Actress Rae Dawn Chong says she slept with Mick Jagger while 'young, underage jailbait': 'It wasn't a #MeToo moment'
Actress Rae Dawn Chong, who starred in Commando and The Color Purple in the 1980s, says she slept with Mick Jagger when she was an underage teen in two new interviews.
Chong, now 58, first referenced her connection to the Rolling Stones rocker, now 76, in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter podcast It Happened in Hollywood in which she spoke of being cast as Jagger’s love interest in the 1985 music video for his single “Just Another Night.” Chong, who was 24 at the time, credited the video for helping her land a role in Commando that year and said she got the gig after running into Jagger and bandmate Keith Richards on the street.
“When I was young, underage jailbait, I was hanging out with Mick Jagger,” she told hosts Seth Abramovitch and Chip Pope. “And so I knew the Stones. I never saw the Stones. I was not necessarily a fan of the Stones, but I hung out with Mick a few times ... Super-underage, but whatever.”
The hosts asked if she and Jagger were sleeping together during their “Just Another Night” partnership,
“Not then,” Chong, the daughter of comedian Tommy Chong, responded. “I was over it. But by then, no, not when we did that movie. We were just friends by then. But as a child ... um, you know,” she laughed. “I knew him in that way as a teenager but not ... as an adult, I was over it.
“We were friends, put it that way, with benefits,” she continued. “I didn’t want to be with him. I thought he was old, but I thought he was interesting because he was Mick Jagger. You know you’re young, you’re just newly sexual — even though you are underage — and it was like, yeah, it was easy-peasy. Should I be more horrified?”
When pressed, Chong said she was “young” at the time of the alleged relationship, though Abramovitch and Pope later reported that she nodded when they asked if she had been 15 at the time. Even so, Chong was quick to defend Jagger and clarify that she didn’t feel “traumatized” by the situation.
“It didn’t traumatize me,” she insisted. “It wasn’t a #MeToo moment, it was something I empoweredly chose. I could have said no, I wasn’t forced, he didn’t ... I thought he was adorable, and I was just new at the whole thing. And he ... just like grabbed me and said, ‘You’re it.’ And like, I wanted to be it.”
She went on to shrug off concern, saying “it was never traumatizing.”
“I grew up free-range in Hollywood,” she said. “Tommy Chong is my father. Hello, it could have been worse. I was never Heidi Fleiss-ed [the “Hollywood madame” who ran a high-end prostitution ring]. I was always in charge of myself ... The worst experiences we ever had as young girls was not with creepy guys that we might have experimented with but we never wanted anything from them. It was just like, ‘Oh that’s so-and-so, hmmm that might be interesting for a second’ ... It was the ‘70s. It was fun.
“I never was taken advantage of. It was never like that ... It was just fun,” she added.
Chong shared that she’d run into Jagger “a couple of times here and there” before reconnecting for his 1985 music video — “By this time, I felt like I’d earned it,” she said of the gig — but noted that he hasn’t spoken to her since she admitted in a past interview that she found it “gross” when he licked her in the video.
“Now he’s really not going to talk to me because I busted him for underage,” she said.
Perhaps anxious about Jagger’s reaction and public reception to her interview with It Happened in Hollywood, Chong gave a second interview about the subject to British newspaper the Mail on Sunday. She told the paper the Jagger story “just slipped out” during the podcast.
“I feel incredibly bad about it,” she said. “It's me and my big mouth. My family and friends knew about it but it's not something I have ever dined out on.
“He's probably going to lose his s*** because I was a minor,” she said of Jagger. “He's going to be so mad at me.”
According to the Mail on Sunday, Chong recorded her alleged Jagger encounter in her journal from 1977, the year she turned 16. At the time, the singer was married to first wife Bianca Jagger.
“I got to experience being a groupie,” the journal reportedly reads. “Not that being a groupie is worth experiencing. I just had to go and be wild. Well I did it. I got to live with Mick Jagger, John Phillips, Mackenzie [Phillips, her childhood best friend] and Ron Wood … it was fun and full of excitement.”
Chong again defended Jagger, saying that he didn’t know her age.
“Mick was very beautiful, very shy, very self-absorbed,” she told the paper.
“He had great lips, he was a great kisser. He wasn't that much older than me in my brain. He was 33 and young and gorgeous with a nice body. It wasn't a bad thing, it was fabulous. Totally rock 'n' roll. He didn't make me do anything I didn't want to do, but he was very vain, always looking in the mirror.”
She added, “He did nothing wrong. He didn't make me do anything I didn't want to do.
“It was the 1970s, a different era. I wasn't a victim ... I don't want him to get into trouble about this. It wasn't traumatizing. I knew what I was doing. I wasn't an innocent schoolgirl. I always acted a lot older than I was. I was a grown-up at 15.
“At 15, I was definitely a Lolita,” she continued. “I knew I had the power to pick and choose whatever man I wanted. I was keen to have every experience I could. Mick was part of that.”
Yahoo Entertainment has reached out to Jagger’s representatives for comment.
Chong’s remarks about Jagger aren’t the only bombshell claims she made during the It Happened in Hollywood podcast interview. She also speculated that former pal Phillips made up her claims of an incestuous affair with her own father, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, in order to sell books. Chong, who is biracial, also spoke of being an “underage thing” at a party thrown by Jack Nicholson in the 1970s, and charged that she lost out on a role on Good Times for not being “ghetto enough.”
“I got fired by Norman Lear because I wasn’t black enough,” she claimed, adding that Janet Jackson was ultimately cast. (Jackson played Penny on the sitcom.)
“I come from Canada, what can I say?” Chong said. “We enunciate.”
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
