Julianne Hough Reveals She Was Sexually Assaulted by Neighbor as a Child

Julianne Hough opened up about her childhood and how she was sexually abused by a neighbor at four-years-old.

While sitting down for a podcast interview with The Jamie Kern Lima Show, the Dancing with the Stars host revealed that she was sexually abused in Utah and how she told her Mormon parents about it.

"My first experience was when I was about four-years-old," Hough began. "A neighbor in our cul-de-sac ... Yeah ... I've actually never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before, but, yeah, that was a very, very confusing time."

The 36-year-old grew up in a Mormon household, something which made the situation all the more complicated.

"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' [faces], and there was not a lot of repercussion for what had happened," Hough recalled.

"And by the way, I'm not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things, that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with ... which is nobody did anything," the Emmy-Award winning host continued.

After going through such a traumatic experience, Hough said she completely dissociated herself from her childhood and managed to block out her life to the age of 10 -- which led her forgetting about the first assault entirely.

Lima then asked if Hough ever told her parents about what happened.

"Later on ... because I forgot about it and other things happened later in my childhood and then about 15, I came home and I started sharing those things, but I had forgot about the neighbor thing at four-years-old until I started really doing this work in the last few years and that's why I think I blocked out from birth to 10," she continued, "because I had completely dissociated from that ever happening."

At 10, Hough moved to London to study performing arts. She said she then found herself not being about to "trust anybody" and began "dimming" her light and her "effervescence of beauty" because that was "the attractive part."

She's previously spoken about being "mentally, physically" abused while in London as well.

Hough revealed that she did eventually tell her parents about her sexual assault experiences and felt at the time that she needed more from them.

"When two people have an experience especially a child and a parent, we both are experiencing different things, even though we're having the same circumstance happen," Hough began to explain.

"So for myself, there was all of my experiences of this is what happened to me in my experience, and in my parents' experience, they have their own guilt and shame of other things and what they were trying to do in the moment. So they can't necessarily connect the two and hear what was happening because they were having their own experience also," she continued.

"But also we've definitely gone through conversation after conversation ... but we get it now, we're on the same page, 'I'm not blaming you now but I definitely needed more at the time,'" Hough admitted.

"And that was at 15 and I said those things and shared those things in the way that I knew how to express it then as well, which was like, 'This just happened but let's move on,' because I also didn't want to deal with it either," she said before adding, "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."

However, Hough found she "reclaimed" her "parental relationship" when she was going through her divorce. She married NHL player Brooks Laich in 2017 however, the pair split in 2019, publicly announcing it in May 2020.

"During my divorce is when I really reconnected with my parents. They showed up for me as my parents and I needed that," she said. "I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me and that was the most healing time for us."

The National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline -- 800.656.HOPE (4673) -- provides free, 24/7 support for those in need.