John Stamos may not be a name that sounds familiar to the Spanish public, unless the main series he worked on is mentioned: Full House. The California-born actor was in charge of playing Jesse Katsopolis, uncle in the fiction of Michelle Tanner, played by twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Beyond this role, the American has built a long and successful career in television series since the 80s.
However, it hasn’t all been stars and lights for the Cypress native. A surprising confession made in April, acknowledging that it cost the twins temporary dismissal during their first filming, is accompanied by a new revelation. This is about a much more serious and gloomy event, since Stamos has acknowledged that he was sexually abused as a child. In his own words, the perpetrator was his babysitter when he was about 11 years old.
The actor has written this information in his memoirs, If You Would Have Told Me (If You Would Have Told Me…), which will go on sale in the United States next Tuesday, October 24. People magazine has been responsible for showing some fragments of the book as previews, in the same way it did with the biography of Britney Spears. Several of these passages deal with the abuse he suffered, his problems with alcohol, and his divorce from Rebecca Romijn.
“I started writing it and that’s when everything suddenly came to me. And then I thought: ‘No, tonight is not about me, it’s about the kids. I’m going to put it aside until the time is right. If not, I’ll be a fake. It’s like: come on now.’ It will be a page, something like that, but I felt like I had to talk about it. It was weird. It was something when I was, I think, 10 or 11 years old. I should never have dealt with those feelings,” Stamos explains in the book.
“It was like you were playing dead to make them stop. But he wasn’t totally aggressive. “I don’t know, he wasn’t good,” he added, describing the situation. The interpreter told People that he remembered the incident gradually over time, but currently his position is totally different. Stamos is a strong advocate for child protection and an ambassador for the organization ChildHelp, charged with protecting children from any type of abuse.
I have done a lot of work for victims. And I felt like I remembered something, slightly. It was always there, but I stored it away, put it aside, like people do, I guess. “If I found out that someone had done something like that to my son… that would be another story,” the interpreter commented on the matter. In words to the media, Stamos wanted to be “100 percent communicative” within this book.
