Brooke Shields reveals the sexist question two male doctors asked her after a seizure

Brooke Shields has spoken out about how male doctors treated her after she experienced a grand mal seizure.

On Monday (January 13), the Pretty Baby alum was discussing her new memoir Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman on Good Morning America when she was asked why she decided to write about her experience with the healthcare system.

“Women go through stuff. We need to be able to say, ‘This isn’t fair.’ We need to be able to self-advocate,” she said. “I had a seizure not too long ago and the two male doctors said, ‘Are you restricting yourself for dietary reasons?’ And I was like, ‘No. I’m a 59-year-old woman who looks younger bloated. Give me some potato chips!’ You wouldn’t say that to a man.”

She continued to explain that the goal of her memoir was not to show the differences between men and women or even to be angry about the situation. “But it’s time to kind of explore this without yelling, without being angry. I tell my girls… we don’t have to yell louder,” Shields said.

“We just have to be secure in what we believe and to be heard, because we’re not going to get anywhere by just screaming.”

The Blue Lagoon actor previously discussed her grand mal seizure in her 2023 Woman of the Year interview with Glamour. At the time, she said when preparing for her show at The Carlyle she had fallen “headfirst” into a wall and began “frothing at the mouth.”

Shields explained that, during her preparation, she was overdoing the amount of water she was drinking. “I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” she said. “I was waiting for an Uber. I get down to the bottom of the steps, and I start evidently looking weird, and [the people I was with] were like: ‘Are you okay?’”

According to Shields, she ended up walking over to a restaurant when the collapse happened. “I go in, two women come up to me; I don’t know them. Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,” Shields recalled.

She continued, adding that she was “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue.” A grand mal seizure causes a loss of consciousness and violent muscle contractions, according to the Mayo Clinic, which describes it as what a person would typically think of when picturing a seizure.

“Stop trying to make me a crazy actress or a female that doesn’t know what the f**k they’re doing,” she said after mentioning the doctors didn’t believe her explanation of why the seizure happened.

“I was drinking too much water because I felt dehydrated because I was singing more than I’ve ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast.”