Revelations From Demi Moore’s Memoir ‘Inside Out’
Published on September 26, 2019. Updated September 28, 2019Demi Moore has lived an interesting life and she’s detailing it in her new memoir Inside Out. From her famous marriages and relationships to her unstable upbringing, Moore is not holding anything back. Check out these revelations from her book:
36. She Witnessed Her Mother Trying to Take Her Own Life
Moore was 12 years old when she first witnessed her mother trying to take her own life. “I stumbled into my parents’ room, where I found my mother trashing and crying as my father struggled to hold her down,” she wrote. “‘Help me!’ he screamed when he noticed me in their doorway. I walked toward them in a trance, not knowing — but on another level understanding completely — what I was witnessing.” While she was successful in helping her father and saving her mother’s life, that incident took away the last of her innocence. “Something very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back. My childhood was over,” she wrote.
Everett Collection35. Her Family Was Constantly on the Move
Demi’s family was constantly moving from place to place. She would attend at least two new schools a year, but it was often a lot more than that. This affected her ability to commit and set goals and see them through. “I didn’t have experience in following through; I had no barometer for the hardships — or the rewards — of commitment. I’ve often wondered what my life would like if I remained in Roswell. I would have had to work on developing and maintaining friendships, which had always been disposable. I would have had to set goals for myself, which I’ve never done, because we weren’t in one place long enough to see them through,” she revealed.
Everett Collection34. Her Parents’ Lax Parenting
Neither of her parents set any real boundaries for the actress. When she was just 13 years old and living in Redondo Beach in Southern California, she asked her mom if she could go to a concert with friends in the Valley and her mom’s response was that she could go and that she should take the car — but that if she was stopped by the police to tell them that she had her parents’ permission. “From then on, I was regularly assigned to run errands in that car. ‘Just remember: we don’t know you’re driving it,’ Ginny told me. It was convenient for my parents, and it was one more way of seeing what they could get away with,” Moore wrote.
Everett Collection33. When Her Parents Finally Divorced, Her Dad Took Her Brother but not Her
As a teen, Moore came home one day to find that her father and brother were gone and so were all of their things. “‘Where’s Morgan?’ I asked my mother. ‘Where’s dad?’ It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. ‘Your father and I are getting a divorce,’ she said. ‘And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”
Everett Collection32. Finding Out Her Dad Wasn’t Her Biological Father
Demi was already a teenager when she realized that the man who had raised her as his daughter was not actually her father — and everyone in her family knew about it but her. When she asked her mother why she was never told, her mother said, “He made everyone promise because he thought you wouldn’t feel the same about him.” Following this revelation, her relationship with him changed. “He ceased making any effort to see me; he stopped calling; when we did see each other — when my mom and I visited Morgan — he barely looked at me and his hugs were awkward and forced. He was just…gone,” she explained.
Everett Collection31. Meeting Her Biological Father
She met her biological father, Charlie, when she was 14, and it was a terrible experience. Her mother, Ginny, showed up and “whisked Charlie off into a room alone.” A few months later, she flew to Houston to meet him and he showed up at the airport with his mistress. His wife was reluctant to meet Demi; however, they ended up meeting the following day along with all of her half-siblings, one of whom looked like the male version of her. She didn’t end up developing a strong relationship with Charlie. “I left feeling clear about one thing: Charlie may have been my biological father, but Danny was my dad,” she wrote.
Everett Collection30. Getting Into Situations She Couldn’t Control
When the Ghost star was 15, she was spending time with a couple of guys who lived in her apartment complex who were in their late to mid-20s. One night, things ended up taking a turn that she wasn’t expecting. “It was fun at first: I was still quite innocent, just beginning to discover the effect I had on guys. But I wasn’t in any way prepared for the consequences. One of them made a move, and the other one disappeared. That was evidently what he had wanted from me all along, and somehow, I felt I had no choice, that it was my job to give it to him — like I was obligated to fulfill his expectations just because he harbored it. I blamed myself for acting provocative and older than my years,” she divulged.
Everett Collection29. Being Violated by an Older Man
Moore was only 15 when she was violated by an older male acquaintance in her apartment. “I have blotted out the exact sequence of events — that details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my home with a man three times my age and twice my size,” she wrote. Afterward, she began blaming herself. “I thought of it as something I caused, something I felt obligated to do because this man expected it from me — I had let him expect it from me. I had eaten at his restaurant, and he had chauffeured me home from school. In my fifteen-year-old mind, I deserved what happened.” When she saw the man shortly after, he told her that her mother is the one who had given him access to the apartment — and to Demi — that night.
Everett Collection28. She Moved Out at 16
A day after the St. Elmo’s Fire actress turned 16, she moved in with her boyfriend at the time, Tom, who was a bassist and twenty-eight years old. Her life was pretty stable with him, and he treated her with care and respect; however, she ended up dumping him for Freddy Moore, the guitarist and singer in the band The Kats.
Everett Collection27. Freddy Moore Was Already Married
Demi was only 16 when she got involved with 29-year-old Freddy Moore. Not only was he almost twice her age, but he was also married to his high school sweetheart from Minnesota. “When he left her for me, I was only sixteen. I was a self-absorbed teenager who hadn’t been raised with a lot of respect for the institution of marriage, and I jumped into life with Freddy without, I’m sorry to say, much concern for his wife,” she confessed.
Everett Collection26. She Became a Model
To make money, Moore got into modeling. She signed with Elite Model Management and, while it gave her “a tiny taste of success,” it also had a negative effect on her self-esteem. She wrote, “But at the same time, it threw me into a world that seemed tailor-made to lower my self-esteem. I had landed in a profession that focused entirely on how I looked, and what size I wore, which reinforced the idea I’d absorbed that my value lay solely in my attractiveness.”
©Tracey Poirier/JPI25. She Cheated on Freddy the Night Before Their Wedding
The night before her and Freddy’s wedding, the A Few Good Men actress snuck out of her own bachelorette party to hook up with a guy she had met on set. Looking back on that night, she wrote, “Why did I do that? Why didn’t I go and see the man I was committing to spend the rest of my life with to express my doubts? Because I couldn’t face the fact that I was getting married to distract myself from grieving [over] my father. Because I felt there was no room to question what I’d already put in motion. I couldn’t get out of the marriage, but I could sabotage it.”
©Tracey Poirier/JPI24. Her Partying Knew No Bounds
While she was working on General Hospital, Demi began struggling with self-doubt and began drinking as a result. “One the surface I was hitting all my marks, but my internal compass sought outlets for my self-doubt. I started drinking,” she wrote. While drinking may have helped her cope, she couldn’t do in moderation. “I couldn’t stop; there was no little voice in my head saying, That’s enough, Demi. There were no brakes,” she confessed.
Everett Collection23. She Cheated on Freddy Moore While Filming in Brazil
While filming the movie Blame It on Rio in Brazil, Moore ended up cheating on Freddy Moore again — this time with her roommate in Rio de Janeiro. “It was easy to forget that I was married — to the point that one night Peter and I ended up in bed. (We both recognized it was a mistake right away; it only happened that once.) I was having an adventure,” she wrote. “I was gaining momentum in my career. And I had never felt so free.”
Everett Collection22. Relationship with Jon Cryer
After leaving Freddy Moore, the actress landed a lead part in the film No Small Affair alongside actor Jon Cryer. The two had a brief affair. “Jon fell for me in real life, too, and lost his virginity to me while we were making that movie. It pains me to think of how callous I was with his feelings — that I stole what could have been such an important and beautiful moment from him,” she confessed. “I was sort of losing it right then, and I was definitely not in a place to take care of someone else’s feelings, I started to do some seriously self-destructive things during that period — I remember waking up and not knowing where I was, thinking, Am I supposed to be at work in an hour?, and having to call someone and ask to be picked up. It’s all a blur.”
Everett Collection21. One Night with Rob Lowe
While filming St. Elmo’s Fire, Demi countered Rob Lowe’s claim from his memoir that the two and had a “hot-and-heavy romance.” She wrote, “I can vaguely recall one ill-advised night together, but I’m grateful to him for the complimentary descriptions of our youth.”
Everett Collection20. Pushed into Rehab
By the time that Moore was filming St. Elmo’s Fire, her addictions were out of control. The director of the film Joel Schumacher and the producers were aware of it, so they forced her into rehab. Although treatment was supposed to take 30 days, a different plan was negotiated so she could leave sooner and begin filming. “I could start the film with just fifteen days of sobriety if I completed the list of requirements that are usually done in thirty. When I left, there had to be a counselor with 24/7 for the duration of filming,” she revealed. Afterward, Moore was committed to her newfound sobriety: “Once I made the decision to get clean and sober, staying that way was actually easy. The negotiation was over: I never wanted to experience that moment of waking up and trying to remember what I had done the night before again.”
Everett Collection19. Relationship with Emilio Estevez
After rehab, her relationship with Emilio Estevez — who she met on the set of St. Elmo’s Fire — started getting serious. “We were together for six months, and then we got engaged, and I moved in with him in his condo in Malibu,” she wrote. “He was very sweet, very attentive, and looking back, I think a major factor in how quickly we moved was that I was craving a family, and he had a close relationship with his.” She spent a lot of time with Emilio and his family, but she struggled with not feeling “good enough for them.”
Everett Collection18. Struggles with Food
During this same time period, the Golden Globe-nominated actress began experiencing serious issues with her body and food. “I could barely bring myself to look in a mirror during the filming of One Crazy Summer because I hated what I saw and worried about how it would translate on-screen. I was also frightened; I was unsure any director would find my shape acceptable and I’d never get another part,” she revealed.
Everett Collection17. She Was Told to Lose Weight for a Role in About Last Night
Demi’s worst fears were realized when she auditioned for a role in About Last Night… and was told by the director, Ed Zwick, that he would cast her in the film, but she would have to promise to lose weight. She wrote, “I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live. I felt a combination of sick, pit-of-my-stomach mortification and raw panic. And so began my process of trying to dominate and control my body — and of equating my worth to my weight, my size, my exterior.”
Everett Collection16. Problems with Emilio
While she and Emilio were planning on getting married, things were anything but perfect. “Emilio and I had in fact just mailed out the invitations for our wedding when a friend told me she had seen out with someone else in L.A. He denied it, of course, but I was having a hard time trusting him: during a two-week breakup a few months before, he’d slept with an “ex” girlfriend, lied about it, and then been forced to tell me the truth when he found out she was [expecting his child],” she explained. The two broke up shortly after and, while he tried to get her back, she was through with him.
Everett Collection15. Living with Large with Bruce Willis
Moore met Bruce Willis at the premiere of her movie Stakeout. She was there with her ex, Emilio, and while she wasn’t initially impressed with the rising star, it didn’t take long for her to warm up to him. It didn’t take very long until they were inseparable. “He made me feel like a princess; he lived large — and soon I did, too,” she wrote. “Bruce came from nothing, and now that he’d made it, he wanted the best of everything, and plenty of it. We would go to a restaurant, and he would order three entrées and have a few bites of each, just because he could. He loved to gamble. He relished the power that money has to wipe away obstacles. Years later, at three in the morning, when one of the babies was crying, he wold lean over and whisper, ‘I’ll give you a thousand dollars to change that diaper.'”
Editorial credit: / Shutterstock.com14. Bruce Didn’t Want Her to Work
After having Rumer, the actress was cast in the film We’re No Angels alongside Robert De Niro and Sean Penn. When Bruce learned that she would be filming the movie in Canada, his response was, “This will never work.” According to her, what he really meant was “that [their] life wouldn’t work if [she] was engrossed in something outside of [their] family.”
Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.com13. Bruce Wasn’t Sure He Wanted To Be Married
Before Willis went to film the 1991 film Hudson Hawk, he told Demi that he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be married. According to her, he also “didn’t want to be the guy who walked out o his family, who did that to his kid.” Things were in a “precarious state” when she visited him on set of the movie. She wrote, “I had the feeling that he had screwed around. It was tense and it was weird and there was just stuff that didn’t seem kosher.”
Editorial credit: / Shutterstock.com12. Obsession with Exercise
Soon after having Scout, Moore was going to film A Few Good Men and had to fit in a military uniform. Her desire to get into shape began consuming her. She was still nursing Scout but, because of the constant exercise, she was “creating a surplus of lipase, an enzyme that breaks down fat, in [her] breast milk,” which prevented Scout from gaining any weight. Moore had to start feeding her formula as a result. For the next five years, her obsession with exercise didn’t let up. “I’d get up early, go for a long run, go to the set, hit the gym, and then feed the baby through the night. It was punishing” she confessed.
Everett Collection11. A Director Wanted Her to Gain Weight
For her role in Indecent Proposal, her body was going to be on full display, which made her obsess even more about her weight. “I cut out carbs, I ran and I biked and I worked out on every machine imaginable in the gym we’d installed in the house in Hailey,” she wrote. She ended up losing a lot of weight, which upset the director, Adriane Lyne. The two spent the duration of filming arguing about her body. “In fairness, it was his film, and he wanted the leading lady to have a soft, sensuous look, whereas my ideal for myself was to be delicate and svelte like a ballerina. On the one hand, it was my body. On the other, it was his film,” she explained.
Everett Collection10. The End of Her Marriage with Bruce
According to Demi, the end of her and Bruce’s relationship wasn’t dramatic. “It is not unusual, from what I hear, to go from feeling like your spouse’s lover and best friend to feeling, over time, like he is just someone with whom you negotiate logistics. That’s basically what happened with Bruce and me,” she wrote. “Only we barely had time to be a couple before we became parents. We had a whirlwind, truncated infatuation that morphed into full-on family all in our very first year. When reality set in, I don’t know if we really knew each other.”
Editorial credit: / Shutterstock.com9. Meeting Ashton Kutcher
The G.I. Jane star met Ashton Kutcher through a mutual friend, Sara Foster, while she is in New York doing advance press for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and he was hosting Saturday Night Live. They hit it off almost immediately. According to her, even though there was a big age difference between them, she didn’t feel it. “He was twenty-five. I was forty. But I’m telling you: we couldn’t feel it. We were totally in sync, from our very first conversation. Keep in mind, when I was twenty-five, I became a mom. I skipped straight from being a young adult into motherhood and marriage. When I met Ashton, it almost felt like a do-over, like I could just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young with him — much more so than I’d ever been able to experience when I was in my twenties.”
©Jill Johnson/jpistudios.com8. Her Agents Warned Her about Dating Ashton
Even though Moore was madly in love with Ashton, her agents weren’t happy about the relationship and warned her. Moore wrote, “My agents said that my relationship was hurting me: all the focus on me being with a younger man meant that people weren’t taking me seriously. I didn’t care. I’d never been so happy in my life.”
©Jill Johnson/JPI7. They Knew They Wanted to Start a family
Right away, Demi and Ashton knew that they wanted to start a family. Less than a year into the relationship, they were expecting a child of their own, a girl they were going to name Chaplin Ray; however, six months in, they lost the baby. “He did his usual ultrasound, but this time, there was no heartbeat,” she revealed. “I registered that deadly silence — instead of the now-familiar thumpthump! thumpthump! of Chaplin’s little heart — and saw the look on my doctor’s face.” She began feeling a lot of pressure to try again; however, she was also aware that she was in her forties and it might not happen for her. “I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I had literally failed to deliver, and my grief felt bottomless. I went through the motions of life, but I don’t know that I was fully in it,” she wrote.
Everett Collection6. Almost Drowning
During a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday, she almost drowned in a hot tub after drinking. “Late that night, we all ended up in the hot tub, and I started passing out and slipping under water. If other people hadn’t been there, I would have drowned,” she divulged. “Ashton carried me back to our bed, and he was furious. To some extent, I understand his reaction. If this had been the first time something like this had happened, that would have been one thing, but it wasn’t.” According, there was an incident where she passed out with her head on the toilet, and Ashton took a picture of it and showed her. “It seemed like a good-natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming,” she stated.
Abaca Press5. Doing Anything to Please Ashton
As time went on, Moore found herself doing anything and everything to become the perfect woman for Kutcher. “I went into contortions to try to fit the mold of the woman he wanted his wife to be. I put him first,” she wrote.”He didn’t ask me to do that. It’s just what I did — what I’d learned to do from my mother, and her mother before her. I wanted this marriage to work, and I was willing to do whatever it took, to jump through any hoops. So when he expressed his fantasy of bringing a third party into our bed, I didn’t say no. I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be.”
Editorial credit: / Shutterstock.com4. She Was Addicted to Ashton
Looking back at her relationship with Ashton, Demi now sees that she had an addiction to him. She wrote, “I think the part that was real was that the girls were angry I’d become so dependent on Ashton — I was addicted to him, is the best way I can put it. And I did all the things that addicts do. I prioritized my addiction over my needs and the needs of my family. I made strange, unconvincing justifications for my behavior — and his.”
Abaca Press3. Ashton Wanted Out
Less than a week after filling out paperwork for an egg donor, Kutcher told The Butcher’s Wife actress that he didn’t think he could do this anymore and that he didn’t think it was working. A few days later, he told her that he wanted to move out; however, she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. “I told him that I didn’t think he should move out, that I wanted us to work through this privately, together. We agreed: let’s keep this between us; let’s not be with anyone else until we sort this out — one way or the other,” she divulged.
Everett Collection2. Ashton Cheated on Her a Second Time
During their marriage, Ashton cheated on Moore twice — once with a woman who gave him her number while he was bowling with the actress and her daughter Rumer and the second time after they agreed that they were going to work through things and not be with anyone else. When the story broke, Moore knew that the girl wasn’t lying. According to her, Ashton “admitted it right away.” Then, a week after her 49th birthday, he moved out.
Andres Otero/Everett Collection1. All of Her Daughters Stopped Talking to Her
Before Ashton cheated on Demi, effectively ending their relationship, she was having issues with her two youngest daughters, Scout and Tallulah. Tallulah had been caught drinking underage and, after the incident, she moved in with Bruce’s current wife, Emma, and left Demi a note telling her that she “didn’t want to come back ever and would not talk to [her].” After that, Scout suddenly didn’t want to talk to her either. Then, following an incident where Demi had a seizure after inhaling some nitrous oxide, Rumer joined her sisters in refusing to speak to her. It took three years for them to finally reconcile with Demi.
Editorial credit: / Shutterstock.com