Matthew McConaughey Reveals He Was ‘Blackmailed Into Having Sex’ at the Age of 15

Matthew McConaughey is opening up a lot about his childhood in his new memoir Greenlights. From revealing a man molested him at the age of 18 to his dad dying while having sex, he’s not holding back from fans or the public. On top of those revealing details, he also confessed he was blackmailed into losing his virginity at the age of 15, which left him in moral distress.

“I was blackmailed into having sex for the first time when I was 15,” he wrote, according to PEOPLE. “I was certain I was going to hell for the premarital sex. Today, I am merely certain that I hope that’s not the case.” He later mentioned that he was also “molested by a man when I was 18 while knocked unconscious in the back of a van.”

Talking openly in interviews about his upbringing and how his mom and dad decided to parent him and his siblings, he’s expressed how different he and wife Camila Alves are in their parenting styles. Inside the pages of his new book, he did share a rather intimate moment of how his father died — something that took readers by surprise. “My knees buckled. I couldn’t believe it. He was my dad. Nobody or nothing could kill him. Except for mom. He’d always told me and my brothers, ‘Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be makin’ love to your mother.’ And that’s what happened. He had a heart attack when he climaxed.”

The words on the pages don’t shy away from telling a profound story, and the How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days actor expressed the process of what he had to do to put it all together and noted that it required quite a bit of isolation. “I’ve never felt like a victim. I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.” Speaking to reporters, he said that he “went away to the desert by myself for 52 days, no electricity” to write the book.

“I’ve been keeping a diary for 36 years; a couple of years ago, my wife gave me a kick in the backside to say: ‘You’ve been talking about sitting down with those for 36 years and seeing what it is for a while. Now’s the time. Get out of here.’” He concluded to describe how he came up with the title of the book.

“I noticed many red lights and yellow lights that I had in my life earlier, that with time turned green. With time I saw, even hard, tragic things — I noticed they are things that can work for everyone. The death of a loved one, it’s a red light — for me, my father moving on was a big red light — but then I’ve noticed when I looked in my journals how much … things he taught me kept him alive by what I learned from him and the man I try to be daily. That’s a green light of his moving on.”