Eric Roberts Apologizes to Sister Julia Roberts After ‘Asinine’ Comments: ‘Pride Turned on Its Head’

Eric Roberts is opening up about his past controversial comments about his sister Julia Roberts’ rise to fame.

In his new memoir, Runaway Train: Or the Story of My Life So Far, the Academy Award nominee apologized to his younger sibling for taking credit for her path to stardom.

“Now one of the things I’d like to apologize for in this book is for publicly saying on more than one occasion, ‘If it wasn’t for me, there would be no Julia Roberts,’” he said in the excerpt of the book obtained by Entertainment Weekly. “That’s not only unfortunate, but it’s also untrue. And I hope Julie will accept this more public apology. It was an asinine thing to have said. I was proud of her, but it was pride turned on its head, to my own advantage.”

“She’s a very driven woman,” he added. “Someone would have plucked her out of the crowd in a place like New York without my help.”

While he apologized for his past comments, Eric explained that Julia and their sister Lisa were inspired by him to move to New York City when they were younger.

“I was born to do this. I moved to New York City when I wasn’t even old enough to drink a beer in public,” the Dancing With the Stars competitor said. “If Julie had stayed in Atlanta, she’d probably have married a wealthy dude and lived a very different life. So I will take credit, once I had broken away from my father (or thought I had) and moved to New York City, for telling my sisters, ‘Come on up, girls; the water’s fine.’ That’s when, it seems to me, she saw my life as a young actor in New York, and saw what I was doing for my livelihood, and she wanted to try it.”

Eric said that he became “so difficult to be around,” that his sisters ultimately ended up getting a place of their own. He paid for the apartment for the first year that they lived there so that he could have “privacy.”

The apology in his book seemingly references the comments that he made in a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair about Julia and his daughter, Emma Roberts.

“If it wasn’t for me, there would be no Julia Roberts and no Emma Roberts as celebrities, as actresses, and I’m very proud of that,” the Runaway Train actor said at the time. “When Julia first came to New York, I went into William Morris and I said, ‘Which one of you is going to sign my sister Julia?’”

“And I am so proud that everybody knows I was first, because I was first by a long shot,” added the star, who has more than 700 credits to his name. “I was first to get Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, so I’m proud of that.”

Eric admitted that his behavior while dealing with his past drug addiction caused some rifts with his sister over the years.

“I was exhausting to be around,” he said. “Complainy, blamey, unable to enjoy enjoyment. Everyone in my world needed a break sometimes, and that must have included Julia,” adding, “I was crazy about my sisters. Loved them, adored them. They were precious to me, and we had times of great closeness. We all felt very protective of each other, but the hardest person to protect yourself from is yourself.”