Anne Heche Is Pregnant

ByABC News
September 6, 2001, 3:31 PM

Sept. 6 -- Up until she met her new husband, Anne Heche says her first night with Ellen DeGeneres was "the best sex I'd ever had." Now the actress is three months pregnant by the "extraordinary guy" she wed last weekend.

ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters announced the pregnancy Wednesday night on 20/20 following an exclusive interview in which Heche said sexual molestation she suffered at the hands of her father caused her to escape into a "fourth dimension" fantasy world in which she believed she was from another planet.

"I'm not crazy," Heche told Walters in the interview. "But it's a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me."

Later, Heche's mother denounced her daughter's assertions as "lies and blasphemies."

In the wide-ranging interview, Heche, 32, talked about her childhood, her career, her highly publicized relationship with DeGeneres and new love Coleman "Coley" Laffoon, a 27-year-old cameraman whom she married on Saturday. Although Heche said during the interview that she was not pregnant, she later called Walters to say she and Laffoon are indeed expecting.

Her Father's Secret Sex Life

Heche, promoting her new book, Call Me Crazy (Simon & Schuster), says she has waged a lifelong battle with mental illness.

"I had a fantasy world that I escaped to. I called my other personality Celestia," she explained. "I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane."

Heche traces her problems back to her father. Donald Heche, a choir director in a Baptist church, began sexually abusing his daughter when she was still a toddler, she says.

"He raped me he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me," said Heche.

She says she contracted herpes from her father. "I had a rash, I had sores, I had welts on my nose and on my lips," she said.

Heche did not learn that her father also had homosexual encounters until 1983, when he was dying of AIDS. When she learned he had the disease, she feared for her own life, she says.

However, in describing the abuse, the actress said it is only "in my memory."