Demi Moore File picture: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP Demi Moore File picture: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
London - Demi Moore has revealed she was raped at 15, abused drugs, and believes she miscarried a child due to drink.
In a candid forthcoming memoir, the actress also tells of her mother’s multiple suicide attempts – and how her stepfather enlisted her help to try to stop one of them.
In Inside Out, the actress, 56, details her downward spiral of alcohol and drug abuse, prompted by her miscarriage of ex-husband Ashton Kutcher’s baby at the age of 42.
A copy of the memoir was passed to the New York Times earlier this week, and is an account of her famously turbulent personal life. Miss Moore told of her mother’s frequent suicide attempts, and said that on one occasion, her stepfather, Danny Guynes got her to help prevent it.
When she was 15 – the year her mother and stepfather divorced – she was raped, she claimed.
Guynes took his own life two years later.
After her divorce from second husband Bruce Willis, with whom she has three daughters – Rumer, Scout and Tallulah – her love life involved a string of younger men.
These included actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire as well as Madonna’s business partner Guy Oseary, for whom she jumped out of a cake in a skimpy bikini for his 30th birthday. Moore also detailed how she met actor Ashton Kutcher in 2003, whose mother admitted had "messed around in college with drugs, but nothing hard".
After her difficult childhood, she said that her relationship with Kutcher had allowed her to "just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young".
The actress became pregnant with his child, a girl she was going to name Chaplin Ray, but she lost the baby six months into the pregnancy. Although she had been free from her drug and alcohol problems for years, she had recently started drinking again and blamed that on the loss of the baby, she reveals in the memoir.
She and Kutcher married in 2005 and had fertility treatment in the hope that she would get pregnant again. However, her drinking got worse and she says she also began abusing Vicodin, a highly-addictive opioid painkiller.
Moore says she subsequently discovered that Kutcher had been cheating on her and they separated in 2011.
The star detailed how her hedonistic life slipped further downhill after their split. While partying with her 23-year-old daughter, Rumer, in 2012, Moore suffered a seizure after smoking synthetic cannabis and inhaling nitrous oxide, later checking in to a rehabilitation centre for anorexia and addiction to prescription pills.
Her drug abuse led to the alienation of her younger children, Scout and Tallulah – and the acrimony put paid to a book deal involving a memoir Moore had wanted to write about the mothers and daughters in her family.
She said: "Part of my life was clearly unravelling. I had no career. No relationship." Her health deteriorated to the point that she found it too challenging even to do the most basic tasks such as reading or watching television.
She discovered she had auto-immune and digestive problems, and said: "Something was going on, including my organs slowly shutting down." The root of the issue, she said, was a "major heavy viral load".
In recent years, the Striptease actress said she has sought medical treatment and went into rehab for trauma, substance abuse and co-dependency. The last of these, which is also known as relationship addiction, is a behavioural condition marked by an excessive reliance on other people for approval and a sense of identity. She also said she has started to become closer to her daughters.
Scout Willis, Moore’s middle daughter with Bruce, said the book had revived uncomfortable memories for her and her sisters, who have also dealt with their own substance abuse and body images issues.
"It’s challenging because she’s making this amazing effort to put out the most vulnerable moments of her life," said Scout, a 28-year-old actress. "It just happens that it also coincides with some of the most challenging and traumatic times of mine."
Moore – who now lives in Beverly Hills with three dogs in a home full of taxidermy animals, which she loves – said she was not worried if the candid memoir damaged her reputation.
"There’s nothing I have to protect," she said, adding that the memoir was a necessary part of her rediscovering herself. Moore said she is drink and drugs free. And she and her daughters Rumer and Scout are taking a ten-month course on spiritual psychology which teaches "soul-centred living".
