Nicholas Brendon: Arrest Was Due to Sexual Abuse & Depression, 'This Isn't Who I Am'

Nicholas Brendon says his arrest in Florida on Friday after trashing a hotel room was caused by his ongoing battle with depression and difficulty dealing with memories of being molested when he was a child.

In an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat on Monday, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star admitted that he’d stopped taking his meds a while ago, “which was a mistake that culminated into my taking some sleeping pills and then going into a blackout.”

The actor had been in Tallahassee to attend the ALT*Con convention when he called police at about 11 p.m. on Friday night, complaining that his phone and wallet had been stolen from his hotel room.

But when an officer arrived at the hotel, the manager said that Brendon, 43, had taken pills and alcohol and was walking around with blood on him and “his clothes torn and wet from a toilet overflow he created [in a hotel room],” according to the police report.

He was arrested after flipping a bed, smashing a porcelain figure, pulling the phone out of the wall and clogging the toilet, which caused water to spill out onto the room’s carpet, causing up to $1,000 damage.

“I hate this. I hate the way I feel right now. I hate how I’ve come off,” Brendon told the newspaper. “This isn’t who I am.”

He said that he was trying to come to terms with “a lot of the stuff I’m having to deal with in my life, inside of my head, which is not fun and it’s not funny.”

Saying that it wasn’t an excuse for his behavior, Brendon explained that one of the issues he was dealing with was being sexually abused as a child.

“When I was a kid I was molested for two years by a teacher,” he said, explaining that he’d never spoken publicly about it before. “From that moment my life changed immensely and I haven’t talked about it because I didn’t want to use it as a crutch, but I’m seeing as I get older that it did have a huge effect on me.”

“I just thought that I could brush it aside,” he added, getting emotional.

Brendon – who’s previously gone to rehab for substance abuse issues and was arrested earlier this year for allegedly trashing a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale – later talked about the abuse with TMZ, explaining that the perpetrator had been jailed for five years.

“If something good can come out of this, if I can talk about it and help people out, and change my behavior, that’d be great,” he added.