Mena Suvari
The American Beauty star revealed in her 2021 memoir, The Great Peace, that she was raped by a friend of her older brother when she was 12. “I never was all right again,” Suvari wrote, later revealing that she began dating a 26-year-old when she was just 17 and claiming the relationship was sexually and emotionally abusive. “The whole time I worked on American Beauty, I was grinding on empty: working to perfect my part, submitting to [his] demands for kinky threesomes at least three or four times a week, and pretending in both cases that everything was OK. Except it wasn’t. … Little by little he whittled away the thin layer of self-worth I had left.”
In July 2022, the Six Feet Under alum confessed to The Guardian that her experiences with sexual abuse warped the way she views sex and relationships. “I’ve never wanted to speak negatively about things that can be very healthy for other people. I was not given the choice or the permission to do it, and that’s what was so destructive for me,” Suvari said at the time. “All of that still weighs on me because I never got the opportunity to discover myself in that way.”
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