John Stamos is opening up about being sexually abused at a very young age.
The actor confesses he was 10 when he was approached by his baby sitter. The account of his encounter is present in his upcoming memoir, “If You Would Have Told Me,” out Oct. 24.
Speaking to PEOPLE about the incidents, Stamos claimed: “I mean, I knew, it was always in the back, and I do so much advocacy for the [survivors],” he says. “I felt like, I remembered it slightly. It has always been there, but I packed it away as people do, right?”
The actor reveals he tried to shrug the tension away.
“I think I told myself, like, ‘Ah, it’s girls, man.'”
“It was like you’re playing dead so they’ll stop. But it wasn’t totally aggressive,” he recalls. “I don’t know, it was not good.”
Stamos then decided to pen the encounter in his memoir.
He says: “I started to write it, and that’s when it really came out,” he recalls.
“And then I thought, ‘No, tonight is not about me. It’s about the kids. I’m going to pack it away again until the right moment,'” he continues. “Otherwise, I’m a phony f—. It’s like, ‘Come on.'”
“I didn’t want the headlines to be that, and I didn’t want the book to be over that,” he explains.
“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,” he notes.
