Brooke Shields has never seen herself as a victim.

In an interview with the New Yorker, the actor and model revealed that as the only child of an alcoholic mother, she learned to be savvy from a young age. “I’d been parenting [her mother], in a way, from the time I was a little girl. When you grow up in an alcoholic household, you learn to navigate it at a very young age, and I was an only child. I just wanted to keep her safe. And she could walk on water—she was my everything," she explained of her relationship with her late mother, Teri. And while her roles in films like Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon may have been controversial, she said, “The irony is that film sets were such a place of safety for me, because I was always accounted for. I had schooling. I had a call sheet every day. There was such order, and people cared about me. And there was laughter. But people didn’t want that to be the truth. They wanted me to be a train wreck, because I was an actress.”

When asked how she felt being interrogated on talk shows throughout the '80s about her sex life, often while sitting alongside her mother, Shields replied, “It just never ended. It made me lose so much respect for—excuse me—the press. There was no one place that had even a modicum of integrity. To have Barbara Walters talk about my measurements? There was nothing intellectual about it. You saw these adults, who were supposed to be the smart people in the world, be so lowest common denominator. I just became shut down to all of it. There’s that one interview, where they’re reading a review of my mother’s face.” She continued, “'Ruddy and alcoholic.' And this schmuck’s reading it to me, in front of my mother! And then he turns to me and says, 'Is that a proper assessment of your mother?' I go immediately to defending the fact that she has allergies. You watch this little girl, and you think, Shame on you, guys. I’ve put more blame and shame on the interviewers than I ever would about Pretty Baby [the Louis Malle film in which she played a child prostitute]. It was an artistic endeavor. Then you get to these journalists, and you think, ‘How is that O.K. to talk to a child like that?’”

Thankfully, Shields says that her own daughters, Rowan Francis Henchy and Grier Hammond Henchy, have been able to look back on her career with a lot of intelligence and empathy. "They’re sixteen and nineteen—they’re so woke!" the actor explained. “It was interesting to see them say what they felt about it. Their big issue was that I was my age. I was proud of them for being able to talk about all of it. I don’t know. You can’t really say, ‘Oh, it was just a different era.’ It was a different era.” Her daughters' primary issue was that Shields couldn't have consented to appearing nude on screen at just eleven years old. She added, “I wouldn’t have known to say no. But it also didn’t occur to me to say no. Everybody [in the press] wanted me to be miserable during that movie. They couldn’t get their minds wrapped around it. The movie tells a disturbing story, and yet there’s truth to it.”