Demi Moore opened up about one of the most traumatic incidents she faced as a teenager in her upcoming memoir, “Inside Out.”
Ahead of the memoir’s release, the “Corporate Animals” actor spoke with Diane Sawyer about being raped when she was just 15, by a man who paid her mother after the incident was over.
In a clip from the “Good Morning America” interview published on Monday, Sawyer says in a voiceover that Moore was “taken by her mother to bars, so that men will notice them. She’s 15 when she comes home one night and an older man they know is in the apartment with the key.”
“She writes, ‘It was rape and a devastating betrayal,’ revealed by the man’s cruel question, ‘How does it feel to be whored by your mother for $500?’” Sawyer added in the video.
After the clip plays, Sawyer asked the actor if she believes that her mother sold her.
“I think, in my deep heart, no. I don’t think it was a straightforward transaction,” Moore answered, seemingly with tears in her eyes. “But she still did give him the access. And put me in harm’s way.”
In the interview, Moore and Sawyer also touched on the actor’s mother’s multiple suicide attempts.
During a heartbreaking interview with Lena Dunham for Harper’s Bazaar, published earlier this month, Moore recalled one of the times that her mother attempted suicide and she had to dig pills out of her mom’s mouth.
“The next thing I remember is using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother had tried to swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told me what to do,” Moore told Dunham.
She added that “Something very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back. My childhood was over.”
Moore herself has been candid about her struggles with addiction. She told Dunham that she became sober again after losing her sobriety in her 40s.
“In retrospect, what I realized is that when I opened the door [again], it was just giving my power away,” Moore told Harper’s Bazaar. “I guess I would think of it like this: It was really important to me to have natural childbirth because I didn’t want to miss a moment. And with that I experienced pain.”
She said that “part of being sober is, I don’t want to miss a moment of life, of that texture, even if that means being in — some pain.”