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 (viaCentral Recorder). “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 theDaily 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).