Terry Crews, versatile actor (The Expendables, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and ex-Old Spice guy, is known for his stacked physique and his “gentle giant” demeanour, which made his Facebook video confessionals on Tuesday all the more surprising.
Crews posted over 20 minutes of video to Facebook with more to come, detailing his lifelong addiction to pornography and how he overcame it.
“For years, years, years, my dirty little secret was that I was addicted to pornography,” he said in a Dirty Little Secret (his title) video. “… Pornography, it really, really messed up my life in a lot of ways.”
Crews, 47, said he “literally had to go to rehab” for his addiction, which he has been free from for “six, seven years now.”
He said it did serious damage with his wife (the two have since repaired their relationship), and made him believe that she “owed” him sex. The two share five children.
Crews even claims the porn addiction forced him to lead “a double life.”
WATCH: Terry Crews wants to help you be a better man
“I believed that I was more valuable than my wife as a human being because I was a man,” he said. “And when you believe that you are more valuable than another person, you kind of feel like they owe you. And I was wrong.”
He feels that porn alters the way you view other people.
“It changes the way you think about people,” he said. “People become objects. People become body parts. They become things to be used rather than people to be loved.”
“Every time you look at pornography is a desire for intimacy,” he continued. “You are trying to fight your feelings of being alone by filling it with pornography in an attempt to feel that you are with someone and you know someone. But the problem is pornography is an intimacy killer.”
Crews does not mince words when it comes to watching sex videos: he believes that women should not let their husband or boyfriend watch at all, and he feels it should be eliminated entirely.
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“You cannot accept any pornography in your man’s life,” he said. “Anything that will make you feel denigrated, make you feel less than, you cannot accept it. It’s kind of like when you got a roach in your house. I promise you, there are 10,000 more roaches. You got to stamp them out… sometimes you got to take some walls down. Sometimes you got to excavate. Sometimes you got to literally raze the house and start over.”
This isn’t the first time Crews has come clean about his behaviour. In 2014, the actor admitted to having a porn addiction while doing circuit interviews for his book, Manhood: How to be a Better Man — or Just Live With One.
“A true man takes responsibility for everything in his life — good and bad,” he told Global’s The Morning Show. “There was a big time in my life where I was much less than a man because I was always blaming people, I was always putting other things on everyone else,” he recalled.
WATCH: Terry Crews appeared on The Morning Show to share his personal tale of growth, and how it helped him become a better man.
“I was a victim. I was like a professional victim. You’re basically a big kid, you know, a boy. The moment I grew up was the moment I realized I was responsible for how I behave, for how I treated everyone in my family, for my life good and bad. It was a real watershed moment for me.”