Charlize Theron shared a raw account of the night her mother shot and killed her father while he was on a drunken rampage in a new interview with The New York Times Magazine, and revealed how doing so has allowed her to no longer be “haunted” by the incident.

Looking back at her turbulent childhood in South Africa and the chaos that preceded the 1991 death of Charles Theron, the Oscar-winning actor told journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro that she was willing to revisit the trauma for the sake of helping other survivors of domestic abuse.

“I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone,” Theron said. “I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”

Theron was 15 when she witnessed her mother, Gerda Jacoba Aletta Maritz, shoot her father in self-defense, but said she remembered him as a threatening presence for a long time before.

“He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal,” Theron said of her father, who she described as a “full-blown functioning drunk.”

On the night of the shooting, Theron and her mom had gone out to see a movie. When they returned home, they discovered that Charles Theron had locked them out of the house and left to go drink at his brother’s house several streets away. Theron said her father and her uncle were already “pretty loaded” when they arrived to retrieve the key.

“...I had to pee really badly, so I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody,” Theron said. “Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?’”

While the slight seemed minor, Theron said she could “tell something was different,” and when they returned home, she pleaded with her mother to leave the marriage.

“I sat down with my mom and said, ‘I think you’re right. I think you should separate from him.’ I had never imagined that those words would come out of my mouth,” she said.

Theron then went into her bedroom and turned off the lights. She remained there until Charles Theron returned home in a rage.

“I could tell the level of anger, frustration or unhappiness by the way he drove in,” she said. “The way that he drove into that property that night, I can’t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen.”

Theron and her mom were barricaded inside the house behind several sets of steel doors, which were standard in apartheid South Africa, yet her father shot his way in and made it “very clear that he was going to kill us.”

Maritz then grabbed her own gun and joined her daughter in the bedroom, where they blocked the unlocked door with their bodies while her father opened fire. Miraculously, Theron and her mother weren’t hit.

“The messaging was very clear. I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun.”

At that point, Maritz opened the door, fired a bullet that ricocheted into her brother-in-law and then shot her husband as he opened the safe to obtain more weapons.

Theron said there was something clarifying about retracing the night and everything that led up to it.

“Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing,” she said. “But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.”

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

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