Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.comSamaire Armstrong, 27, is opening up about rehab. The blond starlet reveals she’s been through treatment not once but twice.
“You know, I just had a lot of access to a lot of freedom,” Armstrong said at last night’s premiere of Bra Boys at Hollywood’s DGA building. “I sort of lost direction.”
Armstrong is grateful for her survival because she knows she was dealing with a potentially deadly struggle: “I was reading this book called Beautiful Boy,” she said. “They sell it at Starbucks! It’s about this family and their drug-addicted son. It’s so prominent these days. I don’t know if it always has been, but it just seems like it’s everywhere. And not everyone has the luxury of coming back from that. A lot of people die.”
Armstrong’s decision to seek treatment the first time around was her own decision, but it sounds like the second time required some sort of intervention. “It was a decision on my own, but that was the first time,” she said. “My family was really involved when I went again.”
The first time she went for six weeks. But in October, a rep for Armstrong confirmed she was being treated at an outpatient facility for “personal reasons.”
The second stint was three months, but she continued working on ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money. “I had a lot of support,” Armstrong said. “I had to be strong. You find that you just have to. And then you go home and cry, fall on the ground crying, but that’s at home. You know at work you just do it. Also, when you’re doing something you love it kind of takes you out of it.”
Last month, producers announced that Armstrong would no longer be a part of the regular weekly cast of Dirty Sexy Money. They insisted she would come back from time to time. “I’m not dying,” Armstrong said about her socialite character. “I think I am going away on a flight.”
Armstrong also said she’s now working on developing a clothing line.
—Additional reporting by Laura Lane