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Time healed their wounds.
By Alexandra Blogier — Written on Mar 18, 2023
Demi Moore’s 13-year marriage to Bruce Willis ultimately ended in an amicable divorce in 2000 and it also gave the actress her three daughters, Rumer, 34, Scout, 31, and Tallulah, 29.
While she and her daughters maintain a close relationship today, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, for three years, Moore's two younger daughters cut contact with the actress, a heartache the family has worked hard to heal.
“Everything that’s come forward has allowed us to reevaluate what’s important and what needs attention that has been overlooked and neglected,” Moore said during a 2021 interview with Naomi Campbell, reflecting on how they addressed their fallout over the course of the pandemic.
Why did Demi Moore's daughters stop speaking to her?
Moore’s daughters revealed that their estrangement from their mother came after her marriage to Ashton Kutcher. The distance between Moore and her daughters existed at varying levels for each respective daughter.
Rumer kept a more open line of communication between herself and Moore — Tallulah and Scout completely stopped talking to their mother for three years.
In a 2019 episode of "Red Table Talk" with the Smith family, Rumer said that “Scout and Tallulah had very different experiences than I had when we stopped talking to my mom.”
Scout and Tallulah Willis didn't speak to Moore for three years after feeling abandoned by her during her marriage to Ashton Kutcher.
Moore's daughters felt that she focused more on him than on her relationship with them.
“So much of that time, especially with Ashton, I was so angry because I felt like something that was mine had been taken away,” explained Tallulah. She added that when Moore and Kutcher tried to have a baby together, “there was so much focus on that, it was like, ‘Oh, well, we’re not enough.’”
Moore herself has said that being in a relationship with Kutcher took her away from her daughters in an emotional sense.
“The addiction and the co-dependency, my addiction to Ashton, that was probably almost more devastating because it took me seriously away emotionally,” Moore stated in her memoir, Inside Out.
“I felt so lost,” Moore says of her emotional state during her estrangement from her daughters. “I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘I don’t know what to do. How do I get through this day?’
“I was in so much pain, physically as well as emotionally, I could barely function.”
Moore reconsidered her identity as a mother during the time she spent out of communication with her daughters.
“That feeling of not being anchored by all of these people’s needs and my role as their nurturer was unbearable,” she wrote in her memoir. “I had no choice but just to be with myself, and I hated it.”
She found herself wondering, “Is this life? Because if this is it, I’m done.” Yet time healed her family’s wounds, as it often does.
Moore has noted that she and her daughters are now in closer touch than ever, in part due to the change in their family environment caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which allowed them to spend more time together and reestablish their relationship as the central focus of their lives.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.