Whoopi Goldberg has revealed details about her cocaine addiction during the 1980s.
In her new book Bits And Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, And Me, the actor opened up about how her cocaine habit began, and how it gradually developed into a problem.
Due to the lack of strict enforcement and a “relaxed” attitude around drugs on TV and movie sets in Hollywood at the time, Goldberg began to take more and more drugs.
“I thought I could handle the cocaine thing,” the Sister Act star shared (via Entertainment Weekly). “It didn’t seem dangerous. Everybody seemed to have access to it, even on TV and movie sets. The cops were never going to raid a studio either.”
She then recalled the moment she experienced a wake-up call after she had fallen “into the deep well of cocaine and sank to a new low”.
Goldberg described how she was found by a hotel maid having taken a significant amount of cocaine.
Recommended
“I had one of those slap-in-the-face moments that make you see pretty fucking clearly that you’ve hit bottom,” she wrote.
“I was staying in a very upscale hotel in Manhattan for my birthday. Somebody had given me an ounce of cocaine. I was sitting on the closet floor, just putting it up my nose. All by myself. I didn’t hear the housekeeper knock or let herself in the room to clean it up.”
Goldberg continued: “She opened the closet door. I screamed. She screamed and backed up and looked like she was going to run. I had to get her quickly and try to calm down.
“She was staring at my face as I talked. Once she understood it was my room, she calmed down and left.”
She added: “I looked at myself in the mirror near the door and saw cocaine all over my face.”
Goldberg also opened up about her experience breaking the addiction, and how her mother was a source of motivation and encouragement to kick the habit.
“I didn’t want my kid to think her mom was an addict,” she explained. “I didn’t want my mom to think her daughter was an addict.
“So, I got myself as straight as an arrow — an arrow that gained twenty pounds in the next year. I thought, ‘Okay, this is the exchange. This is what it’s going to look like. If you want to stay alive, you gotta be okay with this.’”
Earlier this year, Goldberg responded to rumours that she was on the list of high-profile figures who had been connected to Jeffrey Epstein.