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Charlize Theron opens up about the abuse she and her mother faced from her father while growing up in South Africa, which resulted in her mother murdering her father in self-defense. “It’s so strange — all the memories are there. And it’s not that I don’t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way,” she recalled on growing up with an abusive parent to the New York Times. “Because 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.” She describes the day it happened: her father was drinking at his brother’s house and felt insulted when Theron didn’t greet him as she ran to the bathroom. He eventually returned home, extremely angry. She added, “He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us.”
“He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there,” she continued. “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.” Theron felt a lot of “shame” because everyone in their community knew her father was an alcoholic, and kids would taunt her at school. But they didn’t know the full story of what happened. “So for the first couple of years, for as long as I could, I told this story that he died in a car accident. I couldn’t tell it to my school friends, but by the time I left South Africa, that’s the story I told. Because I just didn’t want pity. It made me so uncomfortable,” she added. Theron eventually moved to Italy at 16 to begin her modeling career, but felt guilty leaving her mother behind. She said, “It was amazing because it was escape. The only thing that was hard for me was leaving my mom behind. But she was the one that said: ‘Go and make a life for yourself. There’s nothing for you here right now.’”
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