Tom Hanks has broken his silence after his daughter claimed that her childhood was filled with "violence".
EA Hanks, the 43-year-old daughter of the Oscar-winning actor, has written a raw and revealing book titled The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.
The book dives into her painful upbringing and complicated family history, including alleged abuse from her late mother, Samantha Lewes.
In the book, EA - whose full name is Elizabeth Ann Hanks - writes with brutal honesty about growing up far from the Hollywood spotlight after her parents divorced in 1985.
“I am a kid from the first (non-famous) marriage,” she says in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are Colin’s high school graduation, then my high school graduation. I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
After the split, EA and her brother Colin lived with their mother in Sacramento. She recalls enduring years of instability, emotional and physical abuse, and neglect.
“She pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice,” EA wrote. “She told me there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things.”
She continued: “One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade.”
EA also recounted one terrifying moment when her father discovered they hadn’t been in school for two weeks. “My dad came to pick us up from school, and we’re not there. And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks, and he has to track us down.”
At the premiere of The Phoenician Scheme, Tom Hanks praised his daughter’s courage in going public with her story.
“It’s a pride because, I think, she shares it with me, she’s been very open about what the process is,” Hanks told Access Hollywood.
“I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal, as well as the curiosity, as well as, I’m going to say, perhaps, the ‘shoot herself in the foot’ kind of wherewithal in order to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about.
“We all come from checked or cracked lives, all of us, despite the fact that part of it would seem as though she worked for some international well-known firm with a copyrighted last name,” he added.
“She knows that, and she leans into absolutely everything of it, and I think anyone who does that is a bold journalistic literary mind, and I’m thrilled I can say the same thing about my daughter.”
Hanks remarried actress Rita Wilson in 1988, and EA says her life changed when she moved in with them.
“Rita’s not really a stepmother, she’s my other mother,” EA told People in April. “When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they’ve been together since before I can really remember.”
Tom and Rita have two sons together - Chet, 34, and Truman, 29.