The 56-year-old actress opens up about her complicated relationship with her ex-husband.
Demi Moore is telling all and coming clean in her new memoir, Inside Out. The 56-year-old actress released the tell-all on Tuesday after several weeks of candid promotion.
In the 272-page memoir, Moore opens up about her marriage to actor Ashton Kutcher. The pair got together in 2003 and married in 2005. Eventually, Kutcher filed for divorce in late 2012, finalizing it in 2013.
In her book, Moore doesn’t hold back, telling the good, the bad and the ugly about her relationship with Kutcher. Here are the highlights:
On Meeting Kutcher:
“He was 25. I was 40. But I’m telling you: we couldn’t feel it. we were totally in sync, from our very first conversation… When I met Ashton it almost felt like a do-over, like I could just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young, with him -- much more so than I’d ever been able to experience it when I was actually in my twenties.”
On Her Sex Life With Kutcher:
“I felt completely safe with Ashton, which made it possible to connect sexually in a way I’d never experienced before.”
On How Public Their Relationship Became:
“[Ashton] later confessed that if he’d fully grasped what it would be like, he might never have gotten involved with me.”
On His Involvement in Her Relapse:
“One night, we put some clothes on and went out to dinner. Ashton was enjoying a glass of good red wine when he said, ‘I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing. I think it’s all about moderation.’ I wanted to be that girl. The girl who could have a glass of wine at dinner, or do a tequila shot at a party. In my mind, Ashton wanted that too. So I tried to become that: a fun, normal girl. I didn’t think, This is a kid in his 20s who has no idea what he’s talking about. I didn’t think, I have nearly two decades of sobriety under my belt, and that’s a huge accomplishment. Instead, I cast about for justifications for his argument. Plenty of people party too much in their youth and then develop a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I told myself… Back in our room, I took a beer from the minibar.”
On His Proposal Six Weeks After Finding Out She Was Pregnant:
“He asked me to go down to the beach to watch the sunset, and then he got down on one knee and presented me with a beautiful vintage Cartier ring. I was overwhelmed. I told him I needed to think about it. I didn’t want him to feel he had to marry me just because I was pregnant. But I loved him. And I knew he loved me. And I knew this baby would cement our family, bond us all on the deepest level. By the end of the night, I’d said yes.”
On Her Miscarriage:
“Almost six months into my pregnancy, right at the moment when we were going to start telling everyone, we went to the doctor’s office. He did his usual ultrasound, but this time, there was no heartbeat. I registered the deadly silence -- instead of the now-familiar thumpthump!thumpthump! Of Chaplin’s little heart -- and saw the look on my doctor’s face. If you have never lost a baby, you may think of a miscarriage as not that big a deal. It’s hard to remember, but I’m sure I used to feel that way too: like it was a bit of medical misfortune, a disappointing but not devastating setback. But when it is your baby, who you already love and think of as a member of your immediate family, it doesn’t feel like a minor defeat. It feels like your child has died. I was decimated. I shifted into survival mode… Ashton did his best to connect with me in my grief. He tried to be there for me during the miscarriage, but he couldn’t really understand what I was feeling. First of all, he hadn’t carried this baby. And second, he was in his twenties at the time: he wasn’t remotely late to the game of fatherhood. His possibilities were not running out, far from it. I was suddenly acutely aware that mine were.”
On Her IVF Treatments:
“To his credit, Ashton was fine with having a baby, however: we could use a surrogate, or we could use a donor egg. But my ego was attached to having a biological child I carried. That’s what I’d always done before. Intellectually, I knew that one can connect with a baby on the deepest level without carrying her. But emotionally, I wanted to have that experience with Ashton. Just as I wanted to be the carefree girl who could have a casual drink, I wanted to be the fertile woman who could have his baby.”
On Finding an Egg Donor:
“I was still desperate to have a baby with him… I started scouring the agency lists for the right fit, sharing the most promising prospects with Ashton and hearing his thoughts … he said we should go for it… [after finding someone…] Ashton told me, ‘I don’t think I can do this, and I don’t know if this is working.’ I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I asked him why he’d let me research a donor, go through this painful prolonged process, and make myself vulnerable in this way if he wasn’t up for it. His response was simple: ‘I never thought you’d go through with it.’”
On Almost Drowning on Her 45th Birthday:
“Late that night, we all ended up in the hot tub, and I started passing out and slipping under the water. If other people hadn’t been there, I would have drowned. Ashton carried me back to our bed and he was furious. To some extent, I understand his reaction. If this had been the first time something like this had happened, that would have been one thing, but it wasn’t. But it was also confusing: Ashton had encouraged me to go in this direction. When I went too far, though, he let me know how he felt by showing a picture he’d taken of me resting my head on the toilet the night before. It seemed like a goo- natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming.”
On Threesomes With Kutcher:
“I wanted this marriage to work, and I was willing to do whatever it took, to jump through any hoop. So when he expressed his fantasy of bringing a third person into our bed, I didn’t say no. I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be. Having other people in our marriage presented a totally false sense of power, and an absolutely temporary sense of excitement. There were two different people we opened our relationship to, and they didn’t have bad intentions; they held it in the right space. To this day, I know I could reach out to either of them for friendship; one is now married and has a kid. They were good people, but it was still a mistake. Part of the point of monogamy is the energy of somebody making the sacrifice or the choice for you, and that you thereby hold this special place that no one else can have. As soon as another person is brought in, you are no longer being held in that sacred spot.”
On His Alleged Cheating:
“Ashton had slept with a 21-year-old, in our home, while I was out of town. I remember the night they met. We were at a bowling alley with Rumer, and when he went to switch out our shoes, she gave him her number on a napkin. Or that’s what he told me at the time. When we got home that night and he showed it to me, I said, ‘That is just gross. We were there with our kid, and she was there with her mother and her sister!’ I had a visceral response — it was revulsion. So the fact that he then pursued her felt like a real ‘f**k you.’”
“Because we had brought a third party into our relationship, Ashton said, that blurred the lines and, to some extent, justified what he’d done. I think he felt remorse, but he was also looking for a way to deflect blame, to maintain his own perception of himself as a decent family guy. Ashton did not compensate for his behavior by being extra solicitous and kind. In retrospect, I think all of this was his way of trying to get our of our marriage.”
On Finding Out Via Google Alert About His Alleged Second Time Cheating:
“He admitted it right away. Then I had to hang up and go walk the red carpet praying with every step that this information hadn’t gone wide yet, that nobody would thrust a microphone in my face and ask how I felt about my husband of six years f**king a 21-year-old he’d been hanging out with in a hot tub the weekend of our anniversary. I really thought I might throw up.”
On Her Drastic Weight Loss After Their Split:
"I was almost 50. The husband who I'd thought was the love of my life had cheated on me and then decided he didn't want to work on our marriage. My children weren't speaking to me: no Happy Birthday calls, no Merry Christmas texts. Nothing. Their father -- a friend I'd counted on for years -- was gone from my life. The career I'd scrambled to create since I moved out of my mother's apartment when I was 16 years old was stalled, or maybe it was over for good. Everything I was attached to -- even my health -- had abandoned me. I was getting blinding headaches and losing weight scarily fast. I looked like I felt: destroyed... I shrank down to 98 pounds."
On How She Feels About Him Now:
“I’m grateful to Ashton too, believe it or not. Whatever pain we went through together enabled both of us to grow into the people we are today. We continue to collaborate with our foundation, Thorn, and I’m so proud of the work we do.”
ET has reached out to Kutcher about Moore’s memoir.
For more from Moore, watch the clip below:
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