Terry Crews is getting candid about the parental trauma she endured at the hands of his mother.
In his new memoir, Tough: My Journey to True Power, the Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor revealed the gross act his mother did to him to see if he hit puberty and see if had pubic hair.
“She made me pull down my pants to see if I’d hit puberty,” said Crews said in a recent interview with USA Today on what he reveals in the memoir.
He told the outlet, “It was wild because I never envisioned actually being that transparent. It was so difficult because I love my mom and, to be honest, I didn’t want her to go down as having done something so heinous. But at the same time, it was abusive. This is the stuff that came out in therapy, the stuff that I really had to address.”
Crews has been quite candid about the abuse he witnessed at home and how toxic ideals or misconceptions on masculinity impacted him later in life.
He told USA Today how different his relationship is with his son than his own relationship was with his father.
“I hug my son. I kiss my son,” he said. “It’s a really, really wonderful relationship because I am about finding out what my son wants. A few years ago, we went viral because I remember going home and my son wanted to play video games, and I didn’t understand them. I was almost going to jump into that mode of, ‘Yeah. You kids playing those games,’ that old thing. But all of a sudden I realized, wait a minute, this is an opening. And so I said, “How about we build a computer together?” And my son, to this day, we never forget that. We’re closer than ever.”
In 2018, Terry Crews accused former William Morris Endeavor Agency (WME) employee Adam Venit of groping him at a party in 2016.
Since this revelation, Crews has gone on to become an advocate for justice for sexual assault victims, and a rare example of men coming forward with their own #MeToo stories.
“We’ve talked ourselves into this picture of ultimate manliness, being this superhero,” she said of masculinity. “And the biggest thing about this book is me admitting how mortal I am. Like, I’m a mortal man. Fallible. I could die. But doing these crazy things, my wife had to warn me like, ‘Yo, you could die doing this stuff. You punching people and jumping around. You go up on the wrong guy, it could be over.’ Before I wouldn’t listen to my wife simply because she was a woman. And it was so ridiculous. Everything that’s in this book that I learned, she was already telling me. But I wouldn’t listen.”
Crews’ memoir is out now.
