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Tatum O’Neal: I Was Sexually Assaulted Many Times As A Child

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Updated on July 6, 2023

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Tatum O’Neal, an actress and the youngest Academy Award winner in history, has said that she was repeatedly molested as a young girl.

O’Neal, 54, who won an Oscar at the age of eight for her performance alongside her father Ryan O’Neal in the famous 1973 film Paper Moon, also claimed that all of the abusers were older men who she believed “were safe.”

The 54-year-old actress wrote, “I am a woman and I have experienced sexual assault more than once,” next to a picture of the Oscar-winning movie Paper Moon, for which she was 10 years old at the time.

“It was not my fault when i was 5, 6 12 , 13 , 15,” she stated, adding that “older men who I thought were safe” were behind each assault.

She was not constantly watched since both her mother, the actress Joanna Moore, and her father, Ryan O’Neal, battled alcoholism and addictions. “When your parents are off getting drunk or high, they are not watching what happens to their children. I suffered years of abuse, both emotional and sexual.”

She said that her father’s friend had assaulted her once, and that her mother’s lover attempted to rape her on another occasion.

O’Neal also criticized Donald Trump in the emotional social media post for making fun of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, who claims that Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school.

In response to the president’s remarks on Ford, O’Neal commented, “We’ve sunk to a depth of depravity that I never thought the president of the United States could ever sink to.”

“There are people will say, I had it coming or it was probably my fault. Or I deserved it -that’s what America has come to,” she said, adding that it was time for everyone to band together and work toward improvement. Whatever your preferences, whether you’re black or white, conservative or liberal, we’re all Americans and we should always fight for those who have had trauma or who have suffered, and never injure others for any reason. Together, we fight for empathy and compassion toward one another. I’ve never seen such a dismal period in our nation.

Even though it is a “sad period in our society,” she said, women who have been the victims of sexual assault or other forms of abuse “must NOT let down our armor.”

“It’s time to fight for one another and each other in this dark time ! America We can do better – we will be better!!’” she concluded the post, adding a prayer hands emoji and an American flag emoji.

O’Neal said that she was molested by her father’s drug dealer when she was 12 years old and by a family friend when she was 6 in her 2004 book A Paper Life.

The actress, who wed McEnroe in 1986 and filed for divorce eight years later, has acknowledged having battled drug and alcohol addiction her whole life.

She has also discussed how, after the dissolution of her marriage, she developed a heroin addiction.