Dax Shepard is publicly opening up about being sexually abused as a child and how he believes the trauma later led to his addiction issues.
The former Parenthood star revealed in an interview on The Jason Ellis Show on SiriusXM last week that he’d been molested at the age of 7 by an 18-year-old neighbor.
“It was minimal,” Shepard told Ellis, who has previously spoken about being sexually abused by his father. “It wasn’t anything like what you recounted. But even at that, it took me 12 years to tell anyone that.”
The father of two with wife Kristen Bell said that during the time he kept quiet about the abuse, he had “all these insane thoughts.”
“I was like, a) it’s my fault, as generic as that is,” the 41-year-old continued, “and I’m gay, I must have manifested this because I’m secretly gay.”
Shepard, who has been candid in the past about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, told the radio host and former pro skateboarder that he got some clarity on his struggles thanks to his mom, who is a court-appointed advocate for foster kids in Oregon.
She called her son to share a statistic she’d learned during a seminar. “If you’ve been molested, you only have a 20 percent chance of not being an addict,” Shepard said.
“And I was like, ‘Hmmm, interesting,’ because in my mind I just like to f–king have a great time,” he continued. “But when you hear a statistic like that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.'”
Shepard revealed in an interview with Playboy in 2012 that his drug and alcohol use was so out of control that he was “lucky that I didn’t go to jail.”
“I just loved to get f–ked-up — drinking, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, diet pills, pain pills, everything. Mostly my love was Jack Daniel’s and cocaine,” he said.
And it was his hard-partying background (he got sober in 2004) that worried Bell, 35, when they began dating in 2007.
“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.”
The pair, who have two daughters, Lincoln, 3, and Delta, 16 months, married in 2013.
