Keke Palmer Opens Up About Impact of Child-on-Child Sexual Abuse: “I Felt Weird and Violated”

Keke Palmer is opening up about being a victim of child-on-child sexual abuse.

Ahead of the release of her new book Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative on Nov. 19, where she mentions being molested by a peer when she was around 5 years old, the actress and singer spoke candidly to People magazine about the traumatic experience.

“People don’t really think about child-on-child molestation, but it’s something that exists,” Palmer said. “I felt weird and violated, but I didn’t really know how to place it. I just knew I had all these weird feelings and thoughts, and I felt a little bit out of control and overwhelmed.”

Having been drawn to performing from a young age, the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer host scored her first small role at age 10 in 2004’s Barbershop 2. However, it wasn’t until two years later that Palmer realized the personal impact of the trauma she endured.

“I was reading a book about sexual abuse, and it said all these things about anxiety and hyper-sexualization,” the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer host recalled. “All of this stuff that I attributed to me but really it was because of what I had experienced.”

Once she was able to finally process the incident, “it wasn’t about blaming that other child,” she said, “we don’t know sometimes what has happened to us, especially if it doesn’t look the way that the world has told you it looks like.”

Palmer went on to become a child star in the years that followed, having landed the lead role in True Jackson VP on Nickelodeon. She has since starred in dozens of projects, including Scream Queens, 2019’s Hustlers and 2022’s Nope.

“Fame shocked us. It was a shock that I could make that much money, that I could go to Universal Studios and have a hundred people surrounding me at once,” she said of her family’s reaction to her rise to stardom at a young age. “The weight of that was real bad, and we all felt it in so many different ways.”