Two of Demi Moore's daughters recall how "jarring" it was when the actress relapsed into substance abuse a few years ago, saying it was "like a monster came."
The 56-year-old actress, who rose to fame in the '80s, has battled substance abuse for decades and opens up about her struggles in her recently released memoir Inside Out. She told the New York Times in September that during the early days of her relationship with Ashton Kutcher, she suffered a miscarriage, after which she relapsed. She started drinking and abused Vicodin. In 2012, Ashton filed for divorce after seven years of marriage. That year, while partying with her and ex-husband Bruce Willis' daughter Rumer Willis, Demi suffered a seizure after smoking synthetic cannabis and inhaling nitrous oxide.
Rumer and sisters Scout Willis and Tallulah Willis shunned their mother over her behavior, the newspaper said. Demi then went to rehab—which was not her first stint.
"It was like the sun went down, like a monster came," Tallulah, 25, says on an upcoming episode on Jada Pinkett Smith's family's Facebook Watch show Red Table Talk, while sitting next to her mom and Rumer. "I remember, there's just the anxiety that would come up in my body when I could sense her eyes shutting a little bit more, the way she was speaking, or she would be a lot more affectionate with me if she wasn't sober."
"It was jarring," adds Rumer, 31.
"It was very weird," Tallulah says. "And there were moments where I would get angry and I recall being very upset and kind of treating her like a child, and speaking to her like a child."
Rumer and Tallulah have also battled alcoholism and substance abuse.
Substance abuse has long been in Demi's family. Her mother and stepfather were both alcoholics. At Red Table Talk, Demi opens about her past estrangement from her mom Virginia Guynes, who died in 1998.
"When I distanced myself from my mother, it was completely justified," she said. "I was protecting my children from her behavior. But there was a point where I kind of decided who she was, and in that moment, when I decided who she was, I realized that I limited her from ever becoming anything else, and that there was a part of my compassion and my humanity that had been lost and how could I expect my daughters to have compassion and hold the humanity for me if I didn't recognize that from my mother?"
The full episode of Red Table Talk with Demi and her daughters is set to be released on Monday at 12 p.m. ET.