JUDAS PRIEST frontman Rob Halford opens up about an assault that happened early in his life by his father’s friend.
When asked in an interview with Variety how he has processed what happened to him and if writing his autobiography “Confess” helped, Rob responded: “It’s an important story. Sexual abuse is a horrible thing. At the time, it was terribly confusing and couldn’t have happened at a worse time, for me as a young guy that was already dealing with trying to figure things out.
“Talking about it now, I can feel the horror and being totally frightened and wanting to run away, but at the same time feeling, ‘Now this is affection, in a very crude brutal manner.’ It was incredibly, incredibly complex. You can only imagine for a young man, dealing with that type of assault.
“Somebody asked me, ‘Would you put that story in the book if your father was still alive?’ and I hesitated. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have, because I would hate to have thought that my father felt that he was in some way complicit to that because he absolutely was not,” he continued. “When it comes to sexual abuse, people on the outside, they feel the guilt as well — ‘Well, maybe I should have said something’ or ‘it’s my fault for introducing this person to that person.’ It has a domino effect. But it was an important story to tell.
“As a young person, you’re impressionable, and it manifests itself in a way that really stays with you for the rest of your life, and turns you into the sexually dysfunctional person that I am now,” Halford added. “I’ve come to terms with that in my adult life, [but] had those incidents never happened as a teenager, would I have turned out differently in the way that I’m intimate with people? Probably so.”
“Confess” will arrive on September 29 via Hachette Books. You can order the book here.
