Let's Be Clear with Shannen DohertyForget what you've heard, what you've read, what you think you know about Shannen Doherty.This is her story and she's ready to tell it all. From her career, to her relationships, to her brave battle with cancer...Shannen is embracing her future by reflecting on her past. In the premiere episode of "Let's Be Clear"...Shannen shares recent struggles and past pains, determined to find comfort and inspire hope.
This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Doherty. Hi everyone, I'm Shannon Doherty and welcome to my very first episode of Let's Be Clear with Shannon Doherty. I'm really excited and I'm nervous as well. I have obviously never done a podcast before, but.
I don't know.
It just felt like a very cool and interesting different way to connect and also to be me and tell my own story. What's really interesting is that I've been an actress for forty two years, and in those forty two years, a lot of people have told my story and I never have to grow up reading articles about yourself and to have people writing books about you, claiming things that you did, whether they be.
True or not, is hard.
It's especially the untrue things obviously are much harder because you read them and you wonder where they even came up with that, or they took a kernel of a truth and exaggerated it and expanded it to sort of benefit themselves, and it was incredibly harmful to me, to my career, to my family, to my friends. And one thing I want to be very clear about is that I take full responsibility for my actions always in my life. I have never shoved it off to somebody else and said, oh, well, this was your fault. I am a person who believes in accountability for myself and for others. So it is hard again repeating this, it's hard to read things about yourself or, for instance, somebody to take your cancer journey and turn it into something that's not truthful and that doesn't represent you, or to try to break your story before you break it to your own family. I shaved my head when I was starting my first round of chemo back in twenty sixteen, and I shaved my head because I know eventually my hair was going to fall out, and I really just did not want everybody else to make it about them, for paparazzi to see me out and all of a sudden have these pictures of me walking home with no hair and it not coming from me, and me not breaking my own story. Listen, I'm incredibly blessed, and I'm so grateful for the career that I've had and the opportunities that I've had. But with blessings comes to the other side of things, and I think that's one of the main reasons why I decided to do Let's be clear. Let's be clear what does that mean. It means let's be clear about all of it. Let's be clear about my truth. Let's be clear about relationships, Let's be clear about cancer, Let's be clear about life in general. I toyed for a very long time with the idea of writing a memoirs. I was offered a lot of book deals over the years, and there was something about it that felt very disingenuous to me.
Maybe it was.
The fact that I couldn't get immediate responses back from people reading the book. There was there's almost a disconnect from a memoir. I love books, so don't take it like that way. I absolutely am a book reader. But I like fiction where you know, I drum up what the person looks like, and when the book is over sort of I can make up there, you know, another ending for them if ISO choose. With a memoir, you're sort of reading all of it and it is what it is, but you can't interact with it. And with a podcast you can interact. You know, there's an Instagram, you can ask questions, you can give me suggestions of what it is that you want to hear me talk about. And that was really important to me to just be authentic and transparent and very truthful. Whether that's good for me or at times might be detrimental. I don't really know. We're going to see how it plays out. I just know that it's going to be the truth and nothing. But I also think it's just going to be fun. I'm going to be speaking with a lot of my co stars. Some are going to be fantastic fun interviews. Some are going to be again a lot of hard truths of what we went through back then. I think that growing up on TV in the nineties as a woman, it was very different than it is currently, and I like to say that some of us sort of paved the way, and women are taking such huge strides in the world currently and certainly in TV. I think being on nine o two and zero and being someone who didn't necessarily play by the rules. I didn't placate the men in my business, and I certainly didn't placate my bosses. I fought them, and that goes back to the way that I was raised. My dad, by far, the most amazing man that's ever walked this earth. I miss and love every single second of the day. He was adamant about me being a very strong, intelligent woman who stood up for myself. And my mom was the same way, and they were very big on education and knowing your history, knowing your current affairs, being able to have carry on, conduct an intelligent conversation and be well informed. And then it progressed with Michael Landon. Michael Landon was one of the first people who looked at me and said, listen, they'll walk all over you in this business being a woman, and don't let them. Stand up for yourself. So I did, and it caused, you know, a lot of issues back then, some issues I caused for myself. I was, you know, young, and I wanted to go out and I didn't see any problem with going to, you know, a nightclub at twenty years old with Brian Torre and Marky Mark that's what he was named. Back then. I didn't see where it was bad. And sometimes my behavior would get a little carried away. I think that's kind of normal for somebody in their early early early twenties. But I could have done better for sure, which we're going to discuss all throughout this podcast. What are the things that I could have done better, What are the mistakes that I really made? But also what's like the good that we can take from all of it, and being a strong woman and going up against someone like Aaron Spelling and Duke e Vincent, the people who who were you know, huge producers back then that that did nine on two and Ho that then produced Charm, that produced Dynasty, that produced Melrose Place that you know had this you know legacy people, huge producers, but too as a young woman to go up against them and say things like, hey, you know this script isn't very good and it's not great quality.
We can do better.
And for people to say things to me like you're not hired, to think you're hired to hit your mark and say your lines and act, that's the kind of stuff that really rubbed me personally the wrong way because I wasn't raised that way. I was raised to think. I was raised to have an opinion and that my opinion should be valued. So I just kept on pressing up against that machine, up against men who didn't really want to hear my opinion, and I didn't stop. And I carried that throughout my career, and I carried that through Charmed. I think the difference between me then and me now or when I got into my forties. Rather, is that I learned the simple art of diplomacy. I learned that there might be a nicer way to say some things, There might be a more diplomatic spin that I could take. I also learned to stay at home. I learned to.
Really like.
Cultivate my space, to be healthy in a space that I wanted to actually spend time in, and to surround myself with friends that you know, had my back and were incredibly supportive and that weren't selling stories to the National Inquirer about me, because that happened to me all throughout my twenties. And and friends that would look at me and say, hey, you know, stop your crap, like knock it off. You're you know, you're saying too much, or you're saying too little, or you're too abrasive, or you're too harsh. And those friendships I value. Those are people that I've known for an incredibly long time now. Some of them may have come later in life, and I think that that just comes with maturity and growth and evolving as a human being, where you look at people and you go, Okay, you're you're like a good influence and you're you're inspirational on your own like in your own life, and I can learn so much for you from you. So those are kind of the people that I have in my life now. So we're definitely going to delve into the whole nine o two And oh, was there a pay issue? We're men getting paid more money than the girls on the show. What did that mean back then in the nineties, was that the norm kind of was we'll talk about that. We'll talk about all the fights that you guys heard back on nine. We'll have some of my former co stars on that I love and adore. We'll talk about that infamous you know, tape in the hair and fights saying they got physical.
We'll have all that.
We'll have those conversations and then go from there to like amazing experiences like on Malrath. And you know what it was like to work with Kevin Smith, who was incredibly collaborative and fun and just made the set easy.
It was like a.
Bunch of kids hanging out and working and saying lines. And it was awesome to playing Margaret Mitchell and to Charmed and what Charmed was like. And you know, you've all heard all the rumors some people have addressed them in books. I'm not going to address it in a book. I'm going to address it right here on my podcast.
And.
We'll keep going through my career. And I think even more important than the career is my cancer journey. Some of you may know, I got diagnosed in late two thousand and fifty and I went through surgery, I went through chemo, I went through radiation all throughout twenty sixteen and part of twenty seventeen. And you know what that journey was like, because it was it was hard, and it was scary, but there was also something.
So beautiful about it.
I really learned a lot about myself, and I learned a lot about the people in my life. I learned about my own well of strength and being able to you know, dig deep. And when I thought I couldn't get out of bed, when I you know, dropped down to ninety two pounds from chemo and was incredibly dehydrated, I had to. I had to still get out of bed, and you know, my husband at the time sort of begging me to, you know, keep going, and my mom like literally trying to pick me up out of bed and get me to the doctor. What those moments were like, what was it like to you know, at that point in time, I thought that I wouldn't survive it, and I didn't know how I would get through it. And you know, getting body parts dropped off, getting a breast removed, and how that changes the way that you look at yourself, and it definitely did. I looked at myself as as not whole anymore. I looked at myself as someone who was very damaged. I you know, had still have scars from my reconstruction, Sir, of a scar from hip bone to hip bone, and there's not a day that goes by that I don't look at that scar and feel pain about it and feel a little bit of remorse about probably the decision that I made for the particular reconstruction that I got, which we'll get into with an actual doctor who can help us all walk through it in another episode. You know, what was what was it like to lose my hair? I kind of kind of was known from my hair a little bit, and I was really proud of my hair, to be honest. I know it seems so vain and so silly to see something like that, but you know, it helped define me. And when I lost it. It was I had to find a new definition from myself. It took a lot of kindness from other people. To kindness from my friends. It took kindness from strangers, people on my Instagram sending me messages and connecting with me and you know, sharing their photos of their bald head after chemo to.
Feel like I had.
A family of like minded people that were going through the exact same thing, or their wife was going through the same thing, or their sister or their friend or their mom or their grandmother. Just to have that connection and from men as well, saying like, Hey, I've got this kind of cancer, this is how I feel, this is you know, my.
Bald head like it.
It sort of wrapped me in this cocoon of safety. As cheesy as that may sound or sappy as that may sound, it really did.
It made me feel.
Made me feel less ostracized from the world and like I was a part of something, which then started my feeling of deep, deep responsibility to share my story, the beauty of it and the ugliness of it as well, in order to number one, help others going through what I was going through, and to number two, possibly speed up cancer research, get more money behind it. It's crazy to me that cancer has been around as long as it has and we don't have a cure. So yeah, I feel a responsibility. And people always ask me like, God, do you ever say why me? And I'm like, yeah, I say it all the time, And I remind myself like why not me? Why should it be anybody else but me? And why me? Because I have a platform, and what better thing to use my platform for than to help other people with cancer or to help their loved ones understand what it's like for that person going through cancer, to to bring more awareness to cancer and in hopes of finding a cure. That's why me?
Why me?
Because this is probably my calling. Maybe everything else in my life, my career and all of that was really just to get me to this place, just to get me to the place where I can actually make a difference for others and for myself being selfish for a second, but for.
All of us. So I plan on this show to bring on.
What I regard as some of the best doctors in the cancer field, from brain surgeons to radiation oncologists, to cancer oncologists to cardio oncologists. Because people don't even realize that chemo, it impacts your heart, So that's something that we should all be very aware of to guynecologists because guess what, it impacts your sex life as well. And I'm from the South and originally, so it's very hard for me to have open conversations about gynecologists and sex. But I'm going to do it because it's needed. It's definitely needed. It impacts men with cancer, it impacts women with cancer. It's definitely impacted my life. And this is a podcast called Let's Be Clear, so I'm going to be clear about all of that.
Yeah, So cancer will be a huge topic because.
Once I went through my original chemo and radiation and had surgeries, I ended up being cleared. I went into remission, and then in twenty nineteen, I got diagnosed with stage four cancer, still breast cancer, just the breast cancer had moved into my bones. And some of you may know that stage four cancer is terminal. There there are drugs that you can be on that will prolong your life, but it's not curable as of right now. So living with that I think really.
Changed me. Again.
I've been through, you know, so many different changes and metamorphoses, like if you will in the last couple of years from cancer. But I think this diagnosis in twenty nineteen made me really look at my life and again reassess and become more committed to spreading the word about cancer and connecting to my cancer family, but also what I can do to make things easier on the people that I love in my life and to be prepared. It's hard making out your will, and it's hard making a funeral list.
Stay tuned for that episode. It is.
It's hard sitting down with your mom and having a conversation with her and saying, listen, you're probably gonna outlive me, and you may not like it. I like it because I want her to live forever. I love her so much. But you know, having that conversation is hard. Like and I'll have my mom on the show and she'll tell you what that's like for her. I don't want to put words into her mouth, but to look at your home and start thinking that you've got to put you know, little stickers behind stuff with people's initials on that because you're like, Okay, I really want this piece of art to go to my brother or to my nephew, or it's a you just have moments where you absolutely break down crying, wondering like when that time is going to come, where bird's time for goodbye? And what it's going to be like and is it going to be painful? Is it going to be peaceful? How are the people in my life going to deal with it? And that's hard.
And also, you know, sorry you guys, very emotional stuff for me to talk about. You know, there's there's when you get to stage four cancer, there's protocols that you go through and your hope is that you don't blow through too many protocols and because there's only so many, I want to get into that on this podcast of what those protocols are and how they impacted me. There were some that were phenomenal and there were some that I couldn't tolerate at all, And you want to tolerate them so bad because you know that if you can't tolerate it, you're blowing through a protocol.
You know, and where you're at when you're at like on maybe one of your maybe you only.
Have two more protocols that you can possibly go through, and you're like, I just need to eke out another five years because they're going to come up with something else, which is really what people with.
Stage four look at in their lives.
They really sort of have to look at that and say, I just need another three years. I just need another five years, because there's so many amazing clinical trials happening right now that once they get approved, this will you know, elongate my life again. And you're just kind of chasing you're chasing protocols and you're chasing clinical trials, and it can be all consuming, but you don't want it to be all consuming because you still want to live your life.
You know, you still want to.
You still want to be a willing participant in your own life. And yes, I could, you know, become the healthiest human being in the world and never do anything bad, become a you know, workout freak and just the most clean eater in the world and no alcohol. But god, that's just not for me. I want to enjoy the time that I have and it's all a moderation, right, But I really enjoy my glass of red wine. It doesn't mean that I have a glass of red wine every night, but it means that when I want a glass of red wine, I'm going to have it. So I really want to talk about the people who are their hearts are so in the right place. But I get a lot of messages about, you know, some miracle cure, some holistic miracle cure, and that if I just stopped the chemical drugs that big Pharma is pedaling my way, that I would be cured of my stage four cancer, and what those actually are, do they really work? I kind of want to go down that rabbit hole a little bit. I hope some of you want to go down it with me. So we're going to get into all of that. We're also going to get into deep personal life stuff. I have been engaged. I don't know how many times, I gotta be honest, I can't remember. I lost count at some point.
Ugh.
I have been married three times. Technically i've been married three times. The second marriage I got annulled, so but I was still married to him. And you know, not all of my obviously, not all of my marriages were great because I'm divorced from two and right in the middle of the divorce right now. So but I'm really good friends interestingly enough with some of my ex fiancees and with some of my ex boyfriends, and yeah, with one of my ex husbands. My middle husband I'm which was Rick. I'm still really good friends with. We chat on the phone, we FaceTime, we laugh whenever he's in Malibu. You know, we make a point to see each other. I'm great friends with some exes, like my ex Rob Wise, who I was with for.
Seven years.
He was the second longest relationship I've ever had in my life, and he really helped. He helped me grow up and understand what a relationship was. I mean, we sort of grew up together and helped one another.
I think so.
And then you know, currently being in the middle of divorce while having Stage four cancer, I filed for divorce this year twenty twenty three. I had brain surgery in twenty twenty three as well. We discovered the first week of January that my cancer had spread to my brain. So I had brain met and there was one in particular, a tumor that was large enough for them to remove, and they really wanted to remove it in order to dissect it and get the pathology on it so that we would understand what was happening and then what would be the proper protocol and treatment to give me. So I had brain surgery, which was the most frightening thing I have ever been through in my entire life. I didn't think that I was going to make it. I was positive that I was going to die. And the best case scenario in my head if I didn't die was that I would lose the ability to walk or to talk. And I went in to that surgery early in the morning, and I went in after I found out that, you know, my marriage was essentially over, that my husband had been carrying on an affair for two years, and to not go in that surgery, even though being very clear he wanted to go, I couldn't go into that surgery with him there.
I felt so betrayed.
At the end of the day, I just felt so incredibly unloved by someone I was with for fourteen years, by someone that you know, I loved with all my heart. So I went into surgery, thank God, with my mom by my side, with my brother by the side, with my best friend Chris by my side, my friends Christie and Honarey and Anne, Marie like Holly all praying for me and you know, texting me. I still went into that surgery petrified. I hadn't met my brain surgeon other than via zoom, and I really liked him. His name was doctor Chew. So when I finally got to see him, I you know, I looked at him and I said, just listen, do me a favor, Like, if you can't get the whole tumor out without jeopardizing who I am as a human being, So if you want to get it all out, but it's going to cause me to lose the ability to walk or like my right foot, which was one of the fears, then just leave it, like just close me back up and we'll deal with it. But don't do anything that's going to change me as a human being. And please, whatever you do, don't do something that's going to impact my actual brain. Because going way back to the way that I was raised, being somebody who can process information quickly, being someone who craves learning and having intelligent conversations, I just I didn't want to lose that. It's one of the things I'm the most proud about with myself and one of the things I'm so grateful I had a mom and a dad like I had raising me. The way that they raised me is that I'm smart, and I did not want to lose any of that. I just wanted to make sure I came out me. So I did brain surgery and I lived because I'm here. But you know, I remember waking up and my mom being right there and doctor Chu being right there, and you know, they didn't get it all. He got as much as he could, and he was like, you know, that was enough for the surgery. I did brain radiation on that particular tumor prior to surgery, just so when they went to to scoop it out that you know, it didn't it didn't spread. Sort of look at it as like seeds of cancer within the tumor, so that the seeds were all dead and couldn't spread. That's that's like a layman's explanation of it, but that's the explanation I'm gonna So it had already been radiated. Everybody felt very comfortable with it. And then after my brain surgery, I went for more radiation because I had I think it was either four to five more mets in my brain. There were very very very very very tiny and certainly not something that you could operate on and remove. So I did a couple of rounds of brain radiation with a wonderful radiation oncologist named doctor Maharty and they're all at Theater Sinai here in Los Angeles, and you know, he definitely tried to avoid any more hair falling out, but you're going to have some of that anyway. And then it was really about after that finding like a protocol, and that was with doctor Lawrence Pirot, who is my oncologist. And you know, the first protocol I went on didn't didn't work, and now I'm on a totally different one and it's extremely hard. We'll have that conversation again with a doctor or so anything that I'm missing that's sort of technical, they can help fill in. I'm always going to talk to you guys from the heart and from personal experience, and then I'll have on experts to help me fill in the missing pieces. But you know, it's been a twenty twenty three has been a challenging year for sure. Again from brain surgery to brain radiation to what I'm on now, which is kind of a version of chemo losing your hair all over again or it becoming patchy. And then what do you do? You know, do do you wear wig? Do you go bald? Do you embrace the baldness. Do you walk around with you know, patchy hair? And I'm going to tell you and talk to you about like my choices and what I decided was right for me in this moment and the struggle I still have with it, the struggle of you know, am I being authentic? Am I being true to who I am and true to the cancer CA community. It's again, it's it's you know, pressure.
Pressure. I welcome, by the way, pressure.
I feel very blessed that I have because it's what I'm here to do, I think. And just to go through all of that while also trying to figure out if you're going to get a freakin divorce like and trying to get to the truth of that. One of my friends said it best to me. They were like, you are a truth seeker, like you do not stop until you get to the truth. And I think sometimes it's a big detriment. I think there are times to let things go and and just reconcile and say, okay, I'm never going to know this truth and and that's okay, I'm trying to learn that. But you know, for many, many, many many months, I was obsessed with finding the truth and not through nefarious ways, not through you know, hacking of somebody's email or anything of that nature, but through conversations expecting somebody to be honest with me, because if you share fourteen years together and you cheated, doesn't that person deserve the absolute truth, regardless of how much it hurts them, if they're the ones asking for it, if they're the ones saying, like, listen, I get it. I may cry and I may get angry, and this may really suck to hear, but I need to hear it because I need closure, and this is how I get my closure. So I had a lot of months of trying to figure out what I was going to do, and I went back and forth to be honest, and I never ever, ever thought a million years that I would be that girl. I have always said from the beginning, if you cheat on me, you're out.
That's it.
With every boyfriend, every husband, every fance. You cheat on me, We're done. I will not look back. You will fail to exist. I've been like that, hardcore about it. And then when someone you really, really really love, someone that you regard as your absolute best friend in the world, when you're lied to and you discover that you know they've cheated on you, or they finally tell you that they're cheating on you because they're you know, riddled by guilt or whatever.
I didn't walk away right away. I couldn't.
I was I was so confused, And I was also on steroids and a lot of stuff from brain surgery because they didn't want my brains as well. And it's honestly, it's still really hard. Yes, I made the decision to file for divorce, but you know, I have a lot of memories with this person, and a lot of really beautiful, amazing, great memories. And I also take some responsibility for the demise of our marriage. Actually that's not true. Let me rephrase that and be very clear about this. I do not take responsibility for the demise of our marriage. I take responsibility for some of the issues in our marriage. I take the responsibility not only because of how I was, but because of how cancer impacted my marriage and how it impacted him the second time around, some of the decisions that I made that he may not have agreed with, and his fear. So I do take responsibility for some of that. I do not take responsibility for the demise of a marriage because I am not a quitter. If somebody is still showing me loyalty and respect and love, I am going to hang in there. I am going to try my hardest because divorce is rough. So I struggled with my decision, and I went back and forth, and I had lots of conversations. And by the way, I also spoke to the girlfriend of two years that he cheated on me with, which is a whole other episode. So and I finally had to come to that hard truth and file for divorce. And it was embarrassing. I was, you know, I'm horrified that I can't keep a relationship together. I think it's like a reflection on me, although I kind of like this one. I don't know, I think it's on him. But still I don't want to be a failure in life. And I've failed three times at marriage, and and I still believe in love. I still believe that. You know, my mom and dad were married for I don't I don't know, forty some odd years, and you know, the only thing that separated them physically was my father's death. But you know, my mom still wears her wedding ban and she still says her husband and she always will you know, they're still married in in all the ways that matter. You know, I know that my dad is still with her every day, just like he is with.
Me, and my mom.
As of right now, has no desire to ever get married to anybody else. She is, you know, that's the only man for me. And I'm done now. So I come from that mentality. So it sucks to fail three times. There's a lot to unpack her and we will. We will definitely unpack all of it, all right, guys. So that was a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. It is definitely a lot. And this is just the first episode. So imagine what the next year is going to bring. Uh, It's gonna be honest. It's going to be clear and full access basically into my life and everything that I'm going through and everything that I feel, and along with a healthy mixture of friends and laughter and community and doctors and information like let's learn together, let's cry together, and let's laugh together. Let's just go through this journey of life together. I hope you guys tune in for the next episode. Thank you, And this is let's be clear with Shannon Doherty. Because I'm being clear
