Iconic 90s child star’s sad battle – boozing at 14, meth addiction and four marriages

Jodie Sweetin was just five years old when she was cast as the outgoing, witty and often nosy Stephanie Tanner in Full House.

While her acting career started with TV adverts, Jodie’s role in the hit ABC sitcom, which ran from 1987 to 1995, would see her thrown into the limelight and remains the part she’s best known for to this day. But the former child star, who’s now all grown up and looks unrecognisable from her middle child character, had a tough time after the show came to an end.

Like many child stars catapulted to fame at a young age, Jodie struggled to adjust and quickly found her life spiralling out of control as she started heavily drinking. For years Jodie stepped away from acting as she later battled an intense drug addiction and suffered a rocky love life that ended with three divorces.

READ MORE: Snoop Dogg’s wild life – employs a joint roller, famous family and murder trial

For the latest US showbiz news, click here.

She recalled how her issues with substance abuse began when she guzzled down “two bottles of wine” at her co-star Candace Cameron Bure’s wedding when she was just 14. “That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life but that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do,” she wrote in her 2009 memoir, UnSweetined.

Soon Jodie also started using drugs, taking ecstasy throughout high school before switching to cocaine in college and finding herself in and out of rehab through her teens and 20s. Just a few years after her first marriage to police officer Shaun Golguin in 2002, Jodie tried meth for the first time and quickly got hooked.

Opening up about just how bad her addiction got, she told People in 2008: ”Everything revolved around my addiction. On a typical day I’d wake up and feel terrible because I hadn’t done any. You’re either trying to get it, doing it or worrying about when you’re going to get it next. You don’t even realize that it’s taken over so quickly.”

Jodie’s weight plummeted down to just 100lbs but her husband “had no idea” why until a night of heavy partying in 2005 saw her hospitalised and she finally told her family she had a drug problem. She checked into an in-patient treatment centre and later moved to a sober living house but revealed “trust issues” created by her drug problem led to the breakdown of her marriage during this time and she ended up divorcing her husband.

Jodie continued to focus on her recovery while hosting Fuse’s Pants-Off Dance-Off, where she met her second husband, Cody Herpin, in 2007 while he was working as a driver and transportation coordinator on film sets. The couple tied the knot just two months after meeting and welcomed a daughter, Zoie, in April 2008.

But their happy marriage was short-lived and Jodie filed for legal separation in November 2008. During an intense custody battle over her daughter, Jodie later revealed she’d started getting high again.

In her 2009 memoir, she recalled how she hit “rock bottom” when at one point she drank two glasses of wine and drove with her baby daughter in the car. But a call from the court to tell her she was having an emergency custody investigation due to her drinking was enough to motivate Jodie to get sober, which she did on December 7, 2008.

She wrote: “From that day forward, I threw myself into going to [Alcoholics Anonymous] and avoided people who do blow off their coffee tables. … Life is good. I’m happier than I can remember.” By 2010 Jodie had welcomed her second daughter, Beatrix, with her then-boyfriend Morty Coyle, a musician and DJ.

The couple married in 2012 and kept their wedding a secret for a year but then soon filed for legal separation in June 2013. After the split, Jodie got into a car accident and was prescribed pain meds, which she revealed led to her relapsing.

Jodie managed to get herself back into recovery and went back to school to train as a drug and alcohol counsellor. In the meantime, she dove into acting again, appearing in a number of TV movies before returning to reprise Stephanie Tanner in Netflix’s Fuller House, a spin-off of the original sitcom.

Jodie also appeared on Dancing With the Stars in 2016, coming in sixth place. That same year, she got engaged to Justin Hodak but her rocky love life continued when the pair split a year later.

Following their breakup, he was arrested several times for having a gun in his home while being a convicted felon and showing up at Jodie’s house while she had a restraining order against him. In 2017 he was sentenced to more than six years in jail after he pleaded “no contest” to charges of falsifying evidence by threatening a witness and possession of a deadly weapon.

Despite the setbacks she’s faced, Jodie has continued to focus on her sobriety and has been open about her journey in an effort to help “destigmatise” addiction. She told the Allison Interviews in 2021: “I’m always very honest too. For me, medication has been key.

“Otherwise, I struggle with stuff where I’m not getting out of bed…and that’s now how I want to live my life. And now that I know when I need to speak up for myself, I’ve done that.”

In 2022 she tied the knot for the fourth time after finding love again with addiction therapist, Mescal Wasilewski, who she began dating in 2017. “We intertwine so well, he’s funny and smart, and he’s my biggest supporter. It’s really magical,” Jodie told People of their romance.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk