Brooke Shields examines her life, fame in doc ‘Pretty Baby’
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Brooke Shields reveals that she was the victim of a sexual assault in a new documentary about her life that premiered Friday afternoon at the Sundance Film Festival. She doesn’t name the man who she said raped her, but she described the circumstances: It took place soon after she graduated college with someone she knew professionally and had met for dinner to discuss work. The assault happened when she went to his hotel room to call a cab.
“I didn’t fight that much. I just absolutely froze,” she says in the film. “I thought my one ‘no’ should have been enough.” Later, when she told her friend, security specialist Gavin de Becker, about what happened, he said, “That’s rape.” At the time she wasn’t ready to believe it.
It is just one of many revelations in “Pretty Baby,” a nuanced look at Shields’ life up until now including her rise to fame, her complicated relationship with her mother Teri Shields, who was an alcoholic, and how the media, from the entertainment industry to the journalists interviewing her, commodified her sexualization at a young age while shaming her at the same time. The film will be on Hulu later this year.
Directed by Lana Wilson, the documentary takes its name from Louis Malle’s 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” a drama about a young sex worker, played by an 11-year-old Shields, in New Orleans in 1917. In the film, written by Polly Platt, she kisses a 29-year-old Keith Carradine and also appears nude.
It wasn't the first, nor would it be the last time she was sexualized by the media. At 15 she shot “Blue Lagoon,” then came “Endless Love.” Both had sex and nudity. And then there were those Calvin Klein denim ads. When she was 16 and a global star, a family friend and photographer tried to sell nude photos he took of her when she was...