She said yes.
She has written that she walked out of the courthouse understanding herself to be, in the eyes of the state of California, an eighteen-year-old. The precision of that framing — “in the eyes of the state” — is worth noting. She was not eighteen. She was not, in any developmental or experiential sense, an adult. She was a fourteen-year-old girl who had just been legally released into the world by the apparatus of the court, carrying with her the accumulated damage of a childhood that had been defined by exposure without protection.
It should be noted that the California school attendance requirement for emancipated minors created a specific tension with Drew’s circumstances. She has written that she dropped out of school when she became emancipated, which would have been technically in violation of the requirement — though the practical enforcement of that provision in individual cases was, in the late 1980s, inconsistent. Her departure from formal schooling was one of the many ways in which the legal framework of emancipation and the lived reality of what she was navigating did not map neatly onto each other.
A minor discrepancy in the sources is worth flagging. A 2009 CBS News profile of Drew Barrymore reported a different age for her emancipation than the age she has given in her own direct accounts. Drew’s memoir Wildflower, published in 2015, is explicit that she was fourteen. Given that a memoir represents her direct first-person account of her own experience, and given the instructions in this article’s development notes, the headline follows her account: she was fourteen. The discrepancy is noted here for transparency; readers who encounter other sources citing a different age should be aware that the primary source — Drew herself, in an authorized account — gives fourteen.