Julianne Hough Says She Was Sexually Abused by Neighbor at Age 4

Julianne Hough is getting vulnerable about the trauma and abuse she endured as a child and how she’s worked to heal her pain over the years.

The professional dancer and actress opened up during an emotional conversation on Thursday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show, where she revealed that she was “about 4 years old” when she was sexually abused for the first time. Hough said her abuser was a neighbor who lived in the same Utah cul-de-sac as her family.

“I’ve actually never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before,” Hough admitted. “But that was a very, very confusing time because, obviously, growing up in the Mormon culture, everything needs to be perfect, everybody needs to put on the shiny, we’ve got our stuff together. And there was not a lot of repercussion for what had happened.”

“And by the way, I’m not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with,” she continued. “Nobody did anything.”

The Dancing with the Stars co-host explained that she didn’t tell her parents about what specifically happened to her until later in life, as she “forgot” about the incident. However, she did tell them about “other things [that] happened later in my childhood” when she was in her teens.

“I had forgot about the neighbor thing at 4 years old until I started really doing this work in the last few years,” Hough said. “That’s why I think I blocked out from birth to 10, basically, because I had completely disassociated from that ever happening.”

Later in the episode, the Safe Haven star noted to host Jamie Kern Lima that her parents are no longer in contact with her abuser and that her mother moved them out of the neighborhood as soon as she learned something happened.

Hough recounted the moment she told her mother about the incident after she came home with her clothes inside out as a child. “She said, ‘Tell me what happened,’” Hough recalled. “And I said — this was my only way of describing it because we weren’t allowed carbonation as kids, we weren’t allowed pop or anything like that, but I remember tasting it and it burned and it hurt my lungs — and I remember saying I felt like I had a Sprite bottle between my legs.”

Afterward, she said her mom “freaked out” and that’s when her family moved. “I guess my mom did do what she could,” Hough confessed as she tried to hold back tears. “She just wanted to move and leave. She didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did want to get us out.”

The Footloose actress noted that other family members also dealt with similar abuse growing up. She also previously shared in a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan that she was “abused mentally, physically, everything” at age 10 while attending a dance academy in London with her brother, Derek Hough. That led her to “not trust anybody.”

“The people that also violated my sisters or my brother or myself, they never got reprimanded for it because we didn’t say something,” Hough explained to Lima. “Instead, we just pivoted and we just moved — which is good, get out of a situation — but also that’s another thing which is for me, just pivot, pivot, pivot.”

She added, “I’ve never shared that before, in fact, I just had a little bit of a profound revelation during that: that my mom did do the best that she could.”

Elsewhere during their conversation, Hough said she knows that her parents “felt guilty” once they learned about the abuse she rendered in her teens. “At the time, when I was younger, I think they also didn’t know what to do. And were also in a position of not feeling capable or also feeling helpless,” she explained. “And so, I think now that we’ve had these conversations, they’ve also said those things.”

As Hough continued her healing journey, she eventually “reconnected” with her parents amid her divorce from Brooks Laich in 2020.

“I reclaimed my parental relationship with them, and I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me,” she said. “And that was the most healing time for us.”