Actor Terry Crews has opened up about overcoming a porn addiction that nearly torpedoed his 30-year marriage.
Though Terry Crews has been open about his porn addiction since 2015, he hasn’t detailed the full extent of the toll it took on his marriage to Rebecca King Crews. Speaking with “PEOPLE Every Day,” Crews and his wife said that the addiction pushed them into thinking about marital separation.
“The best piece of advice I ever got was a good friend of mine, he was the first guy I called when Rebecca was like, ‘don’t come home.’ He said ‘Terry, you need to get better for you,’” the actor explained. “You have to understand that was a watershed moment. In my culture, as a man in sports, you do things to get things. You do good things to get cookies, you know? You work hard to get money, you do these things to get sex, but to actually improve just for yourself, that was a foreign thought.”
Crews later added that his cultural upbringing as a black man in Detroit made him reject the idea of therapy as something only “crazy” people do.
“Culturally, you have to understand, where I grew up, I grew up in Flint, Michigan, African American culture, going to therapy was admitting you’re crazy,” he said. “It was something that you didn’t do. Also, sports culture was one where anger helped you. It was aggression, it was competition, everything had to be perfection or nothing. So, you’re talking about things that help people as a man, it got me really, really far business-wise but it was disintegrating my family.”
Crews said that his success actually made the situation worse by giving him a safe space to hide.
“Success is the warmest place to hide,” he said. “I had so many people that were telling me I was great and there was no problem. Hollywood didn’t care. It still doesn’t care if you lose your family, it happens every day. They’re like, ‘Hey man, now we can put you in three movies!’”
“So fame just made it worse,” said Rebecca. “So it’s really true that power and success amplifies what’s going on inside you. And that is why I couldn’t help him and I’m thankful and I’m lucky that he made the choice to do that.”
Rebecca said that she began to see “real behavioral” change in Crews beyond his porn addiction.
“I say he’s still earning it,” she said. “But the truth be told, progressively, I saw what I felt was real fruit, real change, real behavioral change in my spouse. It was in the way he stopped reacting angrily to everything. It was in the newfound patience that I saw with me and with his children. Once he healed his own trauma, he was not reflecting and deflecting his pain as anger to the rest of the world.”
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