Sally Field says she was sexually abused by her stepfather in new memoir

THE beloved actress reveals shocking claims of sexual abuse in her memoir — and says she’s glad Burt Reynolds died before the release.

Sally Field.

SALLY Field opened up in a recent interview with the New York Times about her new memoir In Pieces, in which she described the sexual abuse she experienced by her stepfather.

The two-time Oscar-winning actress says that when she was 14 years old, her stepfather, stuntman Jock “Jocko” Mahoney, would call Field into his bedroom alone.

“I knew,” she wrote in her memoir, according to the NYT. “I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child — and yet.”

According to the NYT, which published the interview on Tuesday, Field’s mother, Margaret, filed for divorce from her father, Richard, in 1951, and remarried to Mahoney in 1952. The couple divorced in 1968, and Mahoney died in 1989.

Sally Field opens up about past trauma in her new memoir. Picture: AP

However, it wasn’t until after Field, now 71, was cast in the 2012 film Lincoln that she told her mother about her stepfather, the star shared.

In her memoir and the NYT interview, Field also recalled other instances of abuse. According to the actress, in 1968 she woke up to find musician Jimmy Webb “on top of me, grinding away to another melody,” Field wrote in her book, per the NYT.

Field noted that she didn’t think that Webb had “malicious intent — I felt he was stoned out of his mind,” she told the outlet.

In response, Webb told the NYT that he had “great respect” for Field.

The veteran actress is one of Hollywood’s best loved stars. Picture: Getty

“I am being asked to respond to a passage in a book that the publishers refuse to let me read, even at my lawyer’s request, so all I can do is recount my memories of dating Sally in the swingin’ 1960s,” he said. “Sally and I were young, successful stars in Hollywood. We dated and did what 22-year-olds did in the late ‘60s — we hung out, we smoked pot, we had sex.

“I have great memories of our times together and great respect for Sally — so much respect that I didn’t write about her in my book because I didn’t want to tarnish her Gidget image with our stories of drugs and sex,” added Webb.

In her upcoming memoir, Field also recalled a time when she was auditioning for the 1976 film Stay Hungry when director Bob Rafelson said: “I can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough.”

“So I kissed him,” Field wrote in her book. “It must have been good enough.” Rafelson denied this to the NYT, calling it “totally untrue.”

“That’s the first I’ve ever heard of this,” he told the outlet. “I didn’t make anybody kiss me in order to get any part.”

Also discussed in her book, is Field’s relationship with the late Burt Reynolds. The former couple dated for five years after they met on the set of the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit.

Field described their relationship to the NYT as “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”

Looking back, Field thinks her romance with Reynolds was her trying to recreate a version of her relationship with her stepfather.

Burt Reynolds says Sally Field was the love of his life.

“I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” Field explained to the NYT. “I was trying to make it work this time.”

Reynolds died on September 6 of cardiac arrest. He was 82.

At the time, Field released a statement to The Associated Press: “There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away. They stay alive, even forty years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart, for as long as I live. Rest, Buddy.”

Now, Field tells the NYT that she’s “glad” the late actor hasn’t read her memoir.

“This would hurt him,” she admitted. “I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further.”

This story originally appeared on Fox News and is republished here with permission.

Originally published as Sally Field says she was sexually abused by her stepfather in new memoir