For the first time, actor Dax Shepard opened up about being sexually abused when he was young.
The former "Parenthood" star stopped by Sirius XM's "The Jason Ellis Show" last week and revealed he was molested at the age of 7 by an 18-year-old neighbor and how he believed the emotional trauma from the sexual abuse led to his future addiction problems.
"It was minimal. It wasn't anything like what you recounted. But even at that, it took me 12 years to tell anyone that," the 41-year-old told Ellis, who was also a victim of sexual abuse. "And then all that time, I was like, A) 'It's my fault,' as generic as that is. I'm like, 'It's my fault. And I'm gay. I must have manifested this because I'm secretly gay.' I had all these insane thoughts for 11 years or 12 years."
In the past, Shepard had been very open with his struggles with addiction and told the host he recently had a breakthrough when his mother, who works with foster children as a court-appointed advocate, told him that children who were abused in their youth are more likely to experience some form of addiction in their life.
"She called me not too long ago and she said, 'You know, I was just at a seminar this weekend, and I learned that if you've been molested, you only have a 20 percent chance of not being an addict,'" Shepard recalled. "And I was like, 'Hmm, interesting,' because in my mind I just like to... have a great f--king time. But when you hear a statistic like that, I'm like, 'Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.'"
The actor, sober since 2004, began dating his wife Kristen Bell in 2007. The couple married in 2013 and has two daughters together, Lincoln, 3, and Delta, 1.
In a 2012 interview with Playboy, Shepard revealed that he "just loved to get f--ked-up" no matter what the source was, but that Jack Daniel's and cocaine were his two biggest vices. In the interview, he also revealed his hard partying background scared Bell when they first got together.
"Kristen's a good girl," Shepard told Playboy. "All the things I'd done were terrifying to her, and she had a hard time believing I would ever be able to stay married and monogamous and a father and all those things. For the first year and a half we were together, that was what we battled over almost weekly."
