One of things left out of the very good, very long interview with this former tween/teen actress from the now rebooted hit show, is how many of those showers she was not taking alone at 16 and 17 were with a married producer of the show.

Jennette McCurdy

iCarly

Dan Schneider

iCarly’s Jennette McCurdy on Healing from ‘Intense’ Physical and Emotional Abuse by Her Mom

As a young child, McCurdy says she witnessed physical fighting between her parents and recalls Debbie’s outbursts often turning violent.

By the time McCurdy was 6, her mother became fixated on her only daughter. “My mom had always dreamt of being a famous actor and she became obsessed with making me a star,” says McCurdy. So despite the fact that she was “cripplingly shy,” she went on auditions and began working steadily. “I felt like my job was to keep the peace,” she says. “And I wanted to make my mom happy.”

Gradually, Debbie’s preoccupation with her daughter’s looks went further. McCurdy was 10 when her mother started bleaching her hair and whitening her teeth. When McCurdy was 11, Debbie introduced the young star to calorie counting. By the time McCurdy landed the role of Sam on iCarly, she was suffering from full-fledged anorexia — which later swung to binge eating and then bulimia.

What’s more, until McCurdy was 17 (by then she was three years into a starring role on a hit show), Debbie insisted on performing vaginal and breast exams and never let her daughter shower alone.

“I know if my mom were alive, I’d still have an eating disorder,” says McCurdy, who recovered in 2018 thanks to intense therapy. “It was only distance from her that allowed me to get healthy.”

McCurdy says she was also “so repressed and delayed developmentally” because of her mom’s control. And so it was only after Debbie died that McCurdy rebelled, having sex and experimenting with alcohol for the first time. For years, she struggled with ongoing bulimia and a dependency on alcohol, until finally, she made some drastic changes. – Source


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