As we get closer to the release date of Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford's new autobiography, Confess, more shocking revelations from the book have surfaced. We've learned he once tried to seduce Iron Maiden vocalist Paul Di'Anno, and that he once got arrested for cruising in California before coming out as gay. I'm a little past halfway on an advanced copy and I am floored with Rob's honesty. One of the more shocking stories was Rob revealing as a young man, he was sexually abused by a friend of his father's.
You can read the whole story in the book, but the jist was that Rob wanted to get involved with the theater scene, and his father knew somebody who worked in that field. Rob's father's friend invited him out to meet some colleagues, and after a night of drinking, they ended up back at Rob's father's place, where Rob said the abuse happened. He never told his father about it, but recently spoke to Variety about why he decided to include the story in his book.
"It's an important story. Sexual abuse is a horrible thing. At the time, it was terribly confusing and couldn't have happened at a worse time, for me as a young guy that was already dealing with trying to figure things out. Talking about it now, I can feel the horror and being totally frightened and wanting to run away, but at the same time feeling, 'Now this is affection, in a very crude brutal manner.' It was incredibly, incredibly complex. You can only imagine for a young man, dealing with that type of assault.
"Somebody asked me, 'Would you put that story in the book if your father was still alive?' and I hesitated. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have, because I would hate to have thought that my father felt that he was in some way complicit to that because he absolutely was not. When it comes to sexual abuse, people on the outside, they feel the guilt as well — 'Well, maybe I should have said something' or 'it's my fault for introducing this person to that person.' It has a domino effect. But it was an important story to tell.
"As a young person, you're impressionable, and it manifests itself in a way that really stays with you for the rest of your life, and turns you into the sexually dysfunctional person that I am now. I've come to terms with that in my adult life, [but] had those incidents never happened as a teenager, would I have turned out differently in the way that I'm intimate with people? Probably so."
Confess is out next week, September 29th via Hachette Books. Order your copy here.
