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Sandra Bullock says she was “unraveling” during a 2014 home invasion involving a suspect who was stalking her for days before he was arrested at her Bel Air residence.
The Oscar-winning actress opened up for the first time about the traumatic experience during Wednesday’s episode of Red Table Talk after co-host Willow Smith shared her own emotional response to a break-in. The singer-actress first revealed her December 2020 home invasion in an October episode of Red Table Talk.
While Smith wasn’t home at the time her residence was broken into, the singer and actress’ recollections of the “hard” emotional event prompted Bullock to recall her own difficult experience from 2014. Bullock was inside her house when a man entered her Bel Air residence unarmed.
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“I’m in the closet going, ‘This doesn’t end well,” she recalled, after admitting that having watched 48 Hours and Dateline exacerbated her fears.
Bullock, alone when the intruder made his way through her house, locked herself in a closet inside her bedroom. “It was the one night that Louis wasn’t with me,” the Ocean’s Eight star said, referencing her son, whom she adopted in 2010. “It was the one night that our nanny goes, ‘Let me just take him to my apartment which is up the street because you’re going to be out late.'”
“Had he been home, I would’ve run to the closet, which is now my official closet but that was his bedroom, and it would have changed our destiny forever,” she added. “The violation of that. I wasn’t the same after that. I was unraveling.”
Bullock and Smith went on to discuss the PTSD they experienced in the aftermaths of their break-ins before the Bird Box star spoke about her intruder, then-39-year-old Joshua James Corbett, who jumped her fence and accessed her Hollywood Hills home. Police discovered Corbett had eight firearms registered in his name at the time of the burglary and was uncovered to have been stalking Bullock for several days.
In 2017, he pleaded no contest to one felony count each of stalking and first-degree residential burglary and was sentenced to five years probation, in addition to having a 10-year protective order issued against him along with being ordered to seek mental health treatment.
In 2018, Corbett died by suicide after an hours-long stand-off, where no shots were fired, with the Los Angeles Police Department at his La Crescenta home. Bullock told Smith, along with her mother Jada Pinkett and grandmother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, that the system had “failed him.”
“What’s sad is that the system failed him,” she said. “There was an altercation with SWAT and he killed himself.”
After that, Bullock said she hadn’t realized she had PTSD from her home invasion, but that she would end up “sobbing” in unexpected moments.
“I would look left out of a car. Not right. I would look left, and I would start sobbing,” she recalled. “And I thought to myself, I’m a single parent and this child is going to absorb nothing but fear and trauma and shame from me in the most pivotal times of his life, and I was like, I don’t want to drop that load of baggage onto my beautiful child.”
Bullock told the Red Table Talk co-hosts that she began EMDR — or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — therapy to help her process what happened to her. The psychotherapy method is used to help individuals recover from trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression and panic disorders, among other conditions.
It was something Bullock said she was “scared to do” but has since helped her and “was the most healing.”
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