For 35 years Cristina Ferrare had good reason to bottle up her memories of John DeLorean.

She had been a 23-year-old model when she fell in love with the rogue car magnate, who was 25 years her senior. After their 1973 wedding they lived a high-society fairy tale with their two young children, Zachary and Kathryn—residing in a 20-room Fifth Avenue duplex so high in the sky that she could see all of Central Park. But the fairy tale screeched to a halt in 1982 when John, after a desperate attempt to get money to save his eponymous car company, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to obtain and distribute $24 million worth of cocaine. Then there was a trial, during which Ferrare—who had remained fiercely supportive of her husband—learned DeLorean had lied to her.

The scandal was front-page news, and Ferrare lost many of her friends, her life savings (thanks to lawyer fees), and her career. Shortly after DeLorean was acquitted, Ferrare left her husband and moved the children out of the penthouse and into her parents’ home, where they slept on air mattresses on the floor.

For decades filmmakers approached Ferrare about adapting the most traumatic chapter of her and her children’s lives for the screen. “But I decided a long time ago not to speak of it because of my children,” Ferrare told Vanity Fair last week by phone. “The questions that I knew people were going to ask me would expose things about my children’s father that I didn’t want them hearing from my mouth.”

So when directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce reached out to her about their documentary Framing John DeLorean—available on VOD and in limited theaters now—Ferrare respectfully declined their invitation to participate on camera. But she supported Zachary and Kathryn’s decision to speak to the filmmakers—and to talk about reconciling the greed of their father, who died in 2005, with the virtues of the man they each considered their best friend.

“Your father is shamed and goes to jail,” Kathryn says at one point in the film, recapping what she experienced as a child. “Your family loses all their money. Your parents get divorced. Everything in your world changes, and for the next 15 years of your life, you get chased by, ‘Is your father in jail?’ and cocaine jokes.… My entire life I had to live it down.” At one point she shares an art project she made—a sketch of the DeLorean DMC collaged with front-page news stories about her family’s fall from grace. Instead of DMC, the car’s bumper reads, “Destroy My Childhood.”

Kathryn worked through her issues with her father in therapy—and after DeLorean declared bankruptcy in 1999 and was living in a one-bedroom apartment, Kathryn boosted his spirits by introducing him to DeLorean conventions, where he could speak to people who still loved his cars.

Zachary, who was about 12 when his father was arrested, has apparently had a more difficult journey processing this trauma. “How the fuck could you put our family in jeopardy like that?” Zachary wonders aloud in the film. While remembering his family’s penthouse, Zachary welcomes cameras into his “shitty little apartment,” featuring an unmade futon and tiny messy kitchen.

After Ferrare first saw the trailer for Framing John DeLorean, she broke into tears. At two other points that day, she began sobbing uncontrollably. Her husband, Anthony Thomopoulos, told her the outpouring of emotion made sense. “He said, ‘Cristina, you and I have been married for 34 years, and you have never ever talked about it with me…You’ve kept this inside of you all these years…It’s perfectly all right. You need to cry. You need to get it out. You need to talk about it.”