Disturbing information about the relationship between actress Ione Skye and rock star Anthony Kiedis — front man for the Red Hot Chili Peppers — has come to light, including an illicit abortion, with the release of Skye’s new memoir, “Say Everything.”
Most famous for her role in the 1980s romantic comedy “Say Anything,” Skye said she began dating Kiedis when she was just 16 years old. At the time, Kiedis was 24, eight years her senior. In an interview with PEOPLE, she said her mother had been furious about the relationship, but she continued on anyway. Skye, daughter of the famous “Mellow Yellow” 1960s singer, Donovan, had been legally emancipated from her parents at the age of 15. She also admitted in the memoir that she had trauma due to neglect from her father, who abandoned her and never acknowledged her existence until she turned 17.
“These girls on TikTok were saying things like, ‘How could my mom let me be with Anthony?'” she says of their relationship being dissected on social media in recent years,” she said. “And I sort of clapped back, not in an aggressive way, but I was like, ‘Well, my mom was really upset that I was with a rockstar like Anthony Kiedis.’ And I don’t know, I kind of started feeling like I was able to tell my side of the story, and I had a lot to tell.”
Kiedis was addicted to heroin at the time, and it had a major impact on her as well.
“There was me before Anthony, and me after,” she wrote. “Sometimes I’d drive all night looking for him, trawling the usual spots over and over: the corner of Sixth and Union, the market where he bought bleach for his needles, the Eat’n High Thai restaurant on Fountain. … My world-inside-of-Anthony’s-world was shrinking by the day. Little by little, I was closing myself off to anyone who cared enough to question my choice in dating a junkie eight years my senior.”
READ: Another actress erroneously claims her miscarriage was an abortion. They are not the same.
By the time she was 17, she was pregnant, and Kiedis drove her to get an abortion – though he didn’t bother to go with her to the appointment. “I was the type of girl who’d wanted a baby since I was a baby, who used to fantasize about finding a swaddled infant on my doorstep or catching a flying ghost baby with a butterfly net. But fantasizing was different from seeing. I couldn’t see having a baby at this point,” she wrote, and added that despite still being a child, she felt that she had to be the one to step up and be responsible, given Kiedis’ addiction.
“He seemed to think that by paying for me to have the termination at a nice Beverly Hills doctor’s office instead of Planned Parenthood he was being a mensch,” she wrote. “He hadn’t offered to be with me today, just guiltily dropped me off at the curb. To say nothing of the fact that after our AIDS scare, and the supposed new lease on life he’d gotten with the negative test result, he’d gone on using needles and having unprotected sex with me. And I’d consented to that.”
She added, “Other people in our group had unsafe sex and they were fine, I kept telling myself, using my teenage reasoning. Of course, I could see how irresponsible we were being. Whether Anthony could see it too, he obviously wasn’t ready to grow up, to take care of himself and others, to make real adult choices. Anthony wasn’t yet strong enough for all this. But I was the girl I had to be.”
Skye now says that she doesn’t regret the abortion, pointing to Kiedis’ anger issues, heroin addiction, and unwillingness to commit to her. But she also seemed to acknowledge that it wasn’t entirely a freely-made choice.
“I was depleted enough from worrying about Anthony and worrying what people thought of us and worrying about my career,” she said. “I was sure that adding a newborn to my list of things to worry about would be the end of me.”
That Skye felt abortion was the only option she had is tragic — and she isn’t alone. A national study found that 64% of post-abortive women felt coerced or pressured into their abortions.
Many women likewise choose to get an abortion because, like Skye, they feel they have no other choice. And like those other women, Skye deserved better.
