Jake “The Snake” Roberts On Overcoming Addiction, Depression & Childhood Abuse

WWE Hall of Famer Jake The Snake Roberts was a recent guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he opened up about his struggles with addiction, being conceived in rape, and being molested as a young boy.  

(Transcription Credit: Michael McClead, WrestleZone)

Roberts Credits DDP For Getting Clean/Healthy Again:

Without it [DDP Yoga] I’d never made it because, us junkies, we like to lie a lot and alcoholics do too, but it was a tough tough road, man. He [DDP] guided me through it. He never gave up and I can never thank him enough for what he’s done for me and giving me my life back and not only my life, but my family. I’ve got my kids back. They’re all digging me now. I’m a great grandfather, probably the best grandfather ever. I’m just saying, because it’s true. No man in his right mind would bring, one, much less two drunks [he and Scott Hall as depicted in The Resurrection of Jake The Snake documentary] into his home. You got to expect tragedy. There’s gonna be something bad come out of this. He was able to hold us together, man. There were a couple brief moments where that kinda escalated and got kinda stupid, but he wouldn’t give up, man. He gets a buzz off helping people, which to me is so amazing. I’ve picked that up off of him. I search people out now in a crowd that are having a hard time walking, or you see something going on, or they’re overweight. That gets me in. Using the name Jake The Snake, I can talk to them, ‘Hey, you ever thought about trying some DDP Yoga man, because it works!’

On When His Addiction Began & Struggles With Shame After Being Molested & Raped:

Alcohol was always there. I started drinking when I was 11 or 12….I was doing the coke and stuff. I’m hating myself the whole time I’m doing it. I’m not getting high anymore and I can’t put it down. I can’t turn away from it because there’s hope in that. What’s the hope for? No more pain. No more shame. That’s what it numbed me from: the shame. Shame is something you put on yourself. You can’t shame me; I have to do it myself. It was there and because I went through some ugly sh*t as a kid, being molested. My sister was molested too and then my sister was kidnapped and murdered. We got all these things thrown in there and I was hating myself because I didn’t protect my sister better. Life happens. [It’s] what you do with it.

That’s one of the things Dallas preaches. It’s what you do with it that counts. You don’t deflect it. You bring it to you. You chew it up. You spit it out. You sift through the bullsh*t and you go on. That’s something I couldn’t do because things got personal with me and I’d lock down and shut up. That’s how I handled things. I just didn’t talk about it. When you’ve been sexually molested, there is no good moment and that screwed my head up and it still messes with my head. I desperately desperately want to have a relationship with a woman, a true relationship, finally, at 63 because I did have relationships before, but I was constantly sabotaging them because I didn’t trust women. The last one raped me and beat me and threatened me and told me my Dad would kill me because my dad was 7 foot and weighed 400 pounds, so he could get the job done, but I just wanted my dad to be proud of me, so all these things factored in while the wife beats me and has me do her and beats me again afterwards.

Sex ain’t sex, if you’re doing it like that. That’s called rape and that sh*t screws your head up for life. Now what do you do with it? As a kid, I hid it away….I remember the first time talking about it to a high school buddy of mine, ‘ You’re so fuc*ing lucky man. She’s so fuc*ing hot.’ She was hot. She was 22 years old because my father’s a child molester, for Christ’s sake. Of course she was hot, but she wasn’t hot to me because that’s my mom. No! Then the beatings afterwards, that fuc*ing confuses you. You’ve got all this sh*t going and you start looking for a way out.

On How Often He Wrestled:

Back in my day, we wrestled seven days a week, except for Saturday and Sunday. We wrestled twice on Saturday and twice on Saturday. You might do the L.A. Coliseum at 2 and then get in the rental car and drive to San Diego so you can do a 7. The next day, you might be in Omaha at 2 and then in Des Moines at 7…There’s no off time, man. I wrestled [Ricky] Steamboat 93 days straight and about 60 days in, I had to call my wife and get her to take me around because I had gotten dumbed out. I was to the point that I couldn’t think, so I’d get to the airport and I’d know that they wanted tickets, but I had no idea where they were at and I couldn’t read anymore. I’d look at stuff to read. It just wouldn’t work [from] exhaustion. You just get beat up. Your body’s hurting so bad. People say steroids. We were taking steroids just to try to get healthy, to heal.

On Difficulties With Getting His Teeth Fixed:

They put 11 implants in and it was pretty bad, man. I had a bad day. It’s hard to medicate me and put me out because I’ve raised those levels too high. When I was out and they were pulling teeth, getting ready to put those things in to screw into, evidently when I was in that process, I stood up and just started pissing on the doctor and pissing on everybody in the room and chasing them. I sobered up, but they had to give me so much sh*t to put me out…this was a year and a half ago.

On Having Difficulties Holding A Baby:

All those years when I used to cringe when somebody would say, ‘Hey, would you hold my baby?’ I was like, ‘You don’t want me to hold your baby. You don’t know what the fu*k, I am. Don’t make me do that,’ because it would hurt me inside to pull that kid in and smile and lie. I’m not a good liar when it comes to sh*t like that. Vince [McMahon] wanted me to do a commercial for the ‘Just Say No’ campaign. ‘You’re gonna have me fuc*ing do this? To me, it’s not funny Vince.’ It’s because I know what it’s like to not be able to say no. There’s no worse feeling in the world, man. Here you have something that’s gonna kill you or you have life over here and it’s all green pastures and you’re gonna have a good relationship with a woman. I’m gonna take the poisonous drink.

On Being Conceived In Rape:

My mother was a 12 year old girl and her mother was dating my father. Her mother was. My grandmother passed out and my father left that bed and went into a 12 year old little girl’s room and raped her: that’s me. That’s how I got started and later in life, my father was raping my sister. I did not know it. He raped his other daughter. I did not know it. I always heard whispering and people giving him the evil eye and was like, ‘What the fuc* is their problem?’ Then I’d get in the ring with a guy and they knew my father and they’d beat the fu*king sh*t out of me because they hated him because they’d seen some of the sh*t he did. You want to believe that of your own father? You don’t ever want to believe that. God, you don’t want to believe that, do you?

On Not Being Able To Hold His Own Children:

The girl you met earlier, Cody, she is the first daughter of mine that I held in my lap. She was 22 before I would ever pick up one of my daughters and set her in my lap because I was afraid I’d turn into my father and I never wanted that. I never wanted to be someone that abuses a child because I’d been abused. I knew what that sh*t was like and I knew what it did to my fuc*ing head. Getting right and getting sober, learning to talk about it, helps a lot. It makes it better. It don’t cure it. You never get over it, but I can deal with it now. I don’t have to go medicate.

Readers can watch the Joe Rogan Experience in its entirety below:

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