Sharon Stone revealed that she allegedly lost millions in savings as while recovering from a debilitating 2001 stroke.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter from Tuesday, the 66-year-old actress claimed that the $18 million that she had accrued after more than two decades in Hollywood had evaporated during the years she was unable to work due to brain damage from the stroke.
Stone — who controversially claimed that Kevin Spacey‘s banishment from Hollywood was partially inspired by homophobia in the same interview — attributed her loss of millions to people around her who allegedly mismanaged her money as she struggled to regain basic functions, like the ability to read, which she lost ‘for a couple of years.’
In total, Stone said it took her seven years to mostly recover from the effects of the life-threatening stroke, which doctors gave her just one in 100 odds of surviving.
‘People took advantage of me over that [recovery] time,’ Stone claimed. ‘I had $18 million saved because of all my success, but when I got back into my bank account, it was all gone.’
Sharon Stone said that her entire $18 million in savings had evaporated during her seven-year recovery from a debilitating stroke she suffered in 2001 in a Hollywood Reporter interview published Tuesday; pictured June 17 in Hollywood
Stone, who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage in 2001, said her brain bled for nine days, which temporarily robbed her of her ‘sense of smell, my sight, my touch’; pictured the year of her stroke
She described the surreal feeling of having little to her name one she was competent enough to take over her finances.
‘My refrigerator, my phone — everything was in other people’s names,’ she revealed.
Stone then clarified: ‘I had zero money.’
It’s not clear what Stone had to pay in medical bills and years of therapies, but she described the sever symptoms caused by her subarachnoid hemorrhage.
‘I bled into my brain for nine days, so my brain was shoved to the front of my face,’ she explained, adding, ‘It wasn’t positioned in my head where it was before.’
The physical change to her brain meant that ‘everything changed.’
‘My sense of smell, my sight, my touch. I couldn’t read for a couple of years,’ the Oscar nominee admitted. ‘Things were stretched and I was seeing color patterns.
‘A lot of people thought I was going to die,’ she added.
Beyond the changes to her senses, Stone agreed ‘one hundred percent’ that the stroke changed how she thinks.
‘A Buddhist monk told me that I had been reincarnated into my same body,’ she shared. ‘I had a death experience and then they brought me back.’
‘People took advantage of me over that [recovery] time,’ Stone claimed. ‘I had $18 million saved because of all my success, but when I got back into my bank account, it was all gone’
‘My refrigerator, my phone — everything was in other people’s names,’ she said of when she regained control of her finances. ‘I had zero money’; pictured June 21 in Beverly Hills
Stone, who said ‘a lot of people’ though she would die, shared her strategy for moving on from the stroke: ‘Stay present and let go’; pictured June 17 in Hollywood
In addition to her difficulty reading for years to come, Stone continued to suffer eyesight problems and had memory difficulties for years to come, which made it difficult for her to get acting jobs.
Despite the debilitating symptoms she lived with for years, Stone said she was eventually able to move by ‘stay[ing] present and let[ting] go.’
‘I decided not to hang onto being sick or to any bitterness or anger,’ she admitted. ‘If you bite into the seed of bitterness, it never leaves you.
‘But if you hold faith, even if that faith is the size of a mustard seed, you will survive. So, I live for joy now. I live for purpose,’ Stone said defiantly.