Hollywood Actor Terry Crews Reveals the 'Dirty Little Secret' He Kept Hidden for Years

Actor and former NFL player Terry Crews is sparking a fair amount of discussion with the release of three videos this month that unveil and unpack his "dirty little secret" — a past addiction to pornography that the "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star said nearly derailed his marriage.

"For years, years, years my dirty little secret was that I was addicted to pornography," Crews said in a Feb. 11 Facebook video. "It really, really messed up my life in a lot of ways. It became a thing where I didn't tell anybody."

The actor said that keeping his porn addiction a secret only made the problem worse, and revealed that he has been free from the grips of his addiction for six or seven years now.

"I literally had to go to rehab for it," Crews said.

He's hoping that by sharing his story, he'll be able to help others who struggle with porn to process through and get help. The first step, Crews said, is talking with others about the problem rather than allowing it to secretly fester.

"By not telling people, it becomes more powerful, but when you tell and when you put it out there in the open ... it loses its power," he said.

Crews, who is a Christian, said that porn impacts how users begin to see other human beings.

"It changes the way you think about people," he said. "People become objects. They become things to be used rather than people to be loved."

Watch his comments below:

In a second video published this month, Crews said that he has received a lot of questions about his own personal struggles with porn.

"I went to therapy big time. When I went into therapy I didn't know what was going on," he explained, digging a bit deeper into his personal journey. "I didn't know how to beat it. I couldn't do it alone. What I was told was that I needed to become more aware."

It is through awareness that Crews said that those who struggle with porn can better gauge their emotions to try and prevent themselves from falling into familiar patterns.

In his own journey, he said that he was more likely to use it when he was depressed or lonely. So, being in-tune with his emotions offered him a way to try and curb the problem through preventative measures.

"You can't survive with guilt and shame," he warned.

See those comments below:

In a third video describing his "dirty little secret," Crews discussed how he also personally struggled with entitlement — another facet that he said played a role in fueling his addiction.

"I had the biggest sense of entitlement ever. I felt the world owed something. I felt like my wife owed me sex," he said. "I felt that everyone owed me. When you have a sense of entitlement it's extremely dangerous ... you find ways to self-medicate and act out with pornography when you feel your needs are not being met."

Crews also said that he believes every man truly desires intimacy, despite perceptions that some men are emotionally detached.

"Every man truly, truly desires to be intimate," he said. "Every time you look at pornography it's a desire for intimacy."

Watch the third video:

Crews is hardly the first person to point out the pitfalls of porn addiction, with a recent meta analysis of 22 separate studies from seven countries claiming to find a tie between pornography consumption and sexual aggression, yielding significant associations between smut and both verbal and physical aggression.

And as TheBlaze previously reported, Christian apologist Josh McDowell believes that rampant and unrestrained pornography use is the “probably the greatest problem or threat to the Christian faith in the history of the world.”

More specifically, McDowell sounded the alarm on how virtual reality products hold the power to exponentially increase porn consumption, imploring faith leaders to take a bold stand against smut.

“If pastors don’t wake up and Christian leaders … [and]  do something — and I mean radical, then the devastating consequences [for] our children will be upon the shoulders and conscience of those pastors,” McDowell said.

McDowell also recently commissioned a sweeping porn study through his organization, Josh McDowell Ministry — a landmark report that revealed a litany of troubling trends.

Nearly half of young people are actively seeking pornography weekly or more frequently — and more than one-in-four individuals between the ages of 25 and 30 first viewed smut before hitting puberty. The survey also found that 21 percent of youth pastors and 14 percent of pastors involved in the study are currently struggling with porn use.

Listen to what McDowell has to say about porn below:

Read the entire study here and learn more about McDowell’s four-day “Set Free Summit” that will address the issue of porn in April.