Featured Image Credit: Kevin Winter/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
Topics: Sexual Abuse, Mental Health, News, Celebrity
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Sexual Abuse, Mental Health, News, Celebrity
Warning: some people may find the contents of this article distressing
Terrence Howard has made a harrowing admission about his childhood as he revealed the age that he became sexually active.
The Empire actor recently sat down with Patrick Bet-David on his PDB Podcast where he spoke about his childhood.
Howard was brought up in Cleveland, Ohio, and he said that his parents weren't around much. After his father was released from jail he would work long hours, while his mother was at school.
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With this in mind, he was often left 'unsupervised' as a child and Howard thinks that's why he ended up experiencing sexual trauma at such a young age.
Sharing the shocking details about what happened, Howard was asked Bet-David at what age he had his first sexual encounter.
"I was four," the former Iron Man star said. "It was the older girls who were watching me; they were like six and seven."
"We did that every day until I was like 13," Howard continued to share. "I had more sex then than I've had in my entire adult life."
Bet-David went on to ask for clarification on what the actor had been doing at that young age, and Howard confirmed that it was intercourse.
In hindsight, he said that he wished that he'd never that those experiences and that he would be a different person if his childhood had been different.
Howard admitted: "I wish I had never done that. I would have been a completely different person, but it gave me a skewed view of interaction.
"I kept thinking that everybody was promiscuous like that. So, by the time I get to 16, 17, I've done enough to where I'm starting– now, the spiritual side of me is starting to show up, but then I slipped back into it at 25 to 30 something."
Apparently it wasn't just Howard who had this experience though, but all the kids in the neighborhood he was living in.
Ultimately the actor said that having those adult experiences at such a young age at a time he wasn't 'mentally prepared' has made him super protective of his children, as well as other people's kids.
"I'm overly protective because I'm trying to protect me," Howard said. "My kids are never alone. They're never alone without at least two people watching them just because I don't want what happened to me to ever happen to them."
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues or want to speak to someone in confidence regarding the welfare of a child, the Childhelp USA National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453) operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and receives calls from throughout the United States, Canada, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.