An emotional Tyler Perry was on the Oprah Winfrey show yesterday and opened up for the first time on television about being abused and molested three times before he even reached the age of 10. During the hour long segment, he revealed that his father once beat him so bad that he blanked out for a few days.
Til this day, I don’t know why he did it. But I remember him cornering me in a room and hitting me with this vacuum cleaner cord. He would just not stop. There are all these welts on [me], the flesh that’s coming from my bone, and I had to wait for him to go to sleep,” Tyler says. “When he fell asleep, I ran to my aunt’s house, and she was mortified when she saw it.
Tyler Perry also revealed that he was 6 the first time he was molested by a neighbor. They were building a birdhouse together when the man put his hands down his pants.“I’m thinking, ‘What is this?’And I felt my body betraying me, because I felt an erection at that age.”
Not too long after that, Tyler was molested by a male nurse that he knew from church.
“[The man from church] used God and the Bible against me to justify a lot of the things that were going on. It was so horrible, and that was my first sexual experience, with this man performing oral sex on me as a boy.”
When Tyler was 10 years old, he was molested again by a friend’s mother. The woman put her son in the bathroom to take a bath and when Tyler was about to leave, she appeared in front of him wearing lingerie. She locked the door and when he tried to leave she said:
“You want to go home? Here’s the key? I come over to get it, and she puts it inside of herself and she tells me to get it. So I—I get the key, but I feel my body betraying me again because I felt an erection. This is so disgusting, you know, what these people did to this little boy.
The woman pulled him on top of her and Tyler had his first sexual experience at the age of 10.
Tyler went on to tell Oprah that the molestations left him confused sexually.
How could it not? I knew I liked the little girls in the neighborhood, but this man was doing something to me and my body kept betraying me. It took me all of my 20s to figure out what this was that this man had given me to carry inside of my heterosexuality that did not belong to me. This is why so many men will not talk about this—the shame of having to admit that.
Til this day, Tyler has to deal with the aftermath of being molested and it has even affected his relationships. He recalls a time that he was unable to perform because a woman locked the door before they became intimate and he had flashbacks of his friend’s mother. Another time, a woman he was in love with walked in wearing lingerie and it triggered the day he was molested again.
“All of these people had given me something to carry,” Tyler says. “I think that everyone who’s been abused, there is a string to the puppet master, and they’re holding you hostage to your behaviors and what you do. At some point, you have to be responsible for them. What I started to do is untie the strings and chase them down to where they came from. And I was able to free myself and understand that even though these things happened to me, it was not me.”
During the show, Tyler admitted that he has forgiven his father but he doesn’t want him to be a part of his life. After his father heard him talk about the abuse, he sent a message to Tyler that said:
“If I had beat your ass one more time, you probably would have been Barack Obama.”
Unreal.
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