Tom Hanks breaks silence after daughter’s bombshell claims about ‘violent’ childhood

Tom Hanks has broken his silence after the release of his daughter’s memoir in which she spoke candidly about her difficult childhood.

In the book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, written by his only daughter Elizabeth Ann Hanks, she recalled the unexpected decision by her mother Samantha Lewes to move her daughter and son Colin to Sacramento, and the “emotional and physical violence” they experienced that brought them back to Los Angeles.

“I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity…  in order to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about,” the 68-year-old actor shared of his daughter, known as E.A.

Speaking to Access Hollywood, he revealed that she had been “very open” with the family about “about what the process is” when it came to writing the book, released in April.

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E.A and her older brother Colin’s mom was actress Samantha Lewes, who Tom met in the 1970s and married in 1978.

In the memoir E.A. wrote of how she has very few memories of living with her father in the early years and that she split her childhood between Sacramento where her mother moved the family, and Los Angeles where Tom lived.

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She candidly recalled how “from five to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” living in a house with a pool and a bedroom covered in pictures of horses. 

But as her mother’s health deteriorated, “the backyard became so full of dog [expletive] that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke, the fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible”.

“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade,” wrote Elizabeth.

“My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”

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The memoir is set around a six-month road trip E.A took after her mother’s death that replicated the trip they took when the author was 14 from California to Florida alongside Interstate 10.

Samantha moved the family to Sacramento in 1987 when the divorce from Tom was finalized, and although never diagnosed E.A. wrote that she believes her mother struggled with bipolar disorder with episodes of “extreme paranoia and delusion”.

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Tom married Samantha in 1978 when he was 22 and she was 26; they met studying theater at California State University in Sacramento. 

Colin was born in 1977 and E.A in 1982.

Tom met wife Rita Wilson in 1981 and they reconnected in 1985 on the film Volunteers.

“Rita and I just looked at each other and – ka-boing – that was that,” Tom once said of his chemistry with Rita during an appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2016. “I asked Rita if it was the real thing for her, and it just couldn’t be denied.”

Tom and Rita married in 1988 and have two sons, Chet, 34, and Truman, 29.