Sylvester Stallone recalls disturbing ‘attack’ he suffered as a juvenile delinquent teen while institutionalized in a psych ward
Sylvester Stallone has opened up about his stint in a mental institution when he was a teenager.
The 80-year-old Rocky star, who recently commented on President Donald Trump, detailed his time at Devereux Manor High School in Pennsylvania while promoting his forthcoming memoir, The Steps.
Speaking to The New York Times, he shared an anecdote about being attacked by a fellow student.
‘In my age group, the teenagers, if you ever snuck out to see a girl or do something like that, you’d be reprimanded by being taken to a place called Park Lodge or the Snake Pit,’ he told the outlet. ‘The smell, the filth, people running around naked, clawing, hands tied, drooling – this is what they thought would impress you never to break the rules again.’
Stallone, whose book will be published on September 29, said he was once sent to a psychiatric ward for ‘a couple of weeks,’ adding, ‘I was attacked there. They tried to rip my groin off.’
Describing his assailant, he said, ‘He was big, had no hair, always naked, rotten teeth. They called him Jay Bird because he was always naked as a jaybird. And I go into the bathroom on the way to the food mess hall, and he comes in and comes around me and he’s like ripping on my throat and he is going into my pants and grabbing my groin.’
Sylvester Stallone has opened up about his stint in a mental institution when he was a teenager; pictured in November 2024
Stallone pictured in New York as a young man
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The actor went on, ‘Then, the two guards come in and they’re beating the crap out of him with razor straps.
‘I go, ‘What the hell is wrong with him?’ And they say, ‘You’re in a crazy house, boy. Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s crazy.”
Upon entering the ward, Stallone said, ‘I know they’re going to try to break me.’
He recalled leaving the institution with a new perspective as he shared, ‘When I came out of there and was standing before the school principal and he said, ‘You learned your lesson?’
‘I said, ‘I learned a lot more than that lesson. A much better lesson: You can’t break me.’ So when I got to [New York City in my 20s] and everything that came after that, I always felt I was unbreakable in that way.’
Elsewhere in his NYT profile, Stallone got candid about previously suffering from an eating disorder.
The Hollywood superstar spoke publicly for the first time about the toll his films took on his body image.
He said of his physique: ‘It was my armour. I looked at Rocky: Very smooth, very normal-looking guy. And then I said, I think the character would start to become more vain.
‘So I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] but more feral and aggressive, and very limber and athletic.’
Stallone said he was once sent to a psychiatric ward for ‘a couple of weeks,’ adding, ‘I was attacked there’
Elsewhere in his NYT profile, Stallone got candid about previously suffering from an eating disorder at the height of his career; pictured as Rocky in 1976
Stallone’s memoir The Steps, from HarperCollins, will be published on September 29
He continued, ‘Then it got to the point where I became bulimic. You heard it here first. I got down to 2.6% body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down.
‘Or I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing.’
The actor admitted using steroids to bulk up his frame, adding: ‘Nobody does it without additives and drugs, period.
‘I don’t care what they say. It isn’t as though you’re a junkie, but if you’re going to work out and try to stay in shape for six months straight, and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.’