According to Shirley Temple herself, when she was only 12 years old, an adult male exposed himself to her. “I had thought he was a producer, but he really was an exhibitor. The only person I had ever seen naked was me, and I thought he was pretty funny-looking so I laughed until I had tears in my eyes,” Temple wrote in her autobiography (via Deseret News).
While this story merits enough horror to fill an autobiography on its own, Temple also revealed that she was the victim of an assassination attempt when she was 10 ten years old (via The New Yorker).
The idea of murdering someone is hard for any sane adult to wrap their head around, it’s even harder to imagine why anyone would want to kill a child. Sadly, the story behind the assassination attempt is just about as devastating as the attempt itself. The trouble started on April 23, 1928, the very day Shirley was born.
