When she was just 17, Joan Collins met Maxwell Reed, a 31-year-old Irish actor on whom she’d had a teenage crush. Their first date did not go well; as Collins claimed in the BBC documentary “This Is Joan Collins”, Reed had spiked her rum and coke with a drug that caused her to pass out. “The next thing I knew I was flat out on the sofa and he was raping me,” Collins said (via The Sun). “In those days, my mother would have said I was ‘taken advantage of.’ Now, we call it date rape.”
Shockingly, not only did Collins continue to date Reed, in 1952 she married him. “Had I not been so innocent about sex and the way things should be I wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “But I had a strong sense of guilt, so I did it.”
The marriage was not a happy one, and as she recounted in the documentary (as reported by the Daily Beast), she detailed the moment when she decided to call it quits. “We were in Les Ambassadeurs, a terribly chic nightclub in Mayfair,” she said. “Max had a habit of gravitating towards rich, elderly men, and I was starting to get a vague idea of what this was all about. Max told me, ‘He’ll pay you £10,000 for one night — and I can even watch.’ I looked at my handsome, loathsome husband and began to cry. ‘Never in a million years.’ I went home to Mummy.”
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
Nicki
