It Ends With Us star Justin Baldoni says he was ‘sexually traumatized’ by an ex when he was ‘hoping to save myself for marriage’
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Justin Baldoni has opened up about his experience in an abusive relationship.
TheIt Ends with Us director and actor recently appeared in an episode of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast when he discussed a toxic relationship he had in college.
While attending Long Beach State University, Baldoni explained he met a “beautiful young woman” at Abercrombie & Fitch, and they quickly started a relationship. Reflecting on their romance now, he said he used it as a source of validation “because I was trying to fill a hole and a void where I just didn’t feel like I was enough.”
“It was a very bad relationship, and I kind of contorted myself and my personality to be what she wanted,” he told the podcast host. “I had strong values and opinions and beliefs going in, and those were very easily manipulated and reshaped to the point where a few months in I completely lost any sense of self that I had left. And it got very emotionally abusive.”
The Jane the Virgin actor alleged that he also experienced sexual trauma in the relationship, which took time to process because of the stereotype that only women can experience sexual trauma from a man.
“In my head, a man can’t experience sexual trauma at the hands of a woman,” Baldoni said. “It’s also the way that society has kind of made me feel that, you know, it’s only the other way around, when in reality it can happen.”
He said he “was hoping to save myself for marriage, and that’s as detailed as I’ll get into the story.”
The Five Feet Apart director added that he had gone years not acknowledging the incident as a source of manipulation until his therapist at the time had asked him what he would do if a woman had told him the exact same story.
“One day my therapist asked me a very simple question. She said, ‘Justin, you do a lot of work in this space: If a woman told you that story, what would you call it?’ And that’s when I broke,” he said.
“That relationship ended with cheating and infidelity. It was a terrible, terrible relationship,” he added. “I left college, I moved to LA, and it was actually thanks to that relationship ending that I ended up becoming an actor.”
Baldoni married his wife, Swedish actor Emily (née Fuxler), in 2013. The couple share two children, Maiya, nine, and Maxwell, seven.
He also admitted on the podcast that he was diagnosed with ADHD for the very first time in January.
“I was diagnosed officially at 40, which means this year, I turned 40 early in January,” Baldoni said. “This is after probably four years of my therapist telling me it might be a good idea to go and get an actual diagnosis, pushing me in that direction because a common theme in my therapy sessions was this feeling of just not being enough.”
Despite there being signs of the condition from his childhood such as struggling with reading and teachers calling him “out of control” and “disruptive,” his parents shied away from receiving a proper diagnosis and medicating him.
“Not wanting me to be doped up on something and ADHD back then wasn’t really understood,” the actor explained. “It was a deficit. You were broken and I think they didn’t want to raise me feeling broken and ironically, because nobody was there to talk to me about it, nobody held space for me. I felt broken.”
