Watch: Ruby Rose Breaks Multiple Ribs, Hospitalized After Falling in Pool
Ruby Rose was at the center of a police investigation more than 10 years before her breakout role on Orange Is the New Black.Â
The actress recalled facing “baby killer” accusations as a 15-year-old in her native Australia, where she and a childhood friend were smoking their first cigarette when they stumbled upon a badly injured boy on a playground.Â
“I saw something on play equipment. I went, ‘Oh!’ I thought it was a doll hanging,” she recounted on the Sept. 19 episode of Kaitlyn Bristowe‘s Off the Vine podcast. “As we got close enough, we could tell this was a real baby human—like a 4½-year-old. There was blood coming out of his ears, nose and mouth. It was very traumatic.”
Rose, now 40, and her friend immediately sought help, with the Batwoman alum picking up the boy and rushing him to a group of adults at a nearby house.Â
“I thought I’d saved his life because there was a big deep breath,” Rose continued, explaining how CPR was performed as an ambulance was called to the home. “And I was like, ‘Oh my god. Thank goodness.'”
While Rose initially thought the boy was going to recover, she later learned that his condition deteriorated and he ultimately died at the hospital because he “was brain dead for so long.”
And as she grappled with the “horrific” incident in the following days, Rose found herself being questioned by authorities.
“The police turned up at my school,” she remembered, adding that she started getting bullied by her classmates over the ordeal. “People were like, ‘Baby killer!’ I was just breaking down left, right and center.”
Fortunately, the truth was eventually uncovered when the boy’s older brother came out of a dissociative amnesia episode, a mental health condition where a person forgets information due to trauma or stress.
“What did eventually happen was the older brother remembered,” Rose shared, explaining how a freak accident led to the death of the little boy. “He’d pushed his brother down the slide. The brother had been caught [and he was] trying to get him off the nail.”
Frank Micelotta/Fox via Getty Images
Unable to free the boy, Rose said the older brother “freaks out when he starts to see blood” and runs off with “no memory” of the incident for two weeks.
“He finally had the memory and went back to the police,” the DJ continued. “I was cleared, but that [the mom] still didn’t want me at the funeral. So, everyone else went except for me.”
To this day, Rose still has the death and its subsequent investigation on her mind. In fact, it shaped her interest in human psychology as she got older.
“My whole life, I studied psychology like somebody would have the same kind of emphasis on being famous,” she added. “I was really interested in the insides of people.”
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