In her new documentary “Pretty Baby,” Brooke Shields reveals she was raped as a young woman.
In the two-part film, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, Shields, 57, did not name her alleged attacker, but she shared details of the assault, which she says occurred shortly after she graduated from Princeton University in 1987.
She recalls meeting the man for dinner to discuss career opportunities. She said she immediately felt uncomfortable after taking up his offer to come back to his hotel room to call a taxi.
“He said, ‘Come back to the hotel, and I’ll call a cab,’” Shields recounted. “And I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for awhile.”
She remembered grabbing his pair of binoculars to distract herself when the man left the room, watching a group of volleyball players out the hotel window.
“The door opens, the person comes out naked, and I’ve got the binoculars, and I’m like, ‘S–t,’” she explained. “And I put the binoculars down, and he’s right on me. Just like, was wrestling.”
She said she feared she’d “get choked out or something” if she tried to fight back — so, she “just absolutely froze.”
“I thought one ‘no’ should’ve been enough, and I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,’ and I just shut it out,” she continued. “God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practiced that.”
She said she fled the hotel room, grabbing her own cab, and she “cried all the way to my friend’s apartment.”
She couldn’t process the incident at the time. Even when her own security specialist reportedly told her, “That’s rape,” she said she replied, “I’m not willing to believe that.”
The Post reached out to Shields’ rep for comment.
The “Blue Lagoon” actress is not alone in how she processed her trauma. A 2015 study of US university students found 60% did not acknowledge they were raped, instead labeling the experience as “bad sex” or “miscommunication.”
“Women who have an experience that legally would be rape, instead label what happened to them as something that is not a crime, such as a miscommunication,” Heather Littleton, a psychologist at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, told the Guardian in 2021.
Shields’ documentary explores the sexualization she faced throughout her prolific modeling and acting career. The title is inspired by the 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” which showed Shields, then 11, nude and kissing Keith Carradine, who was 29 at the time.
Shields was famously crowned a sex icon when she appeared in a Calvin Klein advertisement as a teen with the tagline, “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
“I think it’s been done since the dawn of time, and I think it’s going to keep going on,” she told the Guardian in 2021 of the sexualization of young girls.
“There’s something incredibly seductive about youth,” she added. “I think it just has different forms, and it’s how you survive it and whether you choose to be victimized by it. It’s not in my nature to be a victim.”
She recalled journalists’ probing questions when her career was getting underway, specifically referring to the late Barbara Walters in a recent episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show.”
“She asked me what my measurements were and asked me to stand up,” Shields said on the show. “And I stand up, and she was like comparing herself to this little girl. And I thought, ‘This isn’t right. I don’t understand what this is.’”
“But I just behaved and just smiled,” she continued, adding that she “felt so taken advantage of in so many ways.”
Shields, who previously revealed she was a virgin until she was 22, admitted she felt a tinge of regret about being “so open,” since the nickname, the “most famous virgin in the world,” followed her around.
“I mean, I think it was, in hindsight, a bit of a mistake for me to be so open about my virginity because it never left me alone,” the actress said on her podcast last year.
“Pretty Baby,” directed by Lana Wilson of Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” doc, is slated to be available on Hulu later this year.