Shania Twain is sharing details about how she avoided being sexually abused by her stepfather, Jerry Twain.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, the 57-year-old singer opened up about physically and emotionally being abused in her childhood home in Timmins, Ontario, Canada.
"I hid myself and I would flatten my boobs," she recalled. "I would wear bras that were too small for me, and I'd wear two, play it down until there was nothing girl about me."
Doing this meant she could go "unnoticed."
"Because, oh my gosh, it was terrible — you didn't want to be a girl in my house," she said.
As a result of the abuse, Twain admitted she struggled to embrace her femininity.
"But then you go into society and you're a girl and you're getting the normal other unpleasant stuff too, and that reinforces it," she explained. "So then you think, 'Oh, I guess it's just s---ty to be a girl. Oh, it's so s---ty to have boobs.' I was ashamed of being a girl."
This is not the first time Twain has opened up about being abused by Jerry Twain. In a 2018 interview with the Guardian, the Grammy Award-winner revealed that she was about 10 when the sexual abuse started.
"I feel the sexual abuse goes hand in hand with the physical and psychological abuse when it's somebody you know," she said. "I learned to block it out. Abusers need to manipulate you, whether it's before or after, and what I said to myself is: 'OK, there's something wrong with this person and that person is not well."
Commenting on why she did not speak out about the abuse as a child, Twain admitted she "couldn't bear" the thought of her family being separated "so we all stayed together for better or for worse."
It was only at age 22, after her parents died in a car crash, that Twain began to embrace her identity as a woman.
"All of a sudden it was like, 'Well, what's your problem? You know, you're a woman and you have this beautiful body.' What was so natural for other people was so scary for me," she told The Times. "I felt exploited, but I didn't have a choice now. I had to play the glamorous singer, had to wear my femininity more openly or more freely. And work out how I'm not gonna get groped, or raped by someone's eyes, you know, and feel so degraded."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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