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Demi Moore and two of her three daughters Rumer, 31, and Tallulah, 25, have opened up about the tumultuous time in their lives when the now-56-year-old actor was married to Ashton Kutcher and battling alcoholism. Appearing on Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table – a plug for Moore’s new revealing memoir Inside Out – the actor admitted her decline back into drinking was brought on by her want to please Kutcher.
“[Ashton] is not the cause of why I opened that door [to drinking],” she said. “[But] I wanted to be that girl. I thought Ashton wanted the girl who he could have a wine with. I wanted to be something other than who I am. And it was literally like giving my power away.”
“My addiction to Ashton was probably more devastating because it took me seriously away emotionally,” she continued.
When the girls were young, Moore had fallen pregnant with Kutcher but devastatingly the lost the baby at six months. Rumer said this obsession with having another child was reason she left the family home. “[During that time with Ashton] I felt like something that was mine had been taken away,” she said. “And when [Moore] wanted to have another baby and then it wasn’t happening and there was so much focus on that, it was like, ‘Oh well, we’re not enough’.”
Tallulah was the only daughter left living at home and witnessed her mother falling into a deep battle with alcoholism. “Watching the behaviour with Ashton – everyone had moved out and it was just me – I felt very forgotten. I felt like I nurtured and developed a narrative that she didn’t love me. And I truly believed it,” said Tallulah.
“It was like the sun went down and a monster came,” she continued referring to her mother’s drinking. “I remember the anxiety that would come up in my body when I was sensing her eyes shutting a little bit more, the way she was speaking, or she would be a lot more affectionate with me if she wasn’t sober. It was very weird when it would get angry and I recall being very upset and kind of treating and speaking to her like a child like, ‘Please get away from me’. It would happen in front of friends.”
As Moore details in her memoir, she had hit rock bottom. “I was now completely alone,” she writes. “I was almost 50. The husband who I thought was the love of my life had cheated on me then decided he didn’t want to work on our marriage. My children were not speaking to me. Their father – a person I had counted on for years – was gone from my life. The career I’d scrambled to create for years had stalled – or maybe it was over for good. Everything I was attached to had abandoned me. I looked like I felt – destroyed.”
Rumer said growing up with a very insecure mother meant certain traits were passed down to her. “Unworthiness. [I felt] innately unlovable somehow, no matter how I looked, what I weighed, how my hair looked – whatever the outside reflection was – there was something innately about me that I had to earn love from people and constantly prove myself.”
Watch the full interview here.
