Chevy Chase Was A Tortured Child

Chevy Chase is set to reveal in his new book the grim details of his childhood, describing torture his mother and stepfather put him through while growing up with his younger brother, Page Six reports:

“I lived in fear all the time - deathly fear,” Chase says in a new authorized biography, “I’m Chevy Chase . . . And You’re Not,” by Rena Fruchter, out next month from Virgin Books. It reveals that Chase’s concert-pianist mother, Cathalene, was a “very unhappy woman” who suffered from depression and panic attacks that could set her off at a moment’s notice. They had her locking young Chevy in a closet for hours at a time and waking him up in the middle of the night to slap him “continually and hard, across the face,” Chase tells the author. “I don’t remember what it was for, or what I had done.”

One of her other brutal punishments was to whip Chase over a period of days. “She would say to me, ‘Ten lashes on the backs of your legs every day for a week at 5 p.m.’ How can you hold on to that kind of anger against your kid?” Chase relates to Fruchter. “I knew I was a ‘bad boy,’ but I didn’t know that everybody wasn’t punished the same way I was.” Chase’s younger half-brother, John, tells the author: “My mother, at her worst, was like an unleashed animal. It was at her hands, in her feral states, that Chevy suffered the darkest of his secret torments.”

Chase was also traumatized by his mom’s second husband, John Cederquist, who heaped on him “emotional and physical abuse that sometimes bordered on torture,” Fruchter writes. Both parents are dead, and Chevy says he will never forgive them for what they did.