The Incredible Backstory of Marisol Nichols, Star of CW’s “Riverdale”

“Once you dive down this rabbit hole, it’s hard to turn it off; you can’t un-know it at all. And so I’ve tried and will continue to try to give a voice to this issue, lend whatever I can to help make a difference and to mobilize people to stand together to put an end to this because to me, the biggest problem of it is that most people don’t even know it occurs. Good people don’t know. And if good people don’t know about it, we can’t do anything about it.”

I had the pleasure to interview Marisol Nichols. Marisol is an American actress known for her role in the sixth season of 24 as Special Agent Nadia Yassir and as Hermione Lodge in the CW show, “Riverdale” based on the Archie comic series . She also Starred on “GCB.” Marisol is the Founder of FOUNDATION FOR A SLAVERY FREE WORLD and spokesperson for YOUTH FOR HUMAN RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL, non-profit organizations that fight modern slavery and human trafficking.

Yitzi: What is your “backstory”?

I had a pretty rough childhood. I was raised for a few years by my single mom until she married my step-dad a little later. We moved around a ton when I was a kid. I think we lived in 9 different houses before I was 15 — we moved from the City, back to the suburbs; different suburbs, different houses, all over the place.

I got into drugs at a very, very young age. I had had some certain inappropriate things happen to me when I was a kid and I think between not knowing how to deal with that and having somewhat of a turbulent home life, drugs were kind of an answer to those problems. So I started doing any kind of drug I could pretty much get my hands on starting with pot and cocaine at age 11.

I had something life-changing happen to me at 11 years old that kind of took me down that path and I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I didn’t. I became pretty rebellious. I ran away from home four or five times. I was in and out of a drug rehab at age 12. Did more drugs when I…