UNITED STATES
ET
February 7, 2018
Nicole Eggert is opening up about a painful period in her life.
The actress filed a police report against her former Charles in Charge co-star, Scott Baio, on Tuesday, after publicly alleging that Baio sexually abused her for years, starting when she was 14 years old. Baio has previously denied Eggert’s sexual abuse allegations, saying she is “provably wrong” and “deliberately lying.” While Baio denied having a sexual relationship with Eggert when she was underage, he did say that the two had consensual sex “well after she turned 18.”
ET spoke to Eggert on Wednesday in Los Angeles, where she alleged that their first sexual encounter happened when she was 14 years old, while Baio would have been 25.
“What’s going through my mind is that it’s my first sexual experience,” she tells ET’s Kevin Frazier. “I don’t know what’s going through everyone’s minds. Like, ‘Oh, is this strange? Whoa, what is that? Maybe this doesn’t feel so bad?’ And the thing is, for so long I hid it because I thought because I didn’t fight back, and because he wasn’t holding me down, that it made it OK — that I was to blame as well.”
“I think that’s a message people really need to understand,” she continues. “It’s that he should have known better. He was the adult, I was the child. I had never been with a boy before. I had never been touched that way — by anybody. And he played on my emotions, my hormones — all of it.”
Eggert says that when she was 15 years old, she contemplated killing herself.
“In those days I had moments of being so hurt and so upset, and even thoughts of ending my life,” she says.
She describes what she calls a particularly low moment.
“I was 15 years old standing on the bridge over the L.A. River at Ventura and Vineland in Studio City, and I looked down at that dry river bed and I’m sobbing, I’m sobbing,” she tells ET. “I’m sobbing and I looked at it, and I said to myself, ‘It’s not a legit bridge, you’re not going to die, you’re going to break a lot of bones and you’re not even going to kill yourself. Get home.’ You know, crying even harder, because, like, ‘You idiot, what were you just thinking?’ But you are lost, and hormones are going and raging, and just sexual hormones, you know? Growing hormones.”
Eggert also claims that Baio began physically abusing her after she told him she wanted to date boys her own age.
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