Charlize Theron has spoken with unusual candour about one of the most traumatic nights of her life — the evening her mother shot and killed her father in self-defence at their home in South Africa when Theron was just 15 years old. In an interview with journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro at the New York Times, the Benoni-born actress described the sequence of events in detail, making clear that she believed her life, and her mother’s, were in genuine danger.
“He was going to kill us,” she said plainly.
What happened that night
Theron explained that the evening began with her father, Charles Theron, becoming enraged over a minor mistake she had made. She sensed immediately that something was different about his anger that night. She asked her mother to tell him she was asleep when he came home.
Instead, he returned drunk and forced his way into the house, firing through the steel security doors to gain entry. As he broke through the first gate, he made his intentions explicit. “The messaging was very clear: I’m going to kill you tonight,” Theron recalled. He moved toward the safe to retrieve more weapons.
Her mother, Gerda, reached the safe first. She and Theron had been using their bodies to hold the bedroom door closed as he shot through it. Gerda followed her husband to the safe and shot him. No charges were ever filed — the shooting was ruled as self-defence.
Theron noted that what happened to her family was far from unique. “Unfortunately not an isolated story. These things are prevalent in a lot of families’ homes,” she said.
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Featured Image: Instagram | charlizeafrica
