Hey Dad! star speaks out about co-star Robert Hughes. “There were times I thought about killing myself, seriously.”

*Warning – Disturbing content

Former child star Sarah Monahan has told how her Hey Dad! co-star Robert Hughes exposed himself at her as she sat on the floor behind the TV set.

The 38-year-old, whose attacker was jailed last May for a minimum of six years, gave an emotional account of the abuse she suffered at the hands of the actor in her memoir entitled Allegedly.

Detailed in this week’s WHO magazine, Sarah, who lives in Texas with her American husband Matt Morris, writes: ‘He looked at me, undid his belt and his fly and dropped his pants.

‘He pulled down his briefs … He touched himself brushing his hand over his penis.’

She later adds: ‘I feel that Robert stole my childhood.’

The Australian actress was one of the many victims who suffered sexual abuse by Hughes on the set of the hit sitcom which first aired in 1987.

She also details in her book moments he would encourage her to sit on his lap during photoshoots.

After she was flashed at by Hughes, she says she complained to a show producer and begged that scenes where he hugged his on-screen daughter and in which she sat on his lap were written out.

On Monday, Sarah, who says she never wants children of her as the result of her ordeal, told mamamia how her mother Linda ‘resented’ her for bringing shame on the family name.

She said: ‘[My mum] disowned me when I went public… apparently she resented me because as a kid she would have liked to go back to work and, because I was working, she had to drive me around and then apparently when I went public I made her look bad.’

She went on: ‘I let it go. I push it back on her because she didn’t talk to her own mother for fifteen years, so she had an issue, not me, so I just let her have her own issues.’

‘The world is overpopulated… I have weird genetic things I feel I don’t want to pass on and, because I’m not close to my mother, I don’t feel I need to repeat that again,’ she said.

‘There were times I thought about killing myself, seriously,’ she told the Daily Telegraph.

Sarah was six years old when she joined the show in 1987 and first went public with her story of abuse in a Woman’s Day article in March 2010.

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