East Hampton's Ina Garten reveals childhood abuse by her father: I 'remember thinking he would kill me'

In her upcoming memoir, East Hampton cookbook author and Food Network star Ina Garten says she feared for her life while growing up under a violent father.

"I was terrified," the "Barefoot Contessa" star, 76, told People magazine about passages in her upcoming "Be Ready When the Luck Happens" that described her surgeon father hitting her and pulling her hair if she met with his disapproval.

"I was physically afraid of my dad," she said in an interview published Wednesday. “I literally remember thinking he would kill me if I did something. I was physically afraid of him. And my mother just was unsupportive."

Garten, whose Hamptons gourmet food store, the Barefoot Contessa, would prove the start of a media empire, said her older brother, Ken, also suffered under their parents, Charles and Florence Rosenberg. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, she found herself retreating behind closed doors.

"If there's a threat of violence, you're always afraid, even when it's not happening," Garten said. "So I basically spent my entire childhood in my bedroom with a door closed," adding, "I think it was just protection. It was just to keep myself safe."

Her controlling mother was psychologically abusive, Garten recalled, consistently telling the girl that things would "turn out badly."

"I wouldn't be surprised if she was diagnosed with Asperger's [syndrome]," Garten said. "She really didn’t know how to have a relationship, which is why I think, as I’ve gotten older, having relationships is so important to me."

Garten believes she "overcame my childhood just by sheer determination," she told the magazine. "I just wasn't about to spend my life like that. And I think, a lot of times, people make a decision to live their lives differently and they end up sliding back into what they feel is familiar and I was determined not to do that."

She credits her husband, Jeffrey, 77, whom she met when she was 16 and married when she was just shy of 21, for showing her "a totally different way to live." When the couple wed in December 1968, she said, her mother "thought I was too young to get married, but it was the first time in my life when I just said to her, ‘I know you don't think this is a good idea. And for the first time, I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I don’t care. I’m doing this.’ "

She eventually reconciled with her late father, but not her late mother, Garten said. "He, in his own way, apologized and my mom never acknowledged it."

"Be Ready When the Luck Happens," from the Penguin Random House imprint Crown, is set for publication Oct. 1.

A White House staffer before buying the Barefoot Contessa gourmet food store in Westhampton Beach in 1978, Garten moved the shop to East Hampton in 1985 and sold it to two employees in 1996. She wrote the first of her bestselling cookbooks in 1999 and, three years later, "Barefoot Contessa" began its 19-year Food Network run.

The shop, on Newtown Lane, closed in 2002. In 2022, an intersecting stretch of Barns Lane was renamed Ina Garten Way. She began her current Food Network show, the celebrity-oriented dining series "Be My Guest," that same year.