Despite her Lifetime movie making it look like the two had rekindled their relationship after her divorce from Doug Hutchison, Courtney Stodden reveals things went downhill between when the film was written and now.
Courtney Stodden’s roller coaster relationship with her father has hit another low point.
Stodden, of course, rose to fame after she married The Green Mile actor Doug Hutchison in 2011, when he was 50 and she was just 16. The two met after she signed up for one of his online acting workshops in 2010, before things between them escalated. They first split in 2013, before reconciling and eventually breaking for good in 2018; the divorce was finalized in 2020.
She’s long joked about her “daddy issues,” suggesting they played a role in her marriage to Hutchison and even releasing a song of the same name. And while she’s spoken in the past about being estranged from her actual father, Alex Stodden, her new Lifetime movie, I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story — on which Stodden served as an executive producer and in which she appeared as narrator to her own life — suggested a reconciliation happened between them.
In actuality, Stodden says they started moving toward that while the film was being written, but things have since gone south, again.
“I know the movie portrays my father and I to be kind of at a peacemaking right now and during the writing process, this was about two years ago, my dad and I were trying to have a reckoning, some kind of something, because all I ever wanted was my dad,” Stodden told TooFab.
“If you do the math, it doesn’t take rocket science. I was a sixteen year old marrying someone who was older than their father … the story starts with a girl craving her father’s love,” she continued, “and the hard part for me today, in this moment as an adult with a fully developed brain, is realizing that my father doesn’t want me in his life, and that is the hardest thing for me right now. It completely shatters my heart everyday.”
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Stodden said she never realized she actually had “daddy issues” before, saying her song was just one of the ways she was “making a caricature about my pain, because I wasn’t old enough to put the dots together.” She had hoped that since she and her father were “trying” to reconnect when the movie was being written, the pair would be “at peace” by the time it was released.
That, however, wasn’t the case.
“He just won’t respond to me at all. He is so broken himself and so hurt by what happened,” she explained to TooFab, saying she believes her father — who walked her down the aisle at her wedding — thinks everything that happened to her with Hutchison and the aftermath was all his “fault.”
“He was so hurt to the the point that he went to my childhood home and ended up taking all my videos, my VHS [tapes], my first birthday, my third birthday, all the way up to when I was 12. He took them to the dump and completely threw me away like trash,” Stodden claimed. “So I don’t have any childhood memories anymore and, at this point in my life, I feel like I am trying to beg for some kind of love. I think that’s going to be the hardest part for me moving forward, trying to heal from that.”
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Thankfully for Stodden, things between her and her mother Krista Keller are in a good place now — despite her mom taking some issue with her portrayal in the Lifetime movie.
“My mom has been … she’s built of steel, that woman, I don’t know what makes her so strong,” Stodden told TooFab. “That’s the thing I love about my mom, no matter what, she is there and I know in retrospect she would never sign off on this again and she regrets it every day.”
“I admire her for that, that takes a lot of accountability because no parent wants to admit they are wrong,” she added. “Regarding my dad, that’s a whole different story.”
I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story is streaming now.
