Julianne Hough reveals she was sexually abused aged four by a neighbor in harrowing interview
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Julianne Hough has revealed she was sexually abused when she was four-years-old by a neighbor.
'My first experience was when I was about four-years-old. By a neighbor in our neighborhood, in our cul-de-sac,' she said on The Jamie Kern Lima Show.
'I've actually never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before. That was a very, very confusing time, because obviously growing up in the Mormon culture, everything needs to be perfect.'
'There was not a lot of repercussion for what had happened – and by the way, I'm not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with, which is nobody did anything,' she said.
Julianne Hough has revealed she was sexually abused when she was four-years-old by a neighbor
The actress teared up later on in the interview
She did not tell her parents about the abuse until 'later on' as she had forgotten 'about it.'
'Other things happened later in my childhood, and about 15, I came home and I started sharing those things, but I had forgotten about the neighbor thing at 4 years old until I started really doing this work in the last few years,' she said.
'That's why I think I blocked out from birth to 10 basically because I had completely disassociated from that ever happening,' she said.
Speaking of telling her parents about the abuse, she said: 'When two people have an experience especially a child and a parent, we both are experiencing different things, even though we're having the same circumstance happen.
'So for myself, there was all of my experiences of this is what happened to me in my experience, and in my parents' experience, they have their own guilt and shame of other things and what they were trying to do in the moment. So they can't necessarily connect the two and hear what was happening because they were having their own experience also.'
'At that time, they felt guilty that they couldn't do it, but we've definitely through conversation after conversation like, "But we get it now, right? And we're on the same page? I'm not blaming you now, but I definitely needed more at the time."'
'At 15 and I said those things and shared those things, that was definitely, in the way that I knew how express it then as well, which was like, "This just happened but let's move on," because I also didn't want to deal with it either,"' she said, adding she now wants to talk more about the experience after undergoing healing.
She also shared during the interview: 'Being so young, and those being your first experiences — whether it be physical, mental, sexual — those abuses of power to someone who is vulnerable to it — it immediately sets a precedent of: other people have the power.'
Hough previously revealed she had been abused as a child.
Julianne as a young girl in a photo previously shared by her brother Derek Hough
'My first experience was when I was about four-years-old. By a neighbor in our neighborhood, in our cul-de-sac,' she said on The Jamie Kern Lima Show
She did not tell her parents about the abuse until 'later one' as she had forgotten 'about it'
During a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan, Hough revealed she had been abused at the age of 10 after moving to London to begin studying dance at the Italia Conti Academy of the Arts with her brother Derek.
Her divorced parents did not join her, and Julianne was abused by adults who were supposed to supervise her.
'While I was in London, I was abused, mentally, physically, everything,' she explained, but refrained from clarifying the manner of abuse or who afflicted it.
She explained the abuse grew worse 'when I started hitting puberty, when I started becoming a woman and stopped being a little girl.'
Hough is in the midst of promoting her new novel, Everything We Never Knew
The new revelation came as Hough promotes her newly released novel, Everything We Never Knew.
Hough's debut novel, co-written with Ellen Goodlett, is 'about a woman who seemingly has everything together, perfect life, perfect husband, perfect marriage, perfect job,' she explained during a recent appearance on Good Morning America.
The main character, Lexi Cole suddenly 'has these supernatural experiences that threaten the relationships around her,' the author said.
'She goes on this healing journey thinking she's going to heal other people, but of course, you can't heal anybody else... unless you go and heal yourself first.'
The novel was co-written by Ellen Goodlett and was released earlier this week
When asked about the dedication to the 'young Julianne who did what she needed to do in order to survive and protect herself to get to the place where she is today, Hough, who was brought up in the Mormon church and came out as bisexual in 2019, replied, 'This book is also about trusting yourself.
'I think we get so inundated with noise and fitting in and the sense of not belonging and so we shift and adapt ourselves to fit in, and I think trusting yourself and going within, is what this is all about and that's definitely what I experienced as far as dedicating this to my younger self.'
