Selma Blair Reveals She Started Drinking at Age 7

Selma Blair is opening up about her decades-long battle with booze.

The star previously shared her journey with multiple sclerosis in the documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair,” and is now taking fans back to her childhood in her new book “Mean Baby.”

In the memoir, Blair reveals she started drinking at just 7 years old.

In the latest issue of People, Selma explains, "I don't know if I would've survived childhood without alcoholism. That's why it's such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning. Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism."

The magazine also features an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which she describes how it all started.

"The first time I got drunk it was a revelation,” she writes. “I always liked Passover. As I took small sips of the Manischewitz I was allowed throughout the seder a light flooded through me, filling me up with the warmth of God. But the year I was seven, when we basically had Manischewitz on tap and no one was paying attention to my consumption level, I put it together: the feeling was not God but fermentation. I thought 'Well this is a huge disappointment, but since it turns out I can get the warmth of the Lord from a bottle, thank God there's one right here.' I got drunk that night. Very drunk. Eventually, I was put in my sister Katie's bed with her. In the morning, I didn't remember how I'd gotten there."

From there, she used alcohol to cope via "just quick sips whenever my anxiety would alight. I usually barely even got tipsy. I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret."

As she got older, her alcohol consumption escalated and Blair recounted a college spring break trip where she was raped after a day of binge-drinking, and said it wasn’t the only time she was sexually assaulted.

The “Cruel Intentions” actress writes, "I don't know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did. I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn't. I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words 'Please. Stop.' Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed."

While she has opened up about the rapes in therapy, she said writing about them is also helping her healing process.

"Writing that stopped me dead in my tracks," she told People. "My sense of trauma was bigger than I knew. I did not realize that assault was so central in my life. I had so much shame and blame. I'm grateful I felt safe enough to put it on the page. And then can work on it with a therapist and with other writing, and really relieve that burden of shame on myself."

The 49-year-old, who is the mother of son Arthur, 10, shared, "I wrote the book for my son… and for people trying to find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes."

The star, who got sober in 2016, says, "I'm in a good place. I cannot believe all this happened in my life, and I'm still here and I'm okay."