Dax Shepard was molested as a child, the actor revealed for the first time on Monday.
"Yeah, I was molested," said Shepard on Sirius XM's The Jason Ellis Show, by an 18-year-old "dude in my neighborhood" when he was seven.
Shepard, 41 called the molestation "minimal" but said the experience likely played into his addiction issues later in life.
"It took me 12 years to tell anyone," said Shepard. "And then all that time, I was like, a) 'It's my fault,' as generic as that is, I'm like, 'it's my fault. And I'm gay, I must have manifested this because I'm secretly gay.' I had all these insane thoughts for 11 years or 12 years."
Shepard, who has been sober since 2004, connected the dots to his alcohol and drug addiction issues when his mother, a court-appointed advocate for foster children, told him about a statistic tying abuse to addiction.
"If you've been molested, you only have a 20 percent chance of not being an addict," said the actor, who had previously attributed his urges to partying. "But when you hear a statistic like that, I'm like, 'Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.' "
Shepard married Kristen Bell in 2013 and the couple share two daughters, Lincoln, 3, and Delta, 1. The two have often joked about the "nauseating" level of love they share.
"I ...love him more than I could ever articulate," Bell told the Los Angeles Times recently while promoting The Boss. "But I made a choice to love my husband. I made a choice to be happy with him and be good to him and conduct myself in his presence exactly as I would in his absence. And he made exactly the same commitment to me. And in truth, accepting that we are on the same team is the source of our joy."
