When Minka Kelly was 17, she found out she was pregnant.
She had moved in with her high school boyfriend, Rudy, and his family as her mother — a stripper who had subjected Kelly to a childhood of abuse and homelessness — had suddenly skipped town after being warned of a potential drug bust.
Rudy had already insisted on taking graphic photos of them together, so R-rated that the manager of the one-hour photo booth in the local Albuquerque, New Mexico, Walgreens had told Minka, “We don’t print pictures like that,” the actress writes in her new memoir, “Tell Me Everything,” out May 2.
Rudy solved that problem by purchasing a video camera and directing Minka to perform even “raunchier” scenes.
Watching it a few days later, the “Friday Nights Lights” star was struck by how she spoke and acted like a young child, not a seductive siren.
“I hardly even remembered making the tape,” she writes. “I’d become such a master at leaving my body when things were uncomfortable.”
(Years later, Rudy allegedly attempted to peddle the video to tabloids. It cost Kelly $50,000 to buy back the film, she says.)
Rudy also decided that Minka should get his name inked on her body. She knew immediately it was a bad idea, but she also needed a place to live. They agreed on a tattoo of her lip print, which she had placed “on the side of my pubic mound” so it could be easily covered.
“Little did I know I’d spend the rest of my life explaining to new lovers what the mark was, lying to everyone … I was too ashamed to admit the truth,” writes Minka, who has dated Chris Evans, Derek Jeter, Trevor Noah and John Mayer, to name a few of her famous boyfriends. “I’d been so dependent on a man I’d let him brand me as [if] I was a member of the NXIVM cult.”
Rudy’s stellar behavior didn’t stop there.
He continually called Minka a “slut” for her clothing choices and attempted to coax her into getting intimate with a mutual female friend. When Minka declined, he and the friend began having sex in front of her.
The next day, Minka discovered she was pregnant.
Her mother returned to New Mexico and the teenager made an appointment at Planned Parenthood. On the examining table, Minka writes, she began to cry: “This isn’t what I want.”
While driving away, her mother, Maureen Dumont Kelly, suggested they could raise the baby together.
“Raise this baby together, how?” she writes. “With what money? What home? What insurance? I couldn’t imagine bringing a baby into what my mother brought me into. Absolutely not.
“That was it. In that moment, I knew the right choice. Raising a child with my mother would only continue this family trauma, another cycle added to so many generations of pain. Hadn’t there been enough damage already?”
She went ahead with an abortion.
Minka was raised by her single mother, known as “Mo.” Her father, onetime Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay, wasn’t a part of her life until she was in her late teens.
Mo was vivacious and gorgeous and would bring young Minka to the celebrity-favorite Crazy Girls strip club in Los Angeles where she danced. Minka’s early childhood homes included the 125-square-foot storage room of an apartment complex and a friend’s garage.
The young girl also crashed with a family friend — whose daughter regularly beat up Minka — while her mother worked as a stripper in the Philippines. The working trip kept getting extended.
“I later learned that during that time, she drove a car across the border for [her boyfriend David], transporting drugs,” Kelly writes of her mother. “She got caught and went to jail for a short period of time, but she never told me.”
Mother and daughter later moved to New Mexico to live with that boyfriend, David, and his extended family, which included a revolving group of his other girlfriends.
Minka recalls her mother telling David that the teenager had been “borrowing” her car without permission.
“He hit me with an open hand, then a fist, over and over,” she writes. “He found a piece of cable wire on the floor and started thrashing me with it as I curled into a ball to protect what parts of myself I could … He yanked my hair, pulling me around the room by my ponytail … How long the beating continued, I don’t know. Welts were rising all over my skin when he finally exhausted his fury.”
After it was done, David sat down and said: “Come here and give me a hug. This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
Minka complied.
“‘You a–hole,’ I wanted to say,” she writes. “‘You f–king monster!’ I wanted to cry and scream and tell them both to go f–k themselves, but that would only make it worse. I held it in.”
Somehow, Minka finished high school, returned to Los Angeles and reconnected with her rocker dad.
She got a job as a receptionist in a plastic surgeon’s office but, after deciding to decline the doctor’s offer of breast augmentation as payment, was fired.
Still, Minka was there long enough to become interested in medicine and studied to become a surgeon’s assistant. While living with a boyfriend, Minka let her mom move in — but had to kick her out when she refused to get out of bed and asked for $5,000.
Minka was working as a surgical technician, or scrub tech, while modeling and studying acting on the side. After just a few minor parts, she scored her big break on the NBC show “Friday Night Lights,” which would become a critical hit.
Minka also reconciled with her mother, who had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The actress moved Mo to Austin, Texas, where the series filmed and nursed her until her 2008 death, at age 51.
While filming “Friday Night Lights,” she fell into an ill-fated romance with co-star Taylor Kitsch, who played her onscreen boyfriend Tim Riggins.
“All the effort I might have invested in connecting consistently with the girls on the show went to Taylor. So when my relationship with Taylor became toxic, I had no one to turn to,” the actress writes.
“Life became very difficult both on and off set whenever we broke up. We were young and had very few tools to handle our emotions and personal grievances. On the days we had to work together and were broken up, he didn’t want to be in the hair and makeup trailer at the same time I was.”
With no real friend support in Texas, she continued getting back together with Kitsch and breaking up, over and over again.
Kitsch is the only boyfriend Minka really talks about by name in the book, though her other famous exes include John Mayer, Jesse Williams, Chris Evans, Wilmer Valderrama, Josh Radnor, Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds and Trevor Noah.
She also famously had a three-year romance with Derek Jeter that ended in 2011.
The “Euphoria” alum writes that she and an unnamed boyfriend wanted to have children together and she began rounds of IVF, leading to a pregnancy and miscarriage. They broke up soon after.
“What I learned was that I needed to stop focusing on what I perceived were my partners’ flaws and begin asking myself why I kept attracting and allowing men into my life who weren’t capable of caring for me in the ways I needed as a result of their own unhealed childhood wounds,” she writes.
Minka is honest about the deep psychic wounds she carries as a result of her chaotic past and even questions her mother’s decision to have her, as Mo had previously had three abortions.
“Sometimes I think an abortion might have been best,” she confesses. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be alive and for the opportunities I’ve had but it still breaks my heart to recognize how unprepared my mother was, maybe even constitutionally ill-equipped to be a mother in any genuine way.
“There have been times, I have to be honest, when I’ve been mad at her for having birthed me. I didn’t ask for all this. I didn’t ask for this trauma and for the struggle to earn enough to pay for the tons of therapy I’ve needed to heal these wounds. I didn’t ask for these complicated relationships.”
After her miscarriage and breakup, Kelly underwent a series of ketamine treatments, which helped her reach a powerful realization.
“I had been operating in my adult relationships like that scared sixteen-year-old girl,” she reveals. “I had decided at some point, unbeknownst to my conscious mind, that men are not to be trusted and always must be kept at arm’s distance … The hour I spent crying for that little girl was so healing and that new knowledge changed everything.
“Now, little by little, that little girl is learning to relax and trust me … She can let go now, she doesn’t need to be in charge any longer.”
