A retrospective of Hollywood’s most famous child sex abuse victim
Tiana Lowe
The most harrowing part of Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is not Laura Linney sharing how she and her childhood friend had to hide in Brooke’s Manhattan home when her alcoholic mother, Teri Shields, would return from an evening of binge drinking. It is not when Brooke Shields details how a court ultimately decided that photos of a 10-year-old’s naked body doused in makeup and oil, and published in Playboy, did not constitute child pornography. And it is not when, filming her starring role in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby at 12, Shields relied on the affirmation of co-star Keith Carradine that their on-screen kiss would not actually count as her first.
The whole nation saw Shields openly sex-trafficked by her abusive, alcoholic mother for years. We already know that trauma. The real kicker of the documentary comes at the end, when Shields appeared dumbstruck by her Gen Z daughters calling the original Pretty Baby “child pornography, technically.”
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Her teenage daughters are both older than Shields was when she filmed other nude scenes in Blue Lagoon and Endless Love. And when they point out in the documentary that shows depicting high schoolers typically use 20-something actresses, a surprised Shields deflects by commenting on how teenagers routinely post bikini pics on Instagram.
Shields almost cannot fathom the differences here involving such key concepts as consent and agency. Being stripped, sexualized, and shot on film a decade before losing her virginity was, as she has repeated throughout the years, “just a job.” It was a job where she dissociated not just her mind from her body, but also her public identity from her reality and her sex appeal from her actual sense of sexuality.
Even now, putting out a documentary at Sundance and then Hulu, Shields backs away from the reality of the situation. Her mother, she says in loving defense, was rebelling against the domesticated standards for women of that post-war age. She genuinely believed Brooke was too beautiful not to become her meal ticket.
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Is all trauma really just intergenerational? Obviously not. Despite Shields’s childhood trials, she seems as happy and normal as one could be without such an upbringing. And contrary to her daughter’s musing that perhaps Pretty Baby’s child pornography was “OK” back then, it really wasn’t — the protests against it demonstrate as much. All of Hollywood, the media, and Shields’s mother agreed to abuse her at a time when child sexual abuse, while perhaps less publicly condemned than in the post-#MeToo era, was not condoned.
Shields’s daughters ask her if she would let them pose nude at 11. That she says “no” is not a sign of the times, but of her own moral conviction.