Bella Thorne Talks About Being Molested, Says ‘My Mind is A Scary Place’ & Going Brok

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...e After Disney

Social media has become vital to her livelihood, and she knows it. Despite working on “Shake It Up” for three years, she says that when she turned 18, she had $200 to her name. When I ask her where the money went, her voice turns serious: “You know where it went.” I reply I do not, but she declines to elaborate. (Per the Coogan Law, employers must withhold 15% of a minor’s gross wages, preventing income from going entirely to kid actors’ guardians.)

When she realized how dire her financial situation was at 18, she was forced to move in with her then-boyfriend, another Disney Channel star named Gregg Sulkin. She could never pay for their meals when they went out to dinner, which embarrassed her, because her dad had always taught her to be the first to put down her credit card.

Thorne, whose father died in a motorcycle accident when she was 9, has also spoken publicly about her depression. Last month, on the night “Conrad & Michelle” aired, she posted on Instagram that her emotions “are always all over the place,” encouraging fans to call the suicide hotline if they were having “sad thoughts.”

“My mind,” she tells me now, “is a scary place.”

That’s why she spent all of 2017 working, either on “Famous in Love” or a movie set.

“I can’t leave myself alone too long,” she says. “My mind goes to a weird place if I’m not at work all the time.”

Thorne has never named her abuser and says she has resisted reporting the molestation to the authorities because she does not want to relive the traumatic memories.

“And I guess that makes me selfish,” she says, her voice growing quiet. “I could do it. I should do it. You should tell every girl to go after her attacker. You should tell every girl that she has the right to go out there and speak her truth.

“But then you don’t. Then you can’t even [speak out]. I always want to be a good person. And that makes me qualify as not as good of a person.”

She starts to cry, and I put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her. Suddenly, she lies down on the couch and puts her head on my lap and details the abuse. Most of the time, she says, she acted like she was asleep while it was taking place. And she feels guilty about that.

“I always think, ‘Maybe you could have done something,’ ” she says, still crying. “It kind of makes me mad, because I read these stories that are really awful — I mean, really awful ... it’s really something getting ripped and taken from you. At least those girls tried. I just laid there, comatose.”

At 21, Bella Thorne has 4 movies out, 18 million Instagram followers, 19 cats and the will to survive - Los Angeles Times

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Former Disney Child Actor Bella Thorne Claims She Was Molested From Age 6 to 14

“The transition, it’s definitely tough. But it is what it is. It’s like anything in my life. If you read the book you’ll be like, ‘Haha transitioning from Disney to this was f****** easy.’ I don’t know. Getting molested for f****** from when your six to your fourteen seems like way harder circumstances. You’re being physically abused all the time. Seems like a much more difficult situation than f****** having paparazzi following you since you were twelve. Um, I don’t know. I was still being molested when paparazzi were still f****** following me. So it’s pretty hard in my mind to think of these big flashlight photographs, and everyone thinking they know me and talking about me, but having no idea the type of mistreatment that I was still dealing with at that time. That everyone around me saw and did nothing. So, I don’t know you tell me what’s so hard. ‘Cause that to me, way harder than any of this other **** I deal with on a daily basis.”