HOLLYWOOD HILLS—Model and Actress Brooke Shields revealed to People on Wednesday, March 13, that she was sexually assaulted by a Hollywood executive more than 30 years ago and this experience among others will be explored in her new documentary premiering on Hulu on April 3. 

Her new documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, will recount Shields’ life and legacy including what the actress described as her lowest point in her career which was when she first experienced sexual assault. 

The Princeton grad explained that right after college she was trying to land stable acting gigs when one night she was invited to have dinner with a Hollywood executive. According to Shields, she believed she was getting a movie job. “I had met this person before and he was always nice to me,” she explained in the documentary. After the dinner, she realized “his behavior was changing and there was no talk about the movie.” 

The executive invited her to his hotel room which is where the assault took place. “It was like wrestling,” Shields says through tears in the documentary, “I was afraid I would get choked out or something, I didn’t know. I played the scene out in my head, so I didn’t fight that much. I just absolutely froze. I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out.’”

After the assault she got in a cab and cried as she was travelling to her close friend Gavin de Becker’s apartment. Shields’ told De Becker, who was once her security consultant, what  had happened. For a long time, de Becker was the only person that knew of her assault.

She explained to People in an interview, “It’s taken me a long time to process it,” says Shields, of the assault that occurred in her 20s. “I’m more angry now than I was able to be then. If you’re afraid, you’re rightfully so. They are scary situations. They don’t have to be violent to be scary.”

Afterward, she struggled with self-blame and experienced bouts of dissociation with her sexuality and her body. “It was really easy to disassociate because by then it was an old hat,” she recalls. “And because it was a fight-or-flight type of choice. Fighting was not an option, so you just left your body. ‘You’re not there. It didn’t happen.'”

The series will also examine the uproar around her provocative Calvin Klein jeans campaign when she was just 15, as well as the backlash to her playing a child prostitute in 1978’s “Pretty Baby” when she was only 11. The documentary also touches on her complex relationship with her mom, Teri Shields, who managed her career. 

The documentary revisits the many ways Shields was exploited as an underage girl. She lost a lawsuit against photographer Garry Gross, who photographed Shields nude when she was only 10 and sold the images years later. She also remembers shooting a sex scene for 1981’s “Endless Love” when she was only 16, alleging that director Franco Zeffirelli hurt her in order to get his desired reaction.