Chrissy Metz accused her stepfather of physically and emotionally abusing her throughout her childhood in her explosive tell-all book This Is Me. But the stepfather from hell behavior doesn’t end there. The man who raised her, Crayton Hodge Jr., was once arrested for soliciting for prostitution.
In court papers obtained from Alachua County Court in Gainsville, Florida, Hodge, 70, was arrested and charged with one count of soliciting for prostitution on July 27, 1988.
“Subject requested sexual favor, specifically ‘head,’ in exchange for $10,” the arrest report read. “The entire conversation was monitored, recorded.”
Hodge entered a plea of nolo contendere, which means no contest. He was sentenced to five days in prison with two days of credit towards the confinement.
But the trouble for Hodge didn’t start there. He was busted on June 3, 1986 for writing a worthless check in the amount of $155.45.
The case was nolle prossed, which means he was not prosecuted.
Hodge went on to marry Metz’s mother Denise on January 6, 1993. Her biological father Mark Metz left the family when she was 8 years old.
In the NBC star’s memoir This is Me, she explained how Hodge, who she refers to as “Trigger” in the book, “loved” his two biological children and her half-sister Morgana, who Denise welcomed with a boyfriend who abandoned them.
“Me, not so much,” she wrote. “My body seemed to offend him, but he couldn’t help but stare, especially when I was eating. He joked about putting a lock on the refrigerator. We had lived with a lack of food for so long that when it was there, I felt like I had to eat it before it disappeared. Food was my only happiness.”
She explained how Hodge began physically abusing her as well.
“I don’t remember why Trigger hit me the first time,” she penned. “He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much. He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong. I remember being on the kitchen floor after he knocked me over and I was begging to know what I did. He just shoved me hard with his foot.”
The abuse escalated when she entered her teens, as he began weighing her when she was 14 years old.
“He’d get the scale from the bathroom and clang it hard on the kitchen floor,” she claimed. “‘Well, get on the damn thing!’ Trigger would yell. ‘This is what you need to know.’”
She continued, “He sat in a chair next to the scale as I got on. ‘Good God almighty,’ he yelled every single time. The number then was about 140 or 130. Most of my friends weighed about ninety pounds. ‘Why are you getting fatter?’ he demanded. By then the beating had escalated. One time he hit me and I looked right in his face. If I had a gun, I thought, I would shoot you.”
Despite the abuse, Metz insisted she “really did love him” because he “did more for [her] than [her] father ever did.”
