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Oscar-winning actor Tatum O’Neal has opened up about her difficult journey toward sobriety, revealing that she relapsed after President Donald Trump was re-elected last November.
O’Neal, 61, has struggled with addiction to prescription drugs, alcohol, heroin, and cocaine at various points throughout her life. In 2020, she suffered a near-fatal drug overdose and a debilitating stroke, which left her in a six-week coma.
It’s taken her years of rehabilitation to relearn how to speak and read, and in that time, she has also been in recovery, attending meetings over Zoom.
Still, she says sobriety remains a challenge, especially with America’s current state of affairs.
In a new interview with Variety, O’Neal revealed that on election night — which happened to fall on her birthday (November 5) — she relapsed once it became clear Trump had won the White House.
“I was with my gay friends, and was like, ‘I’m going to have a glass of wine — maybe two,’” she said. “And then I was like, ‘OK, damn: I have one day of sobriety.’”
For most of her life, O’Neal says has been trying to get sober. “I was an addict my whole life. Pretty much on and off, for the past 30 to 40 years,” she told People in 2023. “I’ve been trying to get sober my whole life. Every day, I am trying.”
Elsewhere in her interview with Variety, the Little Darlings star spoke about her strained relationship with her father, Ryan O’Neal, who died in 2023.
“He was controlling,” she said, adding that he regularly criticized her acting abilities, telling her she wasn’t good. “And so then I started to get not good, feeling scared all the time,” O’Neal said.
O’Neal, who co-starred with her father in 1973’s Paper Moon, has been outspoken about his alleged abusive behavior and how he “hated” her after she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film. At just 10 years old, she became the youngest actor to ever win an Oscar.
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“He loved me, but then hated me, because I won the Academy Award,” she previously recalled.
The pair had a long-documented difficult relationship, marked with periods of estrangement. In 2011, they attempted to repair their bond after a 25-year rift on the documentary series Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals. However, their relationship remained tumultuous up until his death in 2023.
In her father’s final days, O’Neal said she visited him at his Malibu home. It would later burn down in the recent wave of California wildfires that devastated the area.
“I know he was drinking, smoking a lot of pot, and he was like, ‘Here, take a pill,’ ”she remembered of her final moments with him. “I was like, ‘No, thank you.’”