Shania Twain Opens up About Childhood Sexual Abuse

Shania Twain hasn’t hidden many of the details about her troubled past, including the poverty she lived in, and how she took care of her siblings after her parents were killed in an accident when she was only 22 years old.

But now, the Canadian is opening up even more about how troubled her childhood was, revealing that she suffered horrendous physical and psychological abuse while her step-father, Jerry, was alive, along with sexual abuse that began when she was about ten years old.

“I’m not going to go into details about it. I don’t mind saying it, because I do think it’s important that people understand you can survive these things,” Twain admits to The Guardian, adding that it was just part of an unhealthy environment that surrounded her.

“I feel the sexual abuse goes hand in hand with the physical and psychological abuse when it’s somebody you know,” she continues. “I learned to block it out. Abusers need to manipulate you, whether it’s before or after, and what I said to myself is, ‘OK, there’s something wrong with this person and that person is not well.’”

Although Twain knew, even at a young age, that what her step-father was doing to her was wrong, she made a calculated decision to stay, so her family could remain intact.

“I did feel sorry for myself a lot as a kid,” says Twain. “It was either go to Children’s Aid and get saved now … I weighed it up and thought, ‘If I go to Children’s Aid, we’ll all get separated,’ and I just couldn’t bear that, so we all stayed together for better or for worse.”

The 52-year-old also witnessed physical fighting between Jerry and her mother, Sharon.

“I was worried about my father killing my mother,” Twain recounts. “I thought they’d kill each other. My mom was quite violent, too. Many nights I went to bed thinking: ‘Don’t go to sleep, don’t go to sleep, wait till they are sleeping.’ And I would wake up and make sure everybody was breathing.”‘

It was those tumultuous years that unintentionally bred Twain’s musical career. In addition to singing in bars late at night to help support her family, Twain also began writing as a way to remove herself from her painful surroundings.

“I wanted to escape,” she shares. “[From] everything. Violent home. Tensions. Nothing to eat. When you’re hungy you can’t do anything about it but distract yourself from the hunger. And it really works. It’s therapeutic. A lot of kids play with dolls and I played with words and sounds.”

Twain later found unprecedented success as a female artist, which came after she married producer Robert “Mutt” Lange. But then sadness found her again, when Mutt admitted to a relationship with Twain’s close friend and assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. The affair cost Twain her marriage (she later married Thiébaud’s former husband, Frédéric Thiébaud), and although she has happily moved on, Twain acknowledges she still has a lot of resentment about her former friend.

“I do really nasty things in my dreams to her,” says Twain. “I’m always cutting her hair or shaving it off.”

Twain recently apologized for saying she would have voted for President Trump, later saying that she is “passionately against discrimination of any kind” and does “not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President.”

Twain’s latest album, Now, is available for purchase on Amazon and iTunes.

Photo Credit: Instagram/shaniatwain