Brooke Shields on her mother encouraging her to pose nude for Playboy aged 10, 'I don’t know why she thought it was right'

Brooke Shields posed nude at the age of 10 for Playboy magazine's Sugar & Spice, now at the age of 57, she is opening up about her childhood exploitation in a new documentary called Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

In an interview with The Times, Brooke Shields spoke about her upcoming documentary about her life. In the documentary, she reflected on her appearance in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, Pretty Baby, in which she played a child prostitute at the age of 12 years old. The actress also reflected on posing nude at the age of 10 for Playboy magazine's Sugar and Spice, and her mother's role in encouraging her to take on these gigs at such a young age.  

In the interview, Brooke spoke about a specific moment in her documentary when she tells her daughters (Rowan, now age 19, and Grier, age 16) that unlike her mother, she would have never allowed them to take on the roles that she did as a child.

In the documentary, Brooke's daughter Rowan said of the film Pretty Baby, “It’s child pornography!” She then added crucially, “Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?” Brooke immediately replied "No," and chose not defend her mother who passed in 2012.

"That was … that was hard for me, to not justify my mom to them, but when they asked me, I thought, ‘Oh God, I have to admit this,'" Brooke told The Times. "I mean, I could say, ‘Oh, it was the time back then,’ or ‘Oh, it was art.’ But I don’t know why she thought it was all right. I don’t know."

"It’s so innate when you’re an only child of a single mother," Brooke said about defending her mother to the press for so many years when she was accused of exploiting her and being an alcoholic. "All you want to do is love your parent and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her. And by virtue of protecting her, I was justifying everything, and that solidified that bond between us."

Speaking about the nude photographs that were taken of Brooke for an erotic magazine when she was 10 years old, the actress admitted that she previously defended her mother's decision to encourage her to do the shoot. 

"It was too much for me to cop to that, really," Brooke said. She added that even in her autobiographies (2005’s Down Came the Rain and then There Was a Little Girl, 2014) she struggled to talk about this incident. "Writing about it just broke me. It was her that I was protecting."

"Everyone always wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was," said Brooke.

Brooke added that making this documentary allowed her to look at herself in a different way. "It was making the documentary that encouraged it,” she said. “That made me look at what kind of person I am and to give myself a little credit. I had to contend with so much at such an early age, and there was resilience, but also I put on blinders as a defence mechanism. But now I can look at that little girl and think, ‘She did it, she pulled through.’ ”

The trailer for this documentary includes some disturbing clips of how Brooke was sexualised by the press at a young age and Brooke admitting, 'I'm amazed that I survived any of it.'

The documentary exploring Brooke's life is titled Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby and premieres on April 3 on Disney+.