Courtney Stodden has revealed that she has been diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.
The model publicly shared her diagnosis on Instagram on Sunday, posting a clip from her infamous 2011 interview with ABC News’ Lara Spencer, which took place after Stodden married Doug Hutchinson, 51, at age 16.
“They made the moment a joke…but for a reason,” Stodden, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, began the lengthy caption.
They continued, “There’s a part of my story that no one ever understood. As an adult, I was diagnosed as suffering from Tourette syndrome…and I spent most of my childhood with uncontrollable tics.”
Ms Stodden, 31, said their tics included stuttering, squinting, mouth movements and muscle tension, as well as seizures from earlier in life.
“I never talked about it before because I was embarrassed,” the reality star wrote. “I didn’t want to put myself out there. I thought it would make people look weird, like there was something ‘wrong’ with me. So I hid it.”
Stodden detailed that when she “had tics and muscle spasms,” she “deliberately” tried to make them look “sexy” to hide what she was actually experiencing.
But when Stodden gave a high-profile interview in 2011, their “nervousness” caused the tics to resurface.
“At that moment, it became a meme…people thought I was onto something,” Stodden recalled. “It wasn’t. There was no alcohol, no pills. There was nothing in my system.”
“What you were seeing was… a girl with Tourette’s Syndrome under pressure, being watched, trying to protect herself. My body was reacting in ways I don’t have the words to explain yet. And instead of being understood… I was laughed at.”
Stodden said that since hiding their Tourette syndrome, they are no longer “ashamed” of their diagnosis.
“Because there’s nothing to be ashamed of about things you can’t control,” they said. “And if you’ve ever felt misunderstood about something that happened to your body… you’re not alone.”
Ms Stodden became a tabloid staple in 2011 after marrying Ms Hutchison, now 65, at the age of 16 in a hastily arranged ceremony in Las Vegas.
The couple separated and reconciled many times during their relationship, before declaring divorce in 2017, and the divorce was finalized three years later.
In 2022, Stodden exclusively told Page Six that her marriage to the “Green Mile” actor felt like a “conservatorship.”
“It was really hard to live in it. We couldn’t be free,” they said.
