Common Shares How He Told His Mom He Was Molested As Boy

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Last week, rapper, actor and author Common revealed that he was molested when he was 9 or 10-years old by a family friend. It was a memory he’d repressed for years. It only resurfaced when he was working on an acting project that involved molestation in 2017. Common said the memory of the incident played like a VHS tape in his mind.

In an attempt to help other men heal from this type of trauma, Common decided to share his story in his latest memoir Let Love Have the Last Word.

“I kind of wiped that out of my mind for a while. For a long time. I had a tendency to do that, to tuck things away in a corner. My journey back to it came with all the work I’ve been doing on myself, from prayer to meditation to therapy to art,” he says. “I didn’t even realize it happened unti I was doing a film called The Tale, which deals with that subject matter. I actually told my costar Laura Dern, ‘Yo, I think this happened to me.’ It just started coming back to me.”

Once Common realized and remembered what had happened to him he knew he needed to tell his mother about the incident. Thankfully, the conversation went better than Common expected.

“[it] wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be. She’s worked in Chicago public schools as a principal and teacher, so the stories she’s heard. . . . Obviously, it’s different when it’s your child. But she said, ‘I hate that these things happened, and I know people that it’s happened to before. Are you okay?’ She checked on me.”

Common shared how he believed his mom processed this revelation.

“I guess she’s looking at the end result. She’s like, ‘You seem like a happy person.’ But that’s another reason why I talked about it. Some people that seem happy are not always happy.”