WASHINGTON, April 19 (UPI) — Dax Shepard said his past addictions may have been linked to his having been molested as a child.
Speaking with Jason Ellis on his Sirius XM radio show last week, Shepard revealed he was molested by an 18-year-old neighbor when he was 7.
“It was minimal,” he told Ellis, who had been sexually abused by his father growing up. “It wasn’t anything like what you recounted. But even at that, it took me 12 years to tell anyone that.”
Shepard said keeping the secret inside led to “insane” thoughts, such as the molestation being his fault, “as generic as that is,” and that he must have “manifested” the incident because he may have been “secretly gay.”
A conversation with his mother, a court-appointed foster kid advocate, led to the realization that his addictions as a younger man may have been linked to the sexual abuse, Shepard said. Sharing a statistic that people who are molested only have a 20 percent chance of avoiding addictive behavior made him realize what had happened.
“I was like, ‘Hmmm, interesting,’ because in my mind I just like to [expletive] have a great time, but when you hear a statistic like that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.'”
Shepard is now married to Hollywood actress Kristen Bell, with whom he has two children. Before settling down, the actor had lived a life filled with drugs and alcohol, telling Playboy in 2012 he was “lucky” he never wound up in jail. He got sober in 2004.
