- In her new book "Mean Baby," Selma Blair said she got drunk for the first time at age seven.
- "I don't know if I would've survived childhood without alcoholism," she told People.
- She also wrote about being sexually abused "multiple times" in her life while drunk.
"Cruel Intentions" star Selma Blair opened up about the first time she got drunk in her new memoir titled "Mean Baby."
"I don't know if I would've survived childhood without alcoholism," she told People in an interview promoting the book. "That's why it's such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning."
In an excerpt of her book published by People, Blair described how she felt the night she got drunk for the first time at seven years old during a Passover dinner, which she clarified was not the first time she drank alcohol.
"….The year I was seven, when we basically had Manischewitz on tap and no one was paying attention to my consumption level, I put it together: the feeling was not God but fermentation," she wrote. "I thought 'Well this is a huge disappointment, but since it turns out I can get the warmth of the Lord from a bottle, thank God there's one right here.' I got drunk that night. Very drunk."
Blair recalled that she woke up in bed with her sister the next morning without remembering who put her there. She said she used "quick sips" of alcohol to ease her nerves "whenever my anxiety would alight" from then on.
The actor noted that this escalated into alcohol abuse as she got older, but Blair wrote that as a youngster she "became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret."
By the time she was in college, Blair said she was a binge drinker. In another excerpt of her book shared by People, she recounted details of a traumatic night during a spring break in college when she was raped after a day of drinking.
"I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn't," she wrote. "I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words 'Please. Stop.' Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed."
The "Legally Blonde" star told People that she hadn't told anyone except her therapist about the spring break rape before writing the book.
"I did not realize that assault was so central in my life. I had so much shame and blame," she said. "I'm grateful I felt safe enough to put it on the page. And then can work on it with a therapist and with other writing, and really relieve that burden of shame on myself."
Her new book isn't the first time Blair has given fans an intimate look into her struggles. She starred in the 2021 documentary "Introducing, Selma Blair," which chronicled her journey to receive a stem-cell transplant to treat multiple sclerosis, a disease of the nervous system that Blair announced she had in October 2018.
In the film, she attributed her difficult childhood to the fact that her late mother, Molly Ann Beitner, "tethered a darkness" to her that made her think "only my suffering could please her."
Blair told People she's been sober since 2016, and plans to stay sober. "It is like a miracle," she said in a video interview accompanying the People cover shoot. "I never want alcohol in my life again and I couldn't say that other times sober."
"Mean Baby" is available May 17.