Charlize Theron Opens up About Terrifying Night That Changed Her Life Forever

Charlize Theron is grateful her mother had to make the unfortunate decision to kill her father. The actress said that had she not, she and her mother would not be alive today.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, she says she hopes her and her mother’s story of survival will serve as inspiration for other victims of domestic violence. Moreso, she wants to negate the fact that she’s ashamed of their story.

Theron was 15 at the time of the incident. Her father, an alcoholic, came to their house in a fit of rage and threatened, as well as began acting on the threat, to kill her and her mother. 

She says she saw her father’s alcoholism progressed over the years, from her days growing up in South Africa. “My dad had built this big bar inside the house. That wasn’t unusual,” she recalled, noting she’d always see people crawling on the floor drunk, and it happened multiple times a week. As an only child in the home, it was difficult for her to deal with alone. “He was a full-blown functioning drunk, but he had moments where he would go missing, we wouldn’t know where he was, and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe,” she added.

While her father wasn’t violent toward her, she says he was verbally abusive to her mother, and he’d drive with her drunk. Things got so bad that her mother sent her to boarding school to have her avoid what was happening at home. 

One night after seeing a movie with her mother, they stopped at her uncle’s house, her father’s brother, where her father was drinking. The Oscar winner says she ran past her father in a hurry to use the restroom and didn’t speak, which he took as being disrespectful. She says upon leaving, she knew immediately that her father was angry. Her father and uncle broke through their home, with her father shooting through the steel door to enter. 

From there, her mother locked them into a room, and while barricading the door shut, Theron’s father shot through the door continuously, missing them miraculously. Her mother grabbed a gun, opened the door, and as the uncle ran down the hallway, she shot the gun, hitting the uncle in the hand. “And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him,” she explained.

Theron wants people to know her situation is not an isolated one, and millions deal with it daily. “I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone. I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore,” she said. She is now part of a campaign to prevent gender-based violence.