NEW YORK (NY)
New York Daily News
January 28, 2018
By Jacqueline Cutler
Tina Alexis Allen was good at keeping secrets.
The older brothers who molested her, starting when she was 9? She wouldn’t tell. The teacher who took over a couple of years later? Something else to keep locked away.
Perhaps it was a family trait. After all, no one kept secrets better than her father —until he started sharing them with her.
Allen earned an MBA in marketing and worked in fashion until opting for a career in acting. She appeared on television in “Outsiders” and films such as “Moving Mountains,” and starred in her own one-woman stage show, “Secrets of a Holy Father.”
Her book “Hiding Out: A Memoir of Drugs, Deception, and Double Lives” hits stores Feb. 22, exposing the long-hidden tale of a tumultuous youth in which her desperately damaged family life turned ever darker.
Allen grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., the youngest of 13 children born to a conservative Catholic family. She was a great athlete, earning a gold medal for basketball in the U.S. Youth Games at age 12.
It seemed like an idyllic suburban childhood as her travel agent father peddled pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
Yet as an 11-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, she had her first liaison — with a teacher. For three years, she and the female teacher 15 years her senior “were having sex on Saturdays while the rest of Chevy Chase was pruning azalea bushes around their stately homes or attending Georgetown Prep lacrosse games.”
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