Loretta Young was compelled to refute rumors that her adopted daughter, Judy, was the result of an affair with her married co-star Clark Gable for decades. However, in a book published after her death in 2000, she confessed that Gable was Judy’s father.

Linda Lewis, Young’s daughter-in-law, revealed in a sit-down interview with Buzz Feed that Young first heard the phrase “date rape” and enquired about their meaning while watching “Larry King Live” in 1998.

“I said, ‘It doesn’t have to be violent, it doesn’t have to be rip-your-clothes-off. It’s when your no isn’t no,'” Lewis told Young.

‘That’s what happened between me and Clark,’ Young replied after hearing her daughter-in-law’s response.

That discovery comes 80 years after Young memorably co-starred with Clark Gable in “Call of the Wild” at the age of 23.

The news shocked Lewis, but he said Young’s top goal was always Judy’s safety.

The family remained silent for the same reason, but after Judy’s death in 2011 at the age of 78, Lewis and her husband Chris, Young’s son from her second husband Tom Lewis, decided to go public.

‘Judy is not here to be hurt by this,’ Lewis clarifies. ‘And that’s what Loretta really wanted to avoid — because who doesn’t want to be conceived in love?’

Young disguised her pregnancy for a few months in Europe before giving birth to Judy in 1935 in California. Judy was subsequently shuffled around to several orphanages until being revealed as Young’s “adopted” daughter 19 months later. Young married radio producer Tom Lewis and had two additional children with him after winning an Oscar for her portrayal in The Farmer’s Daughter in 1948. She eventually informed Judy the truth about her father in 1966.

Lewis told Buzz Feed in April from her Florida home that it was no secret that Young was smitten by the attractive leading man, who was 12 years older than her but married at the time.

“Mom used to tell me that every performance involved falling a little bit in love with her co-star,” she told the outlet.

Judy, she said, was conceived after Gable, who was then married to Maria Langham, sneaked into her compartment and forced himself on her during a train voyage. Young, a devout Catholic, held herself responsible for enabling Gable to pursue her.

“She was so humiliated,” Linda Lewis explained, “and what she would do when she was humiliated was just ‘on with the show.’ Because she had been trained since the age of 3, you put a good face on it, and you go forward. She knew she’d have to continue working with him.”

“The inability to fend off Gable’s advances constituted a failure on her part — not Gable’s,” Petersen writes. “She spent the rest of her life trying to compensate for that failure, believing that the guilt was hers and hers alone.”