exposé, reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey identified a pattern of Weinstein’s behavior, writing, “Women reported to a hotel for what they thought were work reasons, only to discover that Mr. Weinstein, who has been married for most of three decades, sometimes seemed to have different interests.” Whether it was Weinstein or not, it’s clearly a destructive pattern that’s played out throughout Hollywood for decades.

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields will premiere as a two-part documentary on Hulu at a later date. The release date has not yet been announced.

If you or someone you know needs to reach out about sexual abuse or assault, RAINN is available 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673), or online at RAINN.org.