Brooke Shields tells the story of the rape in Pretty Baby, a documentary at Sundance
In her heartbreaking new documentary “Pretty Baby,” Brooke Shields opens up for the first time about being raped in her twenties.
In the film, which premieres Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, the former supermodel reveals her struggles with finding acting work after graduating from Princeton in 1987. Feeling vulnerable, and wondering if her career was really at its peak, she leapt into action. The chance to discuss a new movie role when an acquaintance asks her to dinner.
“I thought it was a business meeting,” Shields explains in the documentary. “I’ve met this guy before and he’s always been nice to me.” But soon at their meal I realized that “his demeanor was changing and there was no talk of the movie.”
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Shields offered to get her own taxi home, but the man insisted on calling one to take it back to her at his hotel. “I go up to his hotel room and he disappears for a while,” says Shields. While she was waiting, he appeared naked and threw himself on her.
“It was like wrestling,” Shields says through a tear. “I was afraid I was going to choke or something, I didn’t know. I played the scene in my head, so I didn’t fight so much… I just froze. I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out.'” “
As it was happening, “I shut it down,” she says. “God knows I knew to separate from my body. I practiced it (as a model).”
Shields, now 57, did not name her alleged attacker. Afterwards, she called a taxi and “cryed all the way” to her boyfriend’s apartment, where she told the head of security, Gavin de Becker, about the incident.
“I was angry to hear her story,” de Becker says in the film. “This is my little sister and I wanted her to know that she did nothing wrong.”
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Shields’ traumatic experience is just one of the many harrowing moments recounted in “Pretty Baby,” which is directed by documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson (Taylor Swift 2020 Netflix doc “Miss Americana”). The two-part documentary, set to air on Hulu later this year, explores Shields’ rapid rise as a child model and the unsettling way she was sexually objectified from a young age.
The film deals with the uproar over her provocative campaign for Calvin Klein jeans when she was 15, as well as the backlash over her playing a child prostitute in the 1978 movie Pretty Baby when she was just 11. The documentary also delves into her complicated relationship with her mother, Teri Shields, who managed her career.
“Brooke is like a work of art,” Terry says of her then-toddler daughter in archive footage. “And like any fine painting, Brooke is to be seen and enjoyed by the world.”
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The documentary revisits the many ways Shields was exploited as an underage girl. She lost a lawsuit against photographer Gary Gross, who photographed Shields nude when she was just 10 years old and sold the photos years later. She also recalls filming a sex scene in 1981’s “Endless Love” when she was just 16, claiming director Franco Zeffirelli harmed her in order to get the desired reaction.
“He grabbed my toe and kept twisting it, so I just looked ecstatic, I guess,” recalled an emotional Shields. “But it upset me more than anything else, because it hurt me… I didn’t want to sound stupid or untalented, so she broke up with me.”
The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, runs through January 29.
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