Hatcher: I was abused as a child
Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher was sexually molested by her uncle as a child.
The 41-year-old actress says she learned in 2002 that a 14-year-old victim of her uncle had committed suicide. Concerned that he would escape charges of molestation, Hatcher approached the prosecutors.
“This is something I’ve tried to hide my whole life,” Hatcher tells Vanity Fair magazine.
“I was just blown away by this young girl’s pain,” she says. “I thought, boy, that’s really close to being me. Any day of the week I could feel that sort of pain. I haven’t tried to kill myself, but I’ve certainly thought about it.”
After Hatcher came forward, her uncle, Richard Hayes Stone, then 64, pleaded guilty to four counts of child molestation in the case of the 14-year-old victim and received 14 years in prison.
Chuck Gillingham, the Santa Clara County deputy district attorney in California, said: “Without Teri, this case would have been dismissed.”
Hatcher said she hesitated because she thought tabloids would suggest she was trying to resuscitate her then-languishing career: “Here’s what I anticipated. He did this, he gets off, and Teri ends up on the cover of a tabloid.”
Hatcher said she was five years old and living in Sunnyvale, California, with her family when Stone would manipulate situations to get her alone in his car so he could take advantage of her.
“These are haunting things that I’ve remembered all my life,” she said.
As many victims of sexual abuse do, Hatcher had complicated feelings about the abuse. She did not see her uncle after she was eight or nine years old, and never told her parents, though she thinks they suspected.
“I think their way of dealing with things is denial and guilt,” she says. “Nobody wanted to talk about it. But all I did was blame myself.”
Hatcher’s career was revived with hit show Desperate Housewives, for which she has twice been nominated for a Golden Globe, winning last year.
“I have so much pain,” she says.
“I’m a woman who carries around all these layers of fear and vulnerability. I’m trying to be my powerful me.”
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