Charlize Theron Recalls Night Her Mother Fatally Shot Her Father

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Charlize Theron has recently opened up about a traumatic event in her life, when her mother fatally shot her abusive father. When speaking with The New York Times, she explained that her father was a functioning alcoholic.

“He had moments where he would go missing,” she explained. “We wouldn’t know where he was, and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe. It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So it really caused a lot of verbal abuse. Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent.”

Theron admitted that she found her father scary. “He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk,” she said. “There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal.”

Theron also spoke in detail about the night that her father attempted to kill her and her mother, when she was only 15. “To get to the point: He finally broke into the house. He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us. His brother was with him as well. We knew it was serious, and so by the time he broke into the first gate, my mom ran to the safe to get her gun. She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it. And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us. It’s insane when you think about it that way. But the messaging was very clear. I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun. Encouragement from the brother. He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”

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Theron made it clear that, although the night in question was traumatic, it wasn’t the first time that her father had been abusive. “Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story,” she said. “These things are prevalent in a lot of homes. Women really get a very, very unfair shake, even in this country. Nobody takes it seriously, the situation that they’re in. And I don’t think anybody took my mom seriously.”

She continued, “People tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.”

As Theron states, it’s important to speak about these situations so others know they are not alone. “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.”