Celebrity

Anjelica Huston, in New Memoir, Says She Was Brutally Assaulted by Ex Ryan O'Neal

"He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair and hit me in the forehead with the top of his skull," she writes

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Published on October 24, 2014 12:25PM EDT

Anjelica Huston alleges that she was the victim of a vicious assault by her then-boyfriend, Ryan O’Neal, in the’70s.

In her new tell-all, Watch Me, the 63-year-old actress recounts the details of an alleged and brutal fight that drove her to break up with the Love Story actor, according to the National Enquirer, which obtained an early copy of the book, due to be published Nov. 11.

“He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair and hit me in the forehead with the top of his skull,” writes Huston.

The incident allegedly took place at a party the two were attending in Beverly Hills in the late ’70s. O’Neal, Huston writes, supposedly became upset with her after she didn’t return immediately from a trip to the bathroom.

“I saw stars and reeled back,” she writes. “Half blind, I ran away from him.”

Huston then shut herself in the bathroom to escape O’Neal before she agreed to let the actor speak to her alone.

But instead, she claims, he hit her again. “Ryan was batting me about the head with an open hand,” she writes. “Then abruptly he left.”

Huston left O’Neal that night, retreating into the arms of former lover Jack Nicholson, whom she’d initially dumped for O’Neal. They dated on and off from 1973 to 1989.

“I regretted leaving Jack,” she writes of their initial split. “I hated causing him pain.”

But that relationship had its flaws, as well: Nicholson had a weakness for the ladies. When Huston confronted him about sleeping with an ex, she writes, he simply told her: “Oh Toots, it was just a mercy f—.”

The womanizing eventually became too much, and Huston ended things with Nicholson. She ultimately married sculptor Robert Graham in 1992 and the two remained together until his death in 2008.