Brooke Shields’ youngest daughter, Grier Hammond Henchy, is opening up about the moment she learned of her mother’s sexual assault while watching her 2023 documentary Pretty Baby.
“I was learning about things the same time that the world was and I just took it more deeply and personally,” Grier recently told People magazine in a joint interview with Shields and her older sister, Rowan Francis Henchy. “I couldn’t even get through it.”
In Hulu‘s two-part documentary, Shields’ explores her six-decade-long acting career, as well as reveals for the first time that she was sexually assaulted in her early 20s by a Hollywood executive, whom she did not name.
While Rowan was aware of her mom’s assault, Shields admitted that she “didn’t prepare” her youngest for the doc’s sensitive subject matter.
“It was a miscommunication,” the actress explained. “I had explained it was an exploration of sexualization of women in my industry but I was naively thinking that because we had such a solid, healthy, fairly normal existence and I’m not completely damaged that she would say, ‘Wow you’ve come through a lot but look where we are today.’”
Shields told People that she tried to tell Grier there’s a “happy ending,” but her daughter responded, “I will never be okay with thinking something bad happened to you.”
“She ended up missing the happy part,” the actress added. “She felt helpless, and just as a mom, we make mistakes and sometimes we make assumptions.”
Shields shares her two daughters with husband Chris Henchy.
Last year, Shields also opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about a moment towards the end of the doc, when she’s sitting with her daughters at the dinner table talking about Pretty Baby and their thoughts about what she went through as a child actor.
“That shocked me,” the actress recalled. “That was not the plan. But the things that my daughters said, I’m not sure I would’ve had that level of conversation had this documentary [not] come up. To hear their perspective and have them engage with me as young woman and for them to talk about me as a child and me as a mother, and to be in that environment together was really touching. This feels like the time is right for [this conversation].”
