In an interview with the "Guardian", Mena Suvari (43) spoke again about the bad experiences she went through at a young age.
As she wrote in her book The Great Peace, Suvari was raped several times when she was 12 by a friend of her older brother. Afterwards he told school that she was a "whore" - out of shame she denied that anything had happened. "That sucked my life dry," says Suvari now. For her, this was confirmation "that nobody will save me, that nobody will do anything for me."
At the same time, she also had her first job as a model - there, above all, she would have learned to look sexy, the more the better. "Everyone raved about how I looked 18, but I was 12," Suvari said. "I was told that I was an adult, so I could act like an adult too." Older men - a photographer, a consultant - repeatedly approached her when she was only 15 or 16 years old. "Nobody said to me, 'That's not right, that person shouldn't do that to you.'
Things got even worse in her abusive relationship with a lighting technician. He insulted and abused her. "I wasn't loved. I was just a body, a vessel for its desires," she wrote. To cope with the situation, she took more and more drugs, including methamphetamine.
At the same time she also played the role of Angela in "American Beauty" - a young woman who is both insecure and precocious. She could identify with her well, she tells the "Guardian". "I knew how to play that role because I was so schooled in it. 'Oh, you want me to be sexually attractive?' There you go. I felt inept in a million ways, but I knew how to play that card." After filming, she returned from the set where she was worshiped "to the worst relationship of her life" where she was "extremely abused," Suvari recalls. It was a dark time when work felt like a break. After all, she wasn't called an idiot or a moron there.
She still suffers from the memories today. The actress went into therapy for over three years, but still describes dealing with her experiences as a "daily struggle": "I feel like things never really go away, you just gain a new perspective on them and develop patience for yourself and more compassion."
