Charlize Theron recalls the time her mother killed her father “I’m not haunted anymore”
When Theron was 15 years old, she witnessed her mother Gerda Maritz fatally shoot her father during a violent incident at their home in South Africa. According to Theron, her father, who struggled with alcoholism, returned home intoxicated and became threatening and dangerous.
He reportedly fired a gun and made it clear he intended to harm both Theron and her mother. In response, her mother acted in self-defense and shot him. Authorities later ruled the killing justified, and no charges were filed.
In a recent The New York Times interview, Theron explained that while the experience was undeniably traumatic, it no longer controls her emotionally.
“I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone,” she said. “I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”
She and her her mother stopped by her uncle’s house after going to the movies, where her father was inebriated. He got upset because Charlize didn’t greet him.
“I had to pee really badly. So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody,” she said. “Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?'”
When she and her mother got home, Charlize asked her mother to protect her from her father’s wrath.
“I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, ‘When he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I’m asleep. I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration, or unhappiness by the way he drove in. The way that he drove into that property that night, I can’t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen.”
Her father eventually “broke into the house,” shooting through the steel doors to gain entry.
Charlize’s mother ran to her safe to get her gun, and then holed up in Charlize’s room, the pair holding the door shut with their bodies.
Her father shot through the door, but amazingly none of the bullets struck Charlize or her mom.
When her father stopped to go to the safe to get his shotgun, Gerda opened the door and started shooting, striking both Charlize’s father and uncle.
“He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”
After the shooting, her mother continued on as normal and sent Charlize to school. “The next morning she sent me to school. She was just like, ‘We’re going to move on.’ Not necessarily the healthiest thing, but it worked for us.”
“She wanted me to forget about it. She didn’t want me to sit in it. We didn’t have therapists around, so in her head the best therapy was, ‘We’ve got to move on.'”
📸Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency / MEGA
