'No One Gets to Own My Truth but Me'

IN A NEW DOCUMENTARY, THE STAR REVEALS HER STRUGGLES, THE SEXUAL ASSAULT SHE NEVER SPOKE OF-AND THE BEAUTY OF FINDING HER VOICE 

- LIZ MCNEIL

At 12 years old, Brooke Shields was already a subject of global fascination. “I always felt embarrassed by the attention,” she admits. “I would be asked stupid questions like, ‘How does it feel to be beautiful?’ And what went through my mind was, ‘How does it feel to be stupid?’ To sit there, even though it was under the guise of adoration—there’s nothing you can respond to, because they’re just telling me what I look like.”

Those extraordinary looks, first broadcast in an Ivory soap commercial when she was 11 months old, graced hundreds of magazine covers, sold countless pairs of Calvin Klein jeans and made her a pop culture phenomenon by the time she was a teen. “She was a nuclear version of what it is like to be judged by your appearance,” says her friend Gavin de Becker. Says Brooke: “From the get-go, I was always portraying somebody else, and I did it to a tee. A movie person, a model person, the daughter to my mom: They all existed in silos. And when you do that for a long enough period of time, it’s hard to know who you really are.”