Charlize Theron shared a raw account of the night her mother shot and killed her father while he was on a drunken rampage in a new interview with The New York Times Magazine, and revealed how doing so has allowed her to no longer be “haunted” by the incident.
Looking back at her turbulent childhood in South Africa and the chaos that preceded the 1991 death of Charles Theron, the Oscar-winning actor told journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro that she was willing to revisit the trauma for the sake of helping other survivors of domestic abuse.
“I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone,” Theron said. “I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”
Theron was 15 when she witnessed her mother, Gerda Jacoba Aletta Maritz, shoot her father in self-defense, but said she remembered him as a threatening presence for a long time before.
“He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal,” Theron said of her father, who she described as a “full-blown functioning drunk.”
