In his autobiography, Confess , the Metal God, Rob Halford , shares a very sensitive subject: the episode in which he was sexually abused by a friend of his father when he was young.
“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 person who was already trying to figure things out,” the artist says in an interview with Variety . “Talking about it now, I can feel the horror and be totally scared and want to run away, but at the same time feeling: ‘Now this is affection, in a very brutal and raw way.’ It was incredibly, incredibly complex. You can only imagine for a young person, dealing with that kind of aggression.”
“Someone asked me, ‘Would you put this story in the book if your father were still alive?’ and I hesitated. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have, because I would hate to think that my father felt he was somehow complicit in it, because he absolutely wasn’t. When it comes to sexual abuse, people on the outside, they feel guilt too – ‘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’s an important story to tell,” the artist recounts.
“As a young person, you’re impressionable, and that manifests in a way that really stays with you for the rest of your life, and it turns you into the sexually dysfunctional person I am now. I’ve come to terms with that in my adult life, [but] if those incidents had never happened when I was a teenager, would I have become different in how I’m intimate with people? Probably yes,” Halford shares.
The icon will talk about this episode and much more about his journey in Confess , his autobiography which will be released next Tuesday, the 29th. Click here to learn more.
