John Stamos is revealing a painful part of his childhood.
In a new interview with People, in support of his memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, the 60-year-old actor shares that he was sexually abused by a babysitter.
Stamos tells the outlet that writing the book helped him realize what he had been through.
“I mean, I knew, it was always in the back, and I do so much advocacy for the [survivors],” the Full House star says. “I felt like, I remembered it slightly. It has always been there, but I packed it away as people do, right?”
Stamos says that he didn’t tell anyone, and made an excuse for what was happening at the time.
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“I think I told myself, like, ‘Ah, it’s girls, man,'” he says. “It was like you’re playing dead so they’ll stop. But it wasn’t totally aggressive. I don’t know, it was not good.”
Stamos reveals that he was about “10 or 11” when the incident happened. Over the course of many years, the actor has been an advocate for speaking up against sexual abuse. Stamos recalls giving an acceptance speech at an event for abused children, and not feeling like it was a good time to share his experience.
The Grandfathered actor also didn’t want his past trauma to be one of the main talking points of his book.
“I didn’t want the headlines to be that, and I didn’t want the book to be over that,” he tells People. “It was a page or something, but I felt I had to talk about it. It was weird. It was something that, I think, I was probably like 10 or 11 [when it happened]. I shouldn’t have had to deal with those feelings.”
While he wasn’t vocal or couldn’t do much when it happened to him, Stamos says that should that happen to his and wife Caitlin McHugh’s 6-year-old son, Billy, it would be handled differently.
“But I’ll tell you, if I found out someone was doing that to my son, that’s a totally different story,” he says.
If You Would Have Told Me is out Oct. 24.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.
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