“I ended up stomping this guy on the pavement,” he explained. In 2006, that “be ready, be prepared” mindset was triggered when the former NFL linebacker had a chaotic run-in with a persistent fan. “I always, always had been like, ‘Be fit, be ready, be prepared, be there.’ ” That’s how it started out,” he said of his fitness journey. “It was one of those things where I knew I had to get stronger because one day I thought I’d have to fight him. He used to beat my mother,” Crews said during his appearance on National Geographic’s “Running Wild with Bear Grylls.” But instead of solely living in fear, Crews turned his body into a near impenetrable weapon. In the past, Crews has spoken out about the ways in which witnessing his father’s violence and abuse shaped him, making it easy to perpetuate toxic male traits and driving him to the brink of his own rage. All of which Crews said left him straddling a fence of right versus wrong when challenged to follow the crowd of “toxic masculinity.” Crews publicly spoke about the incident for the first time at the height of the #MeToo movement, stating that he too was a victim.īut elsewhere in the book, the “White Chicks” actor delves into the warped ideals of how a man should act, or not act for that matter, that were imparted to him by his father and later reinforced by peers. This is the stuff that came out in therapy, the stuff that I really had to address.”Īs an adult, Crews suffered an equally humiliating and similar incident when he was allegedly groped by a Hollywood executive. It was so difficult because I love my mom and, to be honest, I didn’t want her to go down as having done something so heinous. “It was wild because I never envisioned actually being that transparent.
“She made me pull down my pants to see if I’d hit puberty,” said Crews of what he calls one of the most vulnerable tales in his memoir: his mother checking to see if he had pubic hair. The vulnerable examination of his life along with self-revelations he has discovered through therapy are laid out in anecdotes, including an incident with his mother as Crews was entering into manhood. Crews, 53, unveils some of those invisible scars in his memoir, “Tough: My Journey to True Power.” His experience of growing up in a home where he witnessed abuse and with the thinking that strength and an overall stoic demeanor equated to masculinity has had a lasting impact on the actor. Terry Crews has a physical appearance of brute strength, but according to the actor beneath the mass is a man complicated by insecurities. I deleted his phone number and blocked him on social media. I will never hear from him again.Īnd I feel SO STUPID for trying to be this asshole’s friend! I can’t believe I did this to myself AGAIN!įuck it. Apparently the amount of time it will take him to text me and continue this friendship is forever. I’m not texting him back and I want to see how long it takes for him to text me.įorever. So I thought, well this has to be a two-way street. I texted him for a week and mostly was left on read or got short, succinct responses. Can we be friends again? Do you want to be friends again? We struck an uneasy agreement that we would start by texting one another again just to check in. But the next day I texted him again and said I don’t feel like this is resolved. He said he was sorry I felt that way which just pissed me off. After 5 months, I texted him and said it seems like we’re not friends anymore and that was your decision, but it hurt because I really needed a friend and you vanished. Short version of the story: we dated, broke up, remained friends for a year and a half, The week my mother died, he ghosted me. Marilyn's mind was a desert, a drought, with tiny compartments devoted to clothes, makeup, stardom, and fucking. Of course she understood none of it, because there was no fertile ground in which any of this could take hold: You can throw a multitude of seeds into the desert sands, but there will never be fruitage. Marilyn sought and developed her identity as a sex symbol she wiggled and cooed for the camera, but, incapable of satisfaction or understanding, she fought this image, so she would read Joyce and Schopenhauer and Woolf and Jung. "People praised Marilyn because she read books, because, I think, we couldn't conceive that an ambulatory bowl of rich vanilla ice cream needed to think or to grow a mind. Maybe she let him see only a part of who she was because she didn't trust him. Marilyn was known for showing different sides of herself to different people. It's hard to imagine that they spent that much together. His take seems rather uncharitable coming from the same person who wrote Laura in Glass Menagerie. I don't think there's been a thread on this specific topic before.