Mariska Hargitay lived in fear of secret about her biological father being exposed

• Mariska Hargitay makes her directorial debut with HBO documentary, My Mom Jayne, which airs Friday, June 27.
• The documentary film delves into Hargitay’s reassessment of her mother, Jayne Mansfield, and her struggle to accept the truth of her biological father’s identity.
• The Law & Order: SVU star says she spent years living in fear of her secret getting out.

Mariska Hargitay has known the truth about her biological father for 30 years — shockingly, it never became a point of public gossip in all that time.

“That is so real,” Hargitay tells Entertainment Weekly of the fear of waking up one morning to find her deepest secret splashed across magazine headlines. “I still can’t believe that the story has never come out. And I still believe that somehow my story was divinely protected, so that I got to tell it on my timing.”

In her new documentary, My Mom Jayne, Hargitay reveals that her birth father was not, as she and the world assumed, Mickey Hargitay, but rather a crooner named Nelson Sardelli, with whom her mother, Jayne Mansfield, had a public love affair in the early 1960s. Prior to the premiere of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Hargitay disclosed the truth in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Hargitay has suspected the truth since she was 25 years old and known with certainty since the age of 30. But she would introduce Nelson and her two half-sisters as family friends, wanting to protect the secret out of a sense of loyalty to Mickey Hargitay, who raised her and called her his daughter.

Now, Hargitay recognizes that decision as one she describes as a “very young choice.” Indeed, in the new HBO doc, she tells her sisters, “I didn’t have the wisdom to say this is not yours to carry. I was wrong because you guys had to live all these years with the secret.”

To confront the truth and put it into the world on her terms, Hargitay decided to make My Mom Jayne her directorial debut. “It’s a matter of sitting with it for so long and acquiring some wisdom and loosening my grip on thinking that it had to be this secret,” she says. “I realized that the truth is ultimately what sets us free, and I had kept my goal to be loyal to my father long enough.”

It was after Mickey Hargitay’s death in 2006 that she realized revealing the truth wouldn’t “change our bond. Nothing could ever change our relationship. Nothing could change my love, respect, admiration and gratitude for him,” she says. “And as I got to know Nelson, as he explained to me what happened, it just became a much more three-dimensional story. I realized that everyone’s doing the best they can. It wasn’t so black and white anymore to me.”

Directing the film allowed Hargitay to both be a part of the story of her own parentage and to stand back as a more objective observer at times. “It became this living, breathing story, and I wanted to understand each person and the choices that they made because I didn’t have the whole picture,” she explains. “When I learned the whole story from more of a bird’s eye view, I said, ‘It’s such a beautiful family story.'”

Though the documentary contains tearful scenes of apology to her sisters, Hargitay also grants grace to her younger self and shares immense gratitude for the forces that allowed her to process and discuss this secret on her time. “My choice to not tell anyone is certainly understandable,” she says. “I think I did the right thing at the time, but I hadn’t metabolized it all. I wanted to wait until I had the infrastructure to tell the story in a more objective way.”

Hargitay says finally taking the time to release all of this into the world has been a boon to her family. “My brothers have both very generously shared what a healing experience this has been for them,” she notes. “It’s been probably the greatest gift of all of it that they would say that.”

Hargitay continues, “They said, ‘Thank you for helping us get through a tragic and traumatic experience. It’s allowed them to free themselves and express what’s been embedded so deeply in their psyche. The only way out is through, and I would say all of us are a little bit lighter because of the film.”

Still, the secret is the stuff of Hollywood legend and scandal sheet: Iconic pin-up Jayne Mansfield has an affair in the midst of her separation from Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay and conceals it from the world, returning to Hargitay, who welcomes the baby as his own and continues to raise when Mansfield tragically dies in a car accident at only 34 years old.

The truth was out there for those who were looking. Raymond Strait, Mansfield’s former press agent, who features in the documentary, released a salacious tell-all biography, Here They Are, Jayne Mansfield, in 1992, which disclosed the truth of Hargitay’s parentage.

But it never made headlines, and Hargitay spent years maintaining the widely accepted belief that Mickey was her biological father. Hargitay credits this to some otherworldly force looking out for her. “The fact is that the story was out there in a lot of places,” she says. “And so, the fact that it never came out is nothing short of a miracle, truly.”

That’s not to say there weren’t those who tried. Indeed, it was one of the organizers of a Mansfield fan club who first made Hargitay aware of Nelson Sardelli’s existence. “There was a time when Nelson told me that there were a few people who started calling him, saying, ‘I know this, I know that,'” she reveals. “They started fishing around and were really intrusive. Some of them were not even journalists. They were just nosy people who somehow wanted to take ownership of the story, which I just think is so inelegant.”

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It was at that point that Hargitay says she “really did panic. That was probably 15 or 20 years ago. I remember being so scared and so angry,” she recalls. “I was so fearful to have to confront it before I was ready to. Thank God it never went anywhere. It’s been a real gift to me to be able to tell it in my time when I was ready.”

My Mom Jayne debuts Friday, June 27 at 8 p.m. ET on HBO.