Inside Minka Kelly’s dark childhood: From sex tape and teen abortion to being abandoned by stripper mom
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: In her horrifying new autobiography, 'Tell Me Everything,' Minka Kelly reveals her traumatic and distressing upbringing. The 'Friday Night Lights' star, 42, opened up about being in an abusive relationship when she was 17 years old. She said her then-boyfriend forced her to record a sex tape, which led to her being pregnant later.
The actress reveals in extracts from her biography obtained by Page Six how she relocated in with her high school boyfriend, Rudy, and his family when her mother Maureen, who died in 2008, left their home of Albuquerque to avoid a possible drug raid.
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'Tell Me Everything:' A memoir by Minka Kelly
Kelly, whose father is 71-year-old former Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay, was raised in a single-parent household. She has previously stated that this was not because her father wasn't interested in parenting her. She writes in her memoir: "He wanted to try to do the family thing. It was my mum who was too busy having fun." Kelly claimed that her ex-boyfriend had 'insisted' on taking explicit pictures of the couple before obtaining a video camera and forcing Kelly to "perform even raunchier scenes."
Rudy, Minka Kelly's abusive boyfriend
Kelly moved in with Rudy, her high school lover, and his family when her mother, a stripper who had forced Kelly to endure violence and homelessness as a youngster, abruptly left town after receiving news of a possible drug raid.
Kelly wrote: "I hardly even remembered making the tape." She was struck by how she acted on the video, mentioning that she "acted like a young child." She added, "I’d become such a master at leaving my body when things were uncomfortable." Years later, her ex-boyfriend allegedly tried to sell the footage to the media; Kelly claimed she had to pay $50,000 to get the video back.
She claimed that since her boyfriend insisted that she get his name tattooed on her body and because she was afraid of losing her home, she agreed to get his lip print engraved "on the side of my pubic mound." Kelly went on to write: "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, 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 continued to behave obnoxiously. He kept calling Kelly a "slut" because of her attire and tried to convince her to sleep with one of their female friends. He and the friend had sex in front of Kelly when she declined. Kelly learned she was pregnant the next day.
Minka Kelly gets an abortion at 17!
The youngster scheduled a Planned Parenthood appointment after her mother returned to New Mexico. She started crying on the examination table, writing, "This isn’t what I want." Maureen Dumont Kelly, her mother, proposed they raise the baby together as they were driving away.
Kelly writes: "Raise this baby together, how? 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?" Hence, she proceeded with the abortion.
Kelly abandoned by her stripper mom
Kelly was brought up by her single mother, referred to as "Mo." Rick Dufay, a former guitarist for Aerosmith, didn't enter Kelly's life until she was in her late teens. Kelly added that her mother was briefly imprisoned for using a car to cross the border into Mexico to try to smuggle cocaine for her lover David.
Young Kelly would accompany her vivacious and gorgeous mother to the Crazy Girls strip club in Los Angeles where Mo performed. The 125-square-foot storage space of an apartment building and a friend's garage were among Kelly's early residences. While her mother performed as a stripper in the Philippines, the young girl also lived with a family friend, whose daughter often beat up young Kelly.
Kelly returned to Los Angeles after graduating from high school, where she reconciled with her rock star father. She was hired as a receptionist in a plastic surgery practice but was let go after declining the surgeon's offer of breast augmentation as payment. In addition, Kelly made amends with her mother, who had been told that she had colon cancer. The actress relocated Mo to Austin, Texas, where 'Friday Night Lights' was shot, and cared for her until she died in 2008 at the age of 51.
The 'Euphoria' alum claims that she wanted to start a family with an unnamed lover, so she started IVF treatments, which resulted in a pregnancy and miscarriage. The relationship ended shortly after. Kelly previously had a romance with 39-year-old Trevor Noah. After two years of intermittent dating, the couple broke up in May 2022. Since the end of 2022, she has been dating 35-year-old Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds.
