![]() ![]() We have to say it out loud.… That’s been the big discovery for me through all this. “‘Don’t tell dad’ or walking on eggshells can’t be the right way to handle things. “I’m going to face it and figure it out so this doesn’t keep on happening,” she says. I need to do something crazy.”Īnderson hopes that writing about her sexual trauma will inspire others to speak up and break this “generational” cycle of women responding to violence the way they’ve seen those before them handle it. Anderson vaguely references these traumas when describing her decision to flee Canada in the late 80s: “When other things were happening, compounded, and then I just went, I can’t take this anymore. She also describes a boyfriend who let his friends assault her in the back seat of a car. I became shy and withdrawn, just living in my imagination.”Īnderson writes that when she was around 13, she was raped by a man more than a decade older than her. If someone would read this book who’s going through something similar, maybe they’ll tell somebody. A lot of predators choose people or victims that will be ashamed or embarrassed to share the details. “I kept on taking it out and putting it back in,” says Anderson of the passage. The most difficult passage of the memoir for Anderson to write was about the molestation she says she suffered as a child by a female babysitter. I left because my kids were more important and I didn’t want them to see that.’” She cringes, feeling bad. “I said, ‘I think the difference is that I chose my kids and you chose dad. “I was not going to do that to my kids.” Anderson recently confronted her mother about the marital decisions made by both of them. “I was very, very sensitive when it came to any kind of physical violence,” says Anderson. (Lee pleaded no contest to spousal battery and was sentenced to six months in jail.) Despite that love, though, Anderson abruptly ended the relationship in 1998 after Lee assaulted her while she was holding Dylan, then an infant. “Tommy was the love of my life because we had such a beautiful, unique, romantic relationship and two beautiful boys,” she maintains. At the height of her Baywatch stardom, Anderson married rocker and prolific partyer Tommy Lee after spending only four days with him in Mexico. She writes that she was raised by a volatile, hard-drinking father and a mother who left him multiple times but always returned. I’m looking forward to putting it all behind me too.”ĭuring the process, Anderson, who has never tried traditional talk therapy, revisited her upbringing and came to understand how it impacted her choices as an adult. What do they say? Just face it and erase it. “This has really felt like exposure therapy of some kind. “Coming home to face my life as a whole and look at it from this perspective has been really great,” she says. Meanwhile, she put her life down on paper-her preferred mode of self-expression since childhood. “But they think that the full picture is much more interesting than these shallow jabs.” She had kept numerous journals since childhood and amassed a library of home movies from adulthood, and she handed these unedited archives over to Emmy-nominated director Ryan White for use in the documentary, which was coproduced by Brandon. “They’re just sick of defending their mom,” she cracks. Everyone was looking good-all the contractors that were here.” She married one in December 2020, and around the time the marriage ended, about a year later-“It ended up being a disaster”-she was ready for some serious introspection.Īt the insistence of her sons, Brandon and Dylan Lee, the actor sat down to tell her life story. ![]() (“He’d only poop at the Louvre,” she explains.) Speaking about the house renovation, she says she started to “romanticize everything. On top of the upright piano behind her is one of the first paintings she purchased-a stormy landscape in a gilded frame-plus a framed snapshot of her and her golden retriever Zeus in front of the Louvre. She started renovating a house and felt fulfilled in making it “my art project”-designing and decorating her new life. “It’s always an artistic place, anyway.” During the pandemic, Anderson closed out the chapter of her life spent in the elite California zip code and returned to her roots: Canadian normalcy. “A broken heart is always an interesting place to be,” she muses. “This” being a kind of metamorphic awakening for Anderson that began with a broken heart and a sold Malibu beach house.
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