Inside Out(53)

I WAS WORKING in New York on a film with Ellen Barkin called Another Happy Day when the story broke. Ashton had slept with a twenty-one-year-old, in our home, while I was out of town.

I remember the night they met. We were at a bowling alley with Rumer, and when he went to switch out our shoes, she gave him her number on a napkin. Or that’s what he told me at the time. When we got home that night and he showed it to me, I said, “That is just gross. We were there with our kid, and she was there with her mother and her sister!” I had a visceral response—it was revulsion. So the fact that he then pursued her felt like a real “fuck you.”

Suddenly, his infidelity was all over the celebrity gossip circuit—the young woman even tried to sell a sweater of his on eBay for five hundred dollars.

When the news came out in the press, we were already scheduled to do an event at the Clinton Global Initiative, launching our foundation to fight human trafficking. We had put in over a year researching the issue and setting up the infrastructure. Ashton is a really gifted big-picture thinker; to me, of course, the issue was personal. There was no question of postponing this event.

I went into lockdown mode. I knew how I reacted would be the benchmark for how the tabloid stories would be received. If we had a united front, maybe they would dismiss the whole incident as a shakedown. Maybe the best call was simply to absorb what had happened and ignore it.

So he came to New York and I put on a brave face and we gave our presentation on September 23, 2010—the day before our anniversary. Ashton spoke about how there are more slaves on earth now than in any other time in human history, and detailed our efforts to get Twitter and other Internet platforms to avoid being used as marketplaces for the selling of human beings. I talked about the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign we were launching, to try to alter the culture that enables men to feel okay about paying for sex with underage girls. “One in five men have engaged in the commercial sex trade,” I announced to that room full of important people, standing next to my husband of five years who’d just cheated on me with a girl about the age of my oldest daughter. “Real men protect, respect, love, and care for girls.” But I did not feel protected, respected, loved, or cared for myself.

Rumer, who’d moved out on her own by this point and was working as an actor, came with Ashton, which we’d planned long before any of this happened, and then the three of us went to Providence, Rhode Island, to visit Scout, who had recently started at Brown University. I felt strongly that we shouldn’t lie to them—and, technically, I didn’t—but I allowed them to assume that all the chatter in the tabloids was baseless. My intention was to protect them, but now I see that was a mistake. I cheated them out of the opportunity to process this upset with me, as a family. They deserved to know the truth.

Ashton and I decided to drive back to L.A. so we could have the time together, alone. I was strangely flooded with shame; I couldn’t shake the feeling that this whole thing was somehow my fault. Because we had brought a third party into our relationship, Ashton said, that blurred the lines and, to some extent, justified what he’d done. I think he felt remorse, but he was also looking for a way to deflect blame, to maintain his own perception of himself as a decent family guy.

Ashton did not compensate for his behavior by being extra solicitous and kind. In retrospect, I think all of this was his way of trying to get out of our marriage. He didn’t know how to do that in a loving way, or maybe he was too conflicted. I think part of him cherished what we had; part of him couldn’t wait to move on. You can’t blame someone for not having the skills or the level of awareness it takes to behave compassionately. That was the best that he could do. Every one of his actions was saying, Please don’t love me. But, unfortunately for both of us, I did.


TALLULAH, MY ONLY kid still at home with us, had just turned seventeen and was going through an age-appropriate rebellious phase. One evening in the spring of 2011, she told me she was going to spend the evening with some friends studying for a practice SAT, and I went out to a movie. My phone started ringing in the middle of it: it was another parent I knew. Tallulah and some of her friends had been busted for underage drinking. They were walking into a friend’s house carrying a water bottle full of vodka, and it was past curfew in that area, and they’d drawn the attention of the police. I needed to go and pick her up from the station in Hollywood.

When I got there, I made a beeline to the officer in charge and said, “Look: this is obviously not okay, but it’s a first offense. Can they get off with just a warning here, and we will make sure this never happens again?” His response was: “It’ll be off her record when she turns eighteen.” But it would never come off of her “record” in the public eye in the same way it would for her friends: she would be forever associated with this incident; potential employers would see it the first time they googled her. I’ve said to my kids for years: it doesn’t matter who you’re with or what the circumstances are. It will always come out in the press as “Tallulah Willis, busted.” Because of who your parents are, you will be subjected to a different kind of scrutiny than your peers; any mistake you make will become news. And that’s exactly what happened with the drinking incident. It was all over TMZ the next day—just as I feared it would be.

I didn’t hug Tallulah when I first saw her at the station, and maybe I should have. I was upset that she had lied to me about where she was going to be that night, and I was focused on trying to convince the cops to keep this quiet. I was trying to protect her. She interpreted that as me caring only about how the whole thing looked.