Mena Suvari was “addicted to meth” after being brutally raped by her brother’s friend when she was just 12 years old.
The American Pie actress, 42, shared details of the horrific experience in her new memoir, The Great Peace, and revealed that she was “never all right again” after the incident.
Mena said she began to dabble with drugs and alcohol to “numb the pain” after being raped in her teens, and felt a sense of relief writing about it in her new book.
“I never was all right again. It feels strange when I experience second-guessing myself when I would like to choose the word ‘rape,'" she wrote.
"Because I didn’t end up in the hospital. I didn’t end up unconscious. But isn’t just that I said no enough?”
“I took drugs to numb myself from the pain. Alcohol. Pot. Coke. Crystal meth. Acid. Ecstasy. Mushrooms. Mescaline," Mena confessed.
"It was my way of detaching from the hell of my existence – and surviving.”
The American Beauty star soon turned to crystal meth, and the substance began to “take over her life”, with her drug addiction affecting her studies as she was obsessing about her next hit while in school.
“The hours I was at school were spent thinking about getting out of school and doing some lines. I stayed up until late at night, slept a couple hours, then repeated the day.
"Before long I was pulling out my small gold lacquered butterfly embossed compact mirror and snorting a line in the school bathroom during a break," she recalled.
Mena then discussed her troubling relationship with a controlling older man when she was 17, and revealed that he was even pressuring her to submit to his sexual demands while she was hard at work on the Oscar-winning drama American Beauty in 1999.
“The whole time I worked on American Beauty, I was grinding on empty: working to perfect my part, submitting to [his] demands for kinky threesomes at least three or four times a week, and pretending in both cases that everything was okay. Except it wasn’t,” Mena remembered.
She called her ex, who was nine years older than her, the "devil himself," and said she caught a sexually transmitted disease from one of their threesomes.
“Little by little he whittled away the thin layer of self-worth I had left,” Mena shared.
She confessed that #MeToo movement helped her to come to terms with what had happened to her, and despite being “uncomfortable” talking about her experiences, she now feels empowered.
“I spent so much time fighting myself, I spent so much time being hard on myself, living in that pain and regret.
“I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. I just want to have conversations about it, like what can we do about it… I don’t want to feel bad for myself anymore. I don’t want to give that power away,” Mena told USA Today while discussing her new book.
Mena shot to worldwide superstardom playing high school student Angela in the 1999 comedy drama American Beauty, alongside Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening.
She went on to star in three of the American Pie movies, and also appeared in hit TV shows including Six Feet Under, and Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Horror Story.
Mena wed cinematographer Robert Brinkmann, who was 17 years her senior, in 2000, but they divorced in 2005.
Five years later, she wed Simone Sestito, but the couple split just one year later.
Mena married third husband Michael Hope in 2018, and in April this year, they announced the birth of their son, Christopher Alexander Hope.
