The Whole Truth

MARISKA HARGITAY was just three years old when her mother, Jayne Mansfield, was killed in a car accident. In a new documentary, the Law & Order star examines her mother's sex symbol status and reveals a long-held family secret

- By JOY PRESS

THREE-YEAR-OLD MARISKA HARGITAY was asleep in the back seat of a car when it rammed into a truck. The toddler survived, her limp little body lodged underneath the passenger seat. But her mother, Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield, died instantly. “I don’t remember the accident. I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died,” Hargitay tells me nearly 58 years after the crash. She is sitting in her New York City apartment, staring into the black hole where her early memories should be. “I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was five.”

In therapy, Hargitay used to fall asleep anytime she wandered too close to painful events—“like a narcoleptic!” She blamed that on her long hours playing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s Captain Olivia Benson, work she juggles with her personal life as a mother of three. Eventually, Hargitay’s therapist suggested that her sleepiness might be a powerful defense mechanism against trauma. In order to dismantle it, she’d finally have to process the shame she felt about her sex symbol mother and let go of the dark secret about her paternity that she’d been guarding for decades. (Don’t worry, we’ll come to that shortly.) And so, during the depths of the pandemic, Hargitay began transforming her personal Pandora’s box into My Mom Jayne—an emotional documentary that premiered May 17 at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and will air Friday, June 27, on HBO and HBO Max.

My Mom Jayne is Hargitay’s debut as a documentary director, a film she initially saw as an archaeological dig into Mansfield’s life. Dubbed “Broadway’s smartest dumb blonde” by