Joan Collins has opened up about being drugged and raped by her future husband, Maxwell Reed, in a new documentary.
The “Dynasty” star, 81, who has previously written about the trauma in her autobiography, sat down for an interview about the crime for “Brave Miss World,” reports the Daily Mail.
“I was raped when I was 17 years old,” the British actress said in the film.
The attack occurred during a date with the Irish actor, who was 14 years her senior. He gave her a rum and coke before going off to take a bath.
“The next thing I knew, I was out flat on the sofa in that living room and he was raping me. And what he had given me was a drug. He had drugged my drink. It was what is called in those days a Mickey Finn. Which I think today would be Rohypnol. It felt so horrible. That I … that I’d done this thing,” she said.
While Collins realized the blame didn’t lie with her, that didn’t stop her from feeling that the incident was at least partially her fault.
“It wasn’t my fault but I didn’t know, I went out with him. And maybe I shouldn’t have gone out with him. He was much older than me, and he was a famous star,” she said.
The guilt was also so much that the actress felt she had to marry Reed, whom she’d divorce four years later in 1952.
“And I thought, ‘Well I better because you know, he took my virginity.’ I really hated him, but I was so filled with guilt, that he had done this thing to me,” she said.
According to the actress, the relationship was so scarring that it took her “a long time to be able to really trust any man.”
“Brave Miss World” is a documentary (directed by Cecilia Peck, daughter of Gregory Peck) that focuses on the former Israeli Miss World-turned-lawyer Linor Abargil’s quest to encourage women across the globe to speak out about sexual violence.