Dax Shepard is opening up about some difficult topics in his new memoir.
The Hit and Run actor, 51, spoke on the matter with Marcus Mumford during a March 2 episode of his Armchair Expert podcast.
“I want to bond with you on this experience, which is, I have for years on here been acknowledging that I had been molested, and that was its own hurdle to just say that,” Shepard began on the topic. “And I got quite comfortable being able to say that. That was fine.”
Shepared, who has previously detailed his experience with childhood sexual abuse in his 2022 song, Cannibal, also revealed that he has been documenting his own abuse story in a forthcoming memoir.
“Now I’m writing a memoir, and last year, really the whole year was about ‘do I have the balls to write down the details of this?’” he continued. “Because the details were always gonna be mine. I didn’t want anyone to be envisioning me. It’s weird that that was still some wall between my shame.”
Adding that he’s had no problem saying that the abuse itself had occurred, Shepard, who shares daughters Lincoln, 12, and Delta, 11, with wife Kristen Bell, admitted that it was most difficult to rehash the details in writing.
“I bet it took me four months to tell that story,” he recalled. “And when I’m writing it, I cannot help but think of people knowing this about me and how still exposed that feels.”
“And I was pretty emotional during the few months,” he added, of the writing process. “I was having really weird, kind of, spikes of emotions and moodiness, and I would forget that’s why I was having that. But I finished it, and something about it existing there feels like a lot of weight is off my shoulders.”
Shepard first revealed that he was molested as a child in 2020, noting that the abuse was “minimal,” but had a profound effect on him and his later struggles with addiction.
