How Courtney Stodden’s Lifetime Movie Sparked Decision to Quit Alcohol

Stodden, of course, rose to fame after she married The Green Mile actor Doug Hutchison in 2011, when he was 50 and she was just 16. The two met after she signed up for one of his online acting workshops in 2010, before things between them escalated. They first split in 2013, before reconciling and eventually breaking for good in 2018; the divorce was finalized in 2020.

The whole saga was recently chronicled in a Lifetime movie, I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story, on which Stodden served as an executive producer and in which she appeared as narrator to her own life. The experience of working on the movie was tough for Stodden, now 31, who told TooFab how it affected her mental health.

“I think my main concern was not knowing if all the therapy I had done previously paid off, because I knew I’m gonna have to relive all of this,’ and not just reliving it in font, in a book, but actually visually seeing it happen,” she shared in an interview last week, revealing her concerns ahead of the project.

“That was really the main concern I had for my mental health,” said Stodden, who added she was “right in feeling that, because it definitely has triggered a lot of past trauma and re-opened a lot of wounds.”

Some of the work she had done on herself previously including out-patient treatment and cutting back on alcohol, which left her believing she was “healed.” But she then put on a screener of the Lifetime movie and found herself reaching for the bottle.

“I thought, ‘You know, I’m fine, I’m just gonna watch the screener with a couple of [Veuve Clicquot], bang it out,” she said with a laugh. “And I’m telling you, maybe not even ten minutes into the screener my bottle of Veuve was gone. And I’m like, opening the other one.”

“And that’s the day, it was on July 15th, that I realized I am not healed at all,” she continued. “If I had to escape this quickly into the movie, what does that say about my journey now today?”

July 15 is the same day Stodden shared a video to Instagram in which she announced, “Alcohol, I’m breaking up with you. It’s been a toxic relationship for years. Something I used to cope, to escape, to survive. But it’s hurt me more than it’s ever helped me—publicly and privately.”

As of October 2, when TooFab spoke with Stodden, she said she was “79 days no alcohol,” admitting that number comes “with a few slip-ups,” while adding, “but I’m not gonna let that set me back.”

“I’m just gonna keep moving forward,” she vowed. “It’s been really difficult, it’s been one of the most difficult things, but I think in order to get over all of this, you have to go through it to get to the other side.”

Telling TooFab the TV movie was just a “PG version of what I went through,” Stodden also said that watching everything back now “as an adult with my brain completely developed” was just “heartbreaking” to her. It also, however, helped her realize that “I am a survivor” and “really brought me to a place of understanding how much I actually withstood.”

I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story is streaming now.