Valerie Bertinelli is one of America’s most beloved entertainers, and has been for more than five decades.
She made her breakthrough as Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time at just 15 years old to her years hosting Valerie’s Home Cooking on Food Network.
It turns out there was a part of her story she had never told anyone outside of a therapist’s office, that is until now.
In a revelation that is stopping people in their tracks this week, Bertinelli has disclosed for the first time publicly that she was sexually abused at 11 years old.
She kept that secret for 54 years. And the reason she finally decided to share it says everything about where she is right now.
Bertinelli Never Planned To Speak On Her Past
The disclosure comes ahead of her new memoir, Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect, which releases March 10.
Bertinelli told People magazine that when she started writing the book, this was never supposed to be part of it.
“I had no plans to reveal this,” she said. “This was going to be a book about teaching people how to love themselves. I did not know that I would go this far.”
As she worked through the writing process, she found the story demanding to be told.
She made a deliberate choice to confront it head-on. She included a photo of herself at age 11 in the chapter that details the abuse, not for shock value, but to honor the child she once was.
“That was the little girl that was sexually abused,” she explained. “And it boggles my mind that this little girl was taken advantage of that way. It boggles my mind because it’s still happening, and I’m furious about it. And we need to start speaking up and saying, ‘Enough.'”
What Was Bertinelli’s Shame Really About?
For years, Bertinelli has been publicly candid about her struggles with body image and weight.
She lost 50 pounds as a Jenny Craig spokesperson starting in 2007, gained it back, and was dropped by the company.
She has talked openly about her complicated relationship with food. Fans have watched her wrestle with it in real time.
“All of that shame had nothing to do with my body,” she told People. “It was just something to take out my shame on. My poor body. I was so mean to it. I just needed to get all those voices out of my head.”
She connected the dots directly. “As I was going through that, I’m thinking people are going to wonder, why do I have so much self-loathing? That’s not normal. It’s because trauma happened in my childhood for the most part. I can’t speak for anybody else but it’s pretty textbook.”
Bertinelli Took Ten Years To Speak Publicly
Bertinelli said it took her at least ten years to get to the point where she could speak about it publicly.
The first time she said it out loud was to her therapist, and it did not get better right away.
“It got worse before it got better,” she admitted. “I maybe ate a little bit more, drank a little bit more. When you stop eating things for comfort, stop drinking alcohol, it exposes your feelings. You can deal with them or not. And I chose to deal with them.”
What helped her finally cross the threshold into talking publicly about it was the healing itself. “I guess because I’m healing from it, it’s not so scary anymore,” she said. “I can say it out loud. I was sexually assaulted. It doesn’t feel like it owns me anymore.”
2024 Was The Year Everything Came To A Head
The road to this moment of openness was not a straight line.
Bertinelli has described 2024 as the worst year of her life, and the details she has shared make that description hard to argue with.
She went through a difficult end to her relationship with boyfriend Mike Goodnough in November 2024.
Her Food Network contract had already been non-renewed in 2022, the same year she filed for divorce from her second husband, businessman Tom Vitale, after eleven years of marriage.
Her parents are gone. Her first husband, rock legend Eddie Van Halen, passed away in 2020. She described feeling like a failure, like she did not know what love actually meant.
And then, physically, things went sideways too.
She had breast implants removed after a fall, implants she had gotten in the late 1980s and admitted she had “started to hate,” and the procedure led to an infection and complications that required four surgeries within six months.
Her hair started falling out. She was dealing with severe anxiety attacks.
“I had a huge anxiety attack at the end of 2024 that brought me to my knees,” she said. “And I thought, I’m not getting anywhere. I needed to do more work.”
That work is what led her here, to a book cover on which she poses nude at 65, to a People magazine cover story, and to saying out loud, for the first time, what happened to her at 11 years old.
Where Is She Now?
What makes Bertinelli’s story land differently than a typical celebrity confession is that she is not presenting herself as fully healed and wrapped in a bow.
She described the book as an exercise in radical honesty. “It’s about getting naked with who I am, emotionally, physically,” she said. “Getting to the parts that I thought were shameful and come to find out they’re not. They’re all kinds of different facets of what makes us who we are.”
She also said something that has been widely shared since the interview dropped. When asked about posing nude for the book cover at 65, she did not hedge.
“I don’t know what I’m going to look like when I’m 80. But at 65, it looks pretty f—ing good. And I don’t think that’s arrogant. I think you’re allowed to feel good about yourself. I have felt bad about myself for too many decades. I’m going to feel good about myself now.”
Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect releases March 10, 2026.
