American Pie Star Mena Suvari Reveals Being Sexually Abused At 13 In Her Memoir

Back in 1999, Mena Suvari was the object of every man’s desire after she was cast as a choir girl in the teen sex comedy “American Pie” and a super sexy high-school cheerleader in “American Beauty.”

To the outside world, Suvari was at the peak of her career and everything appeared to be going just right for the actress. But on the inside, the actress was slowly getting addicted to marijuana, which "distracted" her from her broken family life, and the sexual abuse she repeatedly faced at the hands of predatory men in her life and career, reveals an extract from her debut book, which appeared in Cosmopolitan.

In the book, "The Great Peace," the 42-year-old actress wrote: “I was living a double life, every time I would go on a set. Every time I was interviewed, I was acting the whole time. It was another role for me to play. That I was OK."

The actress says that the abuse started when she was 13. She said she was raped by a friend of her brother who initially wrote her love letters for almost a year, making her feel "adored" and later on used her to get what he wanted and “discarded” her like she was a piece of crap.

A few years later, she was taken advantage of again. And this time, it was someone from Hollywood. Then, around the age of 17, she got into a relationship that once again turned into a three-year-long abusive relationship.

“I spent almost my entire life feeling disgusted, ashamed, and in denial about what happened to me and what I had allowed myself to do and be a part of,” she says in the book, reported The New York Times. “Then one day, I stopped. I stopped running away and I looked at myself. I looked into the pain and what I saw was that I was ready to leave it all behind and heal.”

She further stated that filming for “American Pie” gave her a place life a whole new sense of purpose. Looking back on her filming days, the actress recounts an eerie acting exercise that she and her co-star Kevin Spacey did on the set before they filmed an intimate scene together.

“Kevin took me into a small room with a bed and we laid next to each other, me facing toward him while he held me lightly,” she writes. “Lying there with Kevin was strange and eerie but also calm and peaceful and as for his gentle caresses, I was so used to being open and eager for affection that it felt good to just be touched.”