Matthew McConaughey’s new book, Greenlights, was released on Tuesday, October 20.
The 50-year-old actor opened up about being a sexual abuse survivor, from his first experience of sex to being ‘molested’ a few years later.
“I was blackmailed into having sex for the first time when I was 15. I was certain I was going to hell for the premarital sex. Today, I am merely certain that I hope that’s not the case,” McConaughey wrote.
While the Dallas Buyers Club star did not provide any details, he wrote: “I was molested by a man when I was 18 while knocked unconscious in the back of a van.”
Prior to returning to the University of Texas as an acting professor in 2019, he volunteered for the campus’s Students United for Rape Elimination initiative, which saw him drive students back home on a golf cart at night.
McConaughey explained how he’s ‘earned a few scars getting through this rodeo of humanity’, recounting past experiences from childhood to adulthood.
“I got whipped until my butt bled for putting on a Cracker Jack tattoo when I was 10,” he wrote. “I’ve never felt like a victim. I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”
In the book, McConaughey also discussed the tumultuous relationship between his mother and father, James and Kay.
“They were, at times, violent. As I say in the book, that is how they communicated. They were divorced twice, married three times, I mean, yeah, it was like the Pacific Ocean in a storm.”
However, he added that ‘those moments were so quickly superseded by the love and humanity’. McConaughey’s dad died in 1992, the details of which were shared in an excerpt with PEOPLE magazine.
“I got a call from my mom. ‘Your dad died.’ My knees buckled. I couldn’t believe it.
He was my dad. Nobody or nothing could kill him. Except for mom,” McConaughey explained. “He’d always told me and my brothers: ‘Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be makin’ love to your mother.’ And that’s what happened. He had a heart attack when he climaxed.
”