Julianne Hough is opening up about her experience being sexually abused by a neighbor as a child. 

The Dancing With the Stars cohost explained on Thursday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show that her first experience with sexual abuse occurred when she was “about 4 years old,” describing her abuser as a neighbor who lived in the same cul-de-sac as her family in Utah. “I’ve actually never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before,” Hough confessed, “but that was a very, very confusing time.”

The 36-year-old noted there was “not a lot of repercussion for what had happened” to her. “And by the way, I’m not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with,” she said. “Nobody did anything.”

Hough explained that she “forgot” about the experience and didn’t tell her parents about it until much “later on” in life. However, she did have a discussion with them about “other things [that] happened later in my childhood” when she was around 15 years old. 

“I had forgot about the neighbor thing at 4 years old until I started really doing this work in the last few years,” she said. “That’s why I think I blocked out from birth to 10, basically, because I had completely disassociated from that ever happening.”

Hough confirmed later in the episode that her parents are not in contact with her abuser and recalled telling her mom about the incident after coming home with her clothes inside out as a child. 

“She said, ‘tell me what happened,’” Hough remembered. “And I said — this was my only way of describing it because we weren’t allowed carbonation as kids, we weren’t allowed pop or anything like that, but I remember tasting it and it burned and it hurt my lungs — and I remember saying I felt like I had a Sprite bottle between my legs.”

Hough said her mom “freaked out” afterward and moved the family out of the neighborhood. “I guess my mom did do what she could,” she admitted before becoming visibly emotional. “She just wanted to move and leave. She didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did want to get us out.”

The actress reiterated throughout the interview that she wasn’t the only member of her family who dealt with similar experiences in the past. “The people that also violated my sisters or my brother or myself, they never got reprimanded for it because we didn’t say something,” she said. “Instead, we just pivoted and we just moved — which is good, get out of a situation — but also that’s another thing which is for me, just pivot, pivot, pivot.”

She added, “I’ve never shared that before, in fact I just had a little bit of a profound revelation during that: that my mom did do the best that she could.”

As part of a 2013 Cosmopolitan cover story, Hough previously revealed that she was “abused mentally, physically, everything” at age 10 while attending a dance academy with her brother, Derek Hough, in London. On The Jamie Kern Lima Show, Hough explained that the experience not only “reinforced giving my power to other people,” but taught her to “not trust anybody” and to dim “my effervescence of beauty, because that was what was the attractive part” of her. 

She noted that her parents “felt guilty” after she told them about the abuse she’d suffered as a teenager. “At the time, when I was younger, I think they also didn’t know what to do. And were also in a position of not feeling capable or also feeling helpless,” Hough said. “And so, I think now that we’ve had these conversations, they’ve also said those things.”

She said they eventually “reconnected” amid her divorce from Brooks Laich in 2020. “I reclaimed my parental relationship with them, and I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me,” she said. “And that was the most healing time for us.” 

Listen to Hough share her story in the video above. 

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.