Dax Shepard, former star of NBC’s “Parenthood” and, along with wife Kristen Bell, half of one of Hollywood’s favorite celebrity couples, said in an interview Monday that he had been molested as a child.

The abuse, Shepard said on Sirius XM’s “The Jason Ellis Show,” was at the hands of an 18-year-old neighbor, when Shepard was just 7.

“It took me 12 years to tell anyone,” he said. “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 told Ellis, also a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

Though Shepard called the incidents “minimal,” he also shared his feelings on how the molestation took a toll on him later in life, fueling eventual struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. His mother, a court-appointed advocate for children in foster care, shared a statistic with him after a recent workshop that caused Shepard pause.


“She called me not too long ago and she said, ‘You know, I was just at a seminar this weekend and I learned that if you’ve been molested, you only have a 20% chance of not being an addict,’” Shepard recounted. “And I was like, ‘Hm, interesting,’ because in my mind I just like to ... have a great time. But when you hear a statistic like that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.’”

Shepard, 41, said he has been sober since 2004. He and Bell began dating in 2007 and married in 2013. The couple have two daughters, Lincoln, 3, and Delta, 1.

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