Tyler Perry Opens Up About Childhood Beatings and Molestation

(Oct. 6) Turning 40 and preparing for the release of the much anticipated release of Precious, filmmaker Tyler Perry candidly wrote about the abuse and molestation he experienced as a child on his website Saturday evening.

After watching the film, Perry wrote that he “realized at that moment that a large part of my childhood had just played out before my eyes.”

Precious is a film produced by Perry and Oprah Winfrey chronicling the life and experiences of an illiterate African-American 16-year-old girl that experiences constant abuse from her mother and is pregnant for a second time by her own father.

"I'm tired of holding this in,” Perry writes.  “I don't know what to do with it anymore, so, I've decided to give some of it away."

Perry begins with how his mother tried and failed at leaving his abusive father and recounts a graphic list of abuse and beatings he experienced.

For his love of reading of writing Perry says he received nothing but merciless verbal abuse from his drunken father.

Perry stated his father would say: "You f**king jackass! You got book sense but you ain't got no mothaf**ken common sense (sic)! You ain't s**t and ain't never gonna be sh*t!"

"I heard this every day of my childhood,” Perry wrote.

Perry detailed how his father would take his anger out on him as a child.

"My father came home, mad at the world," he writes. "He was drunk, as he was most of the time. He got the vacuum cleaner extension cord and trapped me in a room and beat me until the skin was coming off my back.  To this day, I don't know what would make a person do something like that to a child."

Perry also states that his paternal grandmother would bathe him in ammonia, insisting he was riddled with germs, because of his allergies.

"She said she was going to kill these germs on me once and for all," he writes. "She gave me a bath in ammonia."

Perry recalled an instance where the family of the man who he claims molested him asked for help in burying the man.

"I quickly said no, but I wish I would have said yes. There is something so powerful to me in burying the man that molested me. I would have dug the grave myself."

Yet, seeing Precious made he remember that he survived it all.

"It hit me so hard, I sat there in tears realizing that somehow, by the grace of God, I made it through," writes Perry, who signed on as an executive producer on the film. "My tears were tears of joy, being thankful that I made it."

Despite all his hardships he ends his letter celebrating life.

"I know that there are a lot of people out there with stories far worse than mine but you, too, can make it. To those of you who have, welcome to life. I celebrate you," he wrote. "We're all PRECIOUS in His sight."

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