Tom Hanks says 'we all come from checkered' lives amid daughter's memoir claiming abusive childhood

Fox News

2 days ago

Tom Hanks has his daughter's back.
During an interview with Access Hollywood on Wednesday, the Oscar Award-winning actor got candid about daughter E.A. Hanks' decision to go public with her abuse allegations against his ex-wife in her memoir, "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road."
"She's a knockout, always has been," Hanks said of the daughter he shared with the late Susan Dillingham. "You know, it's a pride because I think — she shares it with me. She's very open about what the process is."
"If you've had kids, you realize that you see who they are when they're about six weeks old," he continued. "Their personality is on display right there. Their temper, the way they see the world is demonstrated in their body language and on their face."
"We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us."
"I'm not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity — as well as, I'm going to say perhaps a shoot-herself-in-the-foot kind of wherewithal — in order to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about."
"We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us," he concluded.
E.A., whose initials stand for Elizabeth Anne, wrote about her complicated childhood marred by her parents' divorce and a mother she claims could be emotionally and physically "violent."
After her parents' divorce, her mom got full custody and moved them to Sacramento.
"As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s--- that you couldn't walk around it, the house stank of smoke," she wrote in an excerpt obtained by People magazine, adding she believes her mother, although undiagnosed, suffered from bipolar disorder and episodes of extreme paranoia and delusions.
"The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible."
E.A. recalled one night when her mother's emotional violence "became physical."
"One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade," she wrote. "My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer."
E.A. added that in her senior year of high school, her mother "called to say she was dying."
Dillingham died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49.
Fox News Digital's Brie Stimson contributed to this post.