Lucy Hale admitted that she blacked out the first time that she drank during an appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, November 1. The Truth or Dare star, 34, revealed that her “very first experience with alcohol was the same as when it ended.” While Lucy struggled with alcohol throughout her 20s, she did decide to get sober at 32, and she hasn’t drunk in almost two years.
The Pretty Little Liars alum revealed that her first time drinking she was “12 or 13” and on vacation in Florida. She said that they were drinking “Green Apple Pucker.” She explained that her first time experimenting with alcohol led to her first blackout. “I blacked out — at 12 years old. I don’t remember what happened, I threw up, I got very sick, and I remember being so distraught when I realized what had happened,” she said, via Entertainment Tonight. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, my mom is going to be so disappointed in me.'”
While Lucy admitted to drinking from time to time throughout her teen years, she said that in her 20s, she realized that her “drinking was never normal.” She also said that she realized that she had a “problem” and regularly felt “shame” after nights of drinking. Lucy said that she secretly went to rehab when she was 23, but it wasn’t until years later that she got sober. “I wasn’t ready to give up drinking, which is why I didn’t get sober until I was 32,” she said.
Lucy revealed that she was one year sober in February. She revealed that she had celebrated her sober anniversary on January 2 of this year in a self-love Valentine’s Day post. “While this journey has mostly been private, I felt compelled tonight to let anyone who is struggling know that you are not alone and you are loved,” she wrote on Instagram.
This isn’t the first time that the actress has spoken about her sobriety. She admitted that she was a “textbook binge drinker” in an interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast that February. In that interview, she also spoke about how much time it took to eventually get sober. “It takes time. It took time, and it took patience with myself,” she said.