Brooke Shields Reveals She Was Raped by Hollywood Insider in Powerful Sundance Doc

Brooke Shields is a little girl, likely 11 years old, or even younger. Appearing on a talk show, the male, middle-aged host smiles at her leeringly. He calls her a “pretty girl.” Did she know that, he asks? The studio audience looks on, some baffled and some indifferent, as if this was quite normal. Does she enjoy all the fuss, he continues? Shields’s blue eyes are more piercing than you might remember. And, in this instance, they’re completely vacant, as if she has dissociated.

This is the opening scene to Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the two-part documentary that premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. The footage is shown as audio from a new interview with Shields plays. “It felt so arbitrary and unmerited,” she says, about the fascination with her beauty when she was so young. That anyone called her an icon was something she wasn’t capable of processing.

“I was born with this face, so I didn’t want to think about it,” she says. “I wanted to think about things I could control. Things that could have happened without beauty.”

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