Emily Atack has spoken candidly about a teenage pregnancy, connecting it to a difficult adolescence marked by early trauma and what she describes as 'really unhealthy relationships with men' following an assault at the age of 10.
The 36-year-old Rivals actress, who rose to fame after appearing on the comedy The Inbetweeners, reflected on the period in a recent interview, describing her teenage years as 'troubled' and shaped by abusive relationships and emotional instability.
She said the pregnancy happened while she was in what she called an 'awful, abusive and horrible relationship', adding that her parents, actress Kate Robbins and musician Keith Atack, often 'didn't know what to do with her'. Speaking on the How To Fail podcast, Atack linked the experience to her parents' divorce when she was 16: 'I was sexually active with older boys and men, and that was very difficult for my parents. I remember when my dad left, and I've never actually told anybody this, but I was pregnant and I was very young. I was in this awful, abusive, horrible relationship, and I fell pregnant.'
She spoke about the emotional difficulty of revisiting that period of her life, explaining that it is something she still finds hard to fully articulate and has not yet felt ready to go into it in detail for the public. 'I've never spoken openly about how or what happened and I don't know if I'm ready to yet, but obviously that pregnancy didn't continue,' the actress stated.
Elsewhere in the interview, Atack also reflected on the traumatic memories from her childhood, revealing she was sexually assaulted at the age of 10 and described how she was 'treated appallingly by older men'. Opening up the star said: 'I was keeping so much from my parents when I was young. Again, it's going a little bit dark, but I was sexually assaulted, first of all, when I was ten. That was when I was first ever sexually assaulted and I remember being ten years old and from that moment I was treated appallingly by older men from that age, throughout my life.'
Following her parents divorce, Atack left school and relocated to London with her sister Martha. In her conversation with Elizabeth Day, the actress was keen to stress that she does not want people to misjudge her parents, who she described as 'amazing people'. She added: 'I don't berate them in any way for this. Everybody makes mistakes, and this was just a period of time where lots of mistakes were being made, but now as a mother, I understand.'
