Depression, Drugs & Abuse! Inside The Tragic Life Of Linkin Park's Chester Bennington

Despite his massive success and unending support from friends, fans, and family, Bennington's emotional turmoil ultimately won in the end. At a young age, Bennington was no stranger to the hard ways of the world. Growing up in Phoenix and the youngest of four, his parents split up when he was only 11.

Bennington would later go on to reveal that he'd been sexually abused by an older male when he was a child -- an event which would later turn him onto drugs. "No one in my family molested me," he said. "It was people who were around me. Coming from a broken home, it was easy to fall into thinking, 'This is OK.'"

Bennington was only 13-years-old when he started abusing drugs and alcohol. An addiction he would continue to battle for the rest of his life. "I was a lot more confident when I was high. I felt like I had more control over my environment when I was on hallucinogens or drinking." His drugs of choice went from alcohol and LSD to cocaine and methamphetamine.

In a candid interview with The Pulse Radio a few years back, he opened up about his ongoing struggles with alcohol and drug abuse. "I lived on alcohol. It was either beer, or Jack and Coke, or Jack Daniels in a pint glass with ice. And then it got to the point where my wife said to me about seven months after we got together, she goes, 'I don't think there's been a day since I've known you that you haven't drank.' And I was like, 'What are you talking about? That's crazy'—as I'm drinking a Jack and Coke. That was where my life went."

"I don't know when to stop when I'm in that mode," he told Bullz-Eye.com in another interview. "I'll go through a gallon of Jack Daniels and down some antidepressants in one night and keep on going. I just hated my life at one point. I loved my band, career and friends, but when I got home from tour, I couldn't deal with stuff. I would just begin drinking."

On top of addiction, the singer also suffered through a series of heartbreak with divorce drama to boot. He married Samantha Olit in 1996 and divorced in 2005. They had one child together. The singer temporarily stopped using soon after the two tied the knot but slipped back into heavy drinking during Linkin Park's first tour. Four years after his divorce from Olit, Bennington opened up to Noisecreep, revealing that many of his songs were inspired by his own suffering. "My life was falling apart in many ways that I was writing about on this record in terms of getting divorced, in terms of diving very hard into alcohol and drugs throughout this process." He later went on to marry Talinda Bentley in 2006, whom he shared three children with.