Julianne Hough is opening up about the sexual abuse she suffered in her early childhood for the first time.
During a candid conversation on The Jamie Kern Lima Show, the Dancing with the Starsco-host revealed that her “first experience” with sexual abuse was when she was “about 4 years old” growing up in Utah. The perpetrator was a “neighbor,” she said, calling it a “very confusing time.”
Hough, 36, admitted that she’s “never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before,” and then reflected on how the experiences influenced her.
“There was not a lot of repercussion for what had happened – and by the way, I’m not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with,” she shared. “Nobody did anything.”
Hough said she told her parents about the experience “later on because [she] forgot about it,” and it only came out when she confided in her parents about other experiences with the abuse she’d faced around age 15.
“I started sharing those things, but I had forgot about the neighbor thing at 4 years old until I started really doing this work in the last few years,” she admitted, adding that she had “blocked out from birth to 10 basically because I had completely disassociated from [the abuse] ever happening.”
“Being so young, and those being your first experiences – whether it be physical, mental, sexual – those abuses of power to someone who is vulnerable to it – it immediately sets a precedent of: other people have the power,” she added.
Julianne Hough attends Baccarat x Basil Hayden Speakeasy at the 77th Annual Tony Awards at David Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center on June 16, 2024 in New York City.
Bennett Raglin/Getty
Hough — who just released a new book titled Everything We Never Knew, which allowed her to reflect on her life — told Jamie Kern Lima that her parents “felt guilty” after learning what she’d experienced.
“At the time, when I was younger, I think they also didn’t know what to do. And were also in a position of not feeling capable or also feeling helpless,” she said. “We’ve definitely gone through conversation after conversation like, ‘But we get it now, right? And we’re on the same page? I’m not blaming you now, but I definitely needed more at the time.'”
The Footloose actress also shared that she was able to truly reconnect with her parents while she went through her 2020 divorcefrom Brooks Laich. “During my divorce is when I really reconnected with my parents and they showed up for me – as my parents,” Hough said. “And I needed that. I reclaimed my parental relationship with them and I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me. And that was the most healing [thing].”
Hough has previously shared that when she was 10 and living in London with her brother Derek Hough to attend a dance academy, she was “abused mentally, physically, everything,” as she told Cosmopolitan in 2013. However, she did not elaborate further on her former experiences.
