'I felt like I developed and I nurtured a narrative that she didn’t love me.'
Demi Moore's daughters had a hard time during her marriage to Ashton Kutcher.
Demi -- along with her daughters Rumer, 31, and Tallulah, 25 -- appears on Monday's episode of Red Table Talk and the women get intensely personal about their feelings surrounding Demi's marriage to Ashton from 2005 to 2013.
To kick off the conversation, Jada Pinkett Smith -- who hosts the talk show with her daughter, Willow Smith, and mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones -- reads a passage from Demi's memoir, Inside Out, in which the 56-year-old actress opens up about the lowest time in her life. That point, she writes, came after Ashton allegedly cheated on her, she had a miscarriage, relapsed after nearly 20 years and was cut out by her children.
"I ended up pregnant and then lost the baby at almost six months. And so when I couldn’t get pregnant again, the guilt that I had felt, that it was clearly my fault, was just enormous," Demi shares on the Red Table Talk episode. "So we went on this trip and Ashton said, 'I don’t know if alcoholism's a thing. I think it’s about moderation.'"
"I lived the majority of my adult life sober. I was great sober," she continues. "I made my own story up that [Ashton] wanted somebody that he could have wine with and do stuff with. He is not the cause of why I opened that door. I wanted to be something other than who I am. And it was literally like giving my power away."
For Rumer, though, she says she felt "so angry" for "so much of that time" because "I felt like something that was mine had been taken away."
"I think also when she wanted to have another baby and then it wasn’t happening, and there was so much focus on that, it was like, 'Oh, we're not enough,'" Rumer explains. "Part of the reason I moved out of the house, I think after you had a miscarriage, I was just like, 'Why are you so desperate to have another kid?' And I couldn’t’ stand the idea."
"But then I found these pictures and I was like, 'Oh my god.' I saw how big her stomach was and I was like, 'Oh my god. I was so insensitive,'" Rumer continues. "I never once went to you and said, 'I'm sorry. Are you OK?'"
As Jada and Demi comfort Rumer, noting that it's normal to have feelings of anger, Demi says that she didn't think it was her attempts at pregnancy that tore her daughters -- who also include Scout, 28 -- away.
"The addiction and the co-dependency, my addiction to Ashton, that was probably almost more devastating because it took me seriously away emotionally," Demi shares.
As for Tallulah's experience, the youngest of Demi and Bruce Willis' daughters was the only one living at home during her mom's marriage to Ashton.
"Watching the behavior with Ashton those years -- because everyone left the house and it was just me living there -- I felt very forgotten and I felt like I developed and I nurtured a narrative that she didn’t love me. And I truly believed it," Tallulah admits. "And I know that she does 100 percent, but in that moment, you’re hurt and you can’t fathom that someone that loves you would do that to you and would choose others more than you."
"It was like the sun went down and a monster would come. I remember there was just the anxiety that would come up in my body when I could sense her eyes shutting a little more or the way she was speaking or she would be a lot more affectionate with me if she wasn't sober," she adds. "It was jarring and very weird. There were moments where I would get angry and I recall being very upset and kind of treating her like a child and speaking to her like a child and being like, 'Please get away from me.' And she got very angry. It would happen in front of friends. It was not the mom that we had grown up with."
Rumer agrees with her sister, saying, "You had always chosen us. You always chose us first and made that a priority... Being around a woman as your mother who is this, like, infallible woman who can take on anything, even my dad... Always together, always in control. [And then] not being in control around a man. Like, who is this person? I'm like, 'I don’t know who this is and they are supposed to be my rock.'"
With her family going through a tough time, and as the eldest sibling, Rumer says she tried to play peacemaker between her sisters and their mom, but her attempts at creating a family unit backfired.
"Scout and Tallulah had very different experiences than I had when we stopped talking to my mom. They didn’t speak to her for three years. I went in and out as kind of like the ambassador for the family," Rumer says. "Because, at one point, her friends are calling me and being like, 'I'm really worried about your mom. You need to talk to her.' And so then I’m like, 'OK, well, I have to go and fix this.' And then my family basically kind of, like, shunned me and kind of called me a traitor for going to talk to her."
"And then I was like, 'Then I'll have no one. I'll have my mom who's, like, not capable of being my mom right now and then the rest of my family is just not gonna speak to me anymore," she adds.
New episodes of Red Table Talk debut Mondays on Facebook Watch.
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