Inside Out(55)

It was coming up on our sixth anniversary. Danny Masterson was having a bachelor party the same weekend, and Ashton said he wanted to go down to San Diego for the night to be there for it. He went, and when he returned the next day, he said he’d had a great time. To celebrate our anniversary, he took me to the place we went on our first date: to that piece of land he’d bought that held so many of his fantasies. Our time together was strained, and I just felt in my gut there was something he wasn’t telling me. It was driving me crazy.

The next day I had to fly back to New York to do press for a project I was really proud of. It was a miniseries for Lifetime called Five, composed of five different short films that told stories about breast cancer set in different times and places, directed by five different women. I was one of them. My story was set in the early sixties, at a time when people didn’t even speak the word breast in public, so awareness of breast cancer was a major problem. One of the most rewarding parts of the experience had been directing a little girl, and trying to tell the story with a lot of attention to her point of view. The first day of shooting, Ashton had sent me a beautiful bouquet on set: soft blue flowers with a card that read, “I believe in you.” I couldn’t stop thinking about those flowers on the flight to New York.

I was at the Crosby Hotel, about to get my hair and makeup done for the premiere that evening, when I got a Google alert on my phone. “Ashton Kutcher caught cheating” flashed across my screen. At first I assumed that it was more about the previous year’s incident, that one of the tabloids had just found a new way to repackage it. But once I clicked on the link, I realized it was brand new. It was about the weekend of our anniversary that had just passed, the night he was in San Diego at the bachelor party. There were quotes from a young blonde replaying Ashton’s pickup lines. I felt sick to my stomach: I knew those words. I knew she wasn’t lying. “Aren’t you married?” she said she’d asked him. To which he replied that he was separated. Then he spent the night with her, got up, and drove home to celebrate his anniversary with his wife.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” is what came out of my mouth when he picked up the phone. By which I meant, How dumb can you get? Did you want to get caught? (The truth is, yes, on a subconscious level he probably did.) And what about me? Did you really have to put me in this position, again? You couldn’t at least have found a way to cheat on me quietly—to privately break my heart without dragging me through a public gauntlet of humiliation?

He admitted it right away. Then I had to hang up and go walk the red carpet, praying with every step that this information hadn’t gone wide yet, that nobody would thrust a microphone in my face and ask how I felt about my husband of six years fucking a twenty-one-year-old he’d been hanging out with in a hot tub the weekend of our anniversary. I really thought I might throw up.

A week after my forty-ninth birthday, on 11/11/11, Ashton moved out. The statement I released through my publicist was brief but perfectly distilled my feelings: “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton. As a woman, a mother and a wife, there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.”





Chapter 22


I couldn’t eat. I shrank down to ninety-six pounds: skeletal. I started getting blinding headaches. My body hurt all over, and inside of it, my heart was broken. I felt like giving up.

All I could think was, How did I get here?

I went away with Rumer for Christmas. I was not in a good place, and I behaved badly. One of her friends was with us, and I was just being a little too flirty in that sad way a woman can sometimes act when she’s looking for validation.

I started to misuse migraine medication—nothing crazy, but I was chipping away at something, trying to dig out of my pain.

I found a way.

At that party in my living room in January 2012, I didn’t do anything more than anyone else did—Rumer, some friends of hers, some friends of mine. I inhaled some nitrous. I smoked a little spice, which is like man-made pot. It’s not like I went wild and overdosed. I just had a weird reaction, a seizure, which is apparently not that uncommon when people do nitrous or “whip-its,” the DIY version of the laughing gas you get at the dentist’s office.

But on a deeper level, would I even consider doing drugs with my kid there if I were in my right mind? Of course not. I scared Rumer so badly when she saw me there, semiconscious on the floor; she thought I might die in front of her. She was completely freaked out, and after that night she joined her younger sisters in refusing to speak to me.

That was the worst part, by far. Worse than my friends calling 911 before I could sit up and scream, “No!” Worse than all the tabloid headlines blaring “Demi Moore, rushed to the hospital!” Worse than knowing that Ashton would see that story. Worse than my broken heart. Being a mom was the one thing I felt sure I was truly “successful” at in life, but how successful could I be when not one of my children would speak to me?

How did I get here?

I felt villainized by my family. I was angry that my girls weren’t showing me any compassion and that Bruce refused to intercede. And I was embarrassed that I’d put myself in this position. They all wanted me to go to rehab, which just seemed nuts to me: I’m going to show up at rehab and say, “My name is Demi and I don’t drink and once I did a whip-it”? I knew that the real problem wasn’t drugs or alcohol.