Kerry Washington has opened up again about the moment she learned her father wasn’t her biological parent, revealing that he experienced panic attacks leading up to telling her.
Speaking on the latest episode of Call Her Daddy, released on Wednesday (March 18), the Scandal actress shared that she found out in 2018 her mother, Valerie, had used a sperm donor due to fertility struggles.
Washington also recalled the exact moment her father, Earl Washington, became visibly distressed when she expressed interest in appearing on the PBS series Finding Your Roots, where she planned to explore her family history.
“So I call up my parents and I’m like, ‘I bumped into Skip Gates. I’m going to do Finding Your Roots. We’re going to learn everything we can possibly learn about our family,'” Washington shared around the 48-minute mark of the clip. “And my dad started having panic attacks. And I couldn’t figure it out.”
While her mother was fully on board and thought it was a “great” idea, Washington said her father was clearly “not happy,” which made her start questioning what he could be “afraid of.”
“Are you worried that you’re going to find out like your great-grandmother had a brothel? What could possibly be the issue?” she joked.
She later suggested that her parents meet with Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. first, who then “hypothetically” raised how a sperm donor revelation could affect their daughter’s genealogy results.
“He was like, ‘Definitely it would, and you need to tell her,'” Washington explained.
Eventually, her parents sat her down to talk, but she said they “fumbled through” the conversation, leaving her initially thinking it was some kind of “weird prank.”
“I was so confused and also also at the exact same time, I felt like, ‘Yes, this is it. This is the puzzle piece that I’ve been trying to solve for my entire life.'”
Although Washington admitted she felt like she had been “lied to” about her background, she has since found peace with it.
In a 2023 interview with People, she shared that learning the truth helped her develop “love and compassion and understanding” for her parents.
“Taking this deep dive into our family history made me put myself in their shoes and think about the things that they’ve had to navigate and what they’ve been through and what they’ve sacrificed. And it really made me feel closer to them,” she said.
She also reflected on the experience in her 2023 memoir, Thicker Than Water.
