Julianne Hough has revealed that she was sexually abused when she was four years old by a neighbour.
“My first experience was when I was about four years old. A neighbor in our neighborhood, on our dead-end street,” he said. The Jamie Kern Lima Show.
“I’d never said that out loud to anyone in an interview before. It was a very, very confusing time, because obviously growing up in Mormon culture, everything has to be perfect.”
“There weren’t too many repercussions for what happened and I’m certainly not the only one in my family who went through similar things. So it was very difficult to accept it as no one did anything,” she said.
Julianne Hough has revealed that she was sexually abused by a neighbor when she was four years old.
The actress later cried during the interview.
She didn’t tell her parents about the abuse until “later” because she “had forgotten about it.”
‘Other things happened later in my childhood, and around age 15, I came home and started sharing those things, but I had forgotten about the neighbor thing at age 4 until I started really doing this work in the last few years,’ he said.
“That’s why I think I blocked myself from birth until I was 10, basically because I had completely dissociated myself from that happening,” she said.
Speaking about telling her parents about the abuse, she said: ‘When two people have an experience, especially a child and a parent, we’re both experiencing different things, even though we’re going through the same circumstance.
‘In my case, this is all what happened to me and my parents, who have their own guilt and shame about other things and what they were trying to do at the time. So they can’t necessarily connect the two things and hear what was going on because they were also living their own experience.’
‘At the time they felt guilty for not being able to do it, but definitely… through conversation after conversation, like, “But we understand 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, I said those things and shared them, definitely, in the way I knew how to express it back then, too, which was like, ‘This just happened, but let’s move on,’ because I didn’t want to deal with it either,” she said, adding that she now wants to talk more about the experience after undergoing healing.
She also shared during the interview: “Being so young and having those be your first experiences, whether physical, mental, sexual, those abuses of power towards someone who is vulnerable to them, immediately sets a precedent of: other people have the power.”
Hough previously revealed that she suffered abuse as a child.
Julianne as a child in a photo previously shared by her brother Derek Hough
“My first experience was when I was about four years old. A neighbor in our neighborhood, on our cul-de-sac,” she said on The Jamie Kern Lima Show.
She didn’t tell her parents about the abuse until “later” because she had forgotten about it.
During a 2013 interview with CosmopolitanHough revealed she had been abused at the age of 10 after moving to London to begin studying dance at the Italia Conti Academy of Arts with her brother Derek.
Her divorced parents did not support 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 declined to clarify the form of the abuse or who committed it.
She explained that the abuse worsened “when I started to hit puberty, when I started to become a woman and stopped being a girl.”
Hough is in the midst of promoting her new novel, Everything We Never Knew
The new revelation came as Hough was promoting 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 under control: a perfect life, a perfect husband, a perfect marriage, a 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 anyone else… unless you go and heal yourself first.’
The novel was co-written by Ellen Goodlett and was published earlier this week.
Asked about the dedication to ‘young Julianne who did what she had to do to survive and protect herself to get to where she is today,’ Hough, who was raised Mormon and came out as bisexual in 2019, responded: ‘This book is also about trusting yourself.
“I think we’re so inundated with noise and fitting in and feeling like we don’t belong, that we change and adapt to fit in, and I think trusting yourself and looking inward is what this is all about and that’s definitely what I experienced dedicating this to my younger self.”