Justin Baldoni recounted experiencing “sexual trauma” by the hands of an ex-girlfriend in faculty, and the way the “horrible, horrible relationship” led to him turning into an actor.
The director and actor, currently identified for It Ends With Us, opened up on the Dec. 4 episode of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, discussing a spread of subjects, together with his current ADHD analysis and his expertise with a poisonous relationship in faculty.
Baldoni, 40, shared that he entered the connection whereas attending Long Beach State, assembly a “lovely younger girl” at Abercrombie & Fitch.
However, the connection rapidly turned dangerous.
“I type of contorted myself and my persona to be what she wished,” Baldoni defined.
“I had sturdy values and opinions and beliefs stepping into, and people had been very simply manipulated and reshaped… I fully misplaced any sense of self that I had left. And it received very emotionally abusive.”
The star revealed he skilled sexual trauma through the relationship, one thing he struggled to course of for years as a consequence of societal expectations.
“In my head, a person cannot expertise sexual trauma by the hands of a girl. It’s additionally the way in which that society has type of made me really feel,” Baldoni stated, including, “But I instructed myself for 15 years after that that wasn’t really what occurred… all the issues that girls have been feeling and experiencing for a very long time.”
A breakthrough got here throughout remedy when his therapist posed an eye-opening query: “Justin, you do a whole lot of work on this house: If a girl instructed you that story, what would you name it?” Baldoni stated, “That’s after I broke,” marking the beginning of his therapeutic.
Reflecting on the connection’s finish, which concerned infidelity, Baldoni stated, “It was a horrible, horrible relationship. I left faculty, I moved to L.A., and it was really because of that relationship ending that I ended up turning into an actor.”
Now married to spouse Emily since 2013, the couple share two youngsters, Maiya, 9, and Maxwell, 7.
