Padma Lakshmi says she was date-raped at 16. 5 horrifying revelations

last week, four women accused Brett Kavanaugh, US President Donald Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court Judge, of sexually assaulting them.

Since then, several people have questioned why these women didn’t come forward earlier and how they allowed Kavanaugh to assault them.

In response to this narrative, where people are questioning assault survivors on their timing of coming out with their stories, Padma Lakshmi penned an op-ed in The New York Times in support of sexual assault victims.

On September 21, Padma Lakshmi had taken to Twitter, joining many sexual assault survivors, to share the reasons why people don’t report their attackers right away, using the #WhyIDidntReport.

And yesterday, in her op-ed, Padma Lakshmi narrated her story of getting raped at the age of 16 and why she took almost 32 years to talk about it.

1. WHAT HAPPENED

Padma revealed that her boyfriend, who was 23 years old at the time, had raped her while she was asleep. She said, “On New Year’s Eve, just a few months after we first started dating, he raped me. While we were talking, I was so tired that I lay on the bed and fell asleep. The next thing I remember is waking up to a very sharp stabbing pain like a knife blade between my legs. He was on top of me. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘It will only hurt for a while.’ ‘Please don’t do this,’ I screamed. The pain was excruciating, and as he continued, my tears felt like fear. Afterward, he said, ‘I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep.’ Then he drove me home.”

2. WHY SHE THOUGHT IT WAS HER FAULT

After the harrowing incident, Padma Lakshmi didn’t talk about it because for the longest time, she thought it was her fault.

She imagined that people would blame her for the incident. “We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: ‘What the hell were you doing in his apartment? Why were you dating someone so much older?'”

3. WHY VICTIMS TAKE TIME TO COME TO TERMS WITH THEIR STORY

She said, “I have been turning that incident over in my head throughout the past week, as two women have come forward to detail accusations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford said he climbed on her and covered her mouth during an attempted rape when they were both in high school, and Deborah Ramirez said he exposed himself to her when they were in college. But I understand why both women would keep this information to themselves for so many years, without involving the police. For years, I did the same thing. On Friday, I tweeted about what had happened to me so many years ago.”

She then also mentioned the sexual abuse she underwent at the age of 7, which culminated in her being sent to live in India for a year after she told her parents about the incident.

“The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out,” she wrote in the New York Times.

4. CLOTHES DO NOT MATTER

She said, “You may want to know if I had been drinking on the night of my rape. It doesn’t matter, but I was not drunk. Maybe you will want to know what I was wearing or if I had been ambiguous about my desires. It still doesn’t matter, but I was wearing a long-sleeved, black Betsey Johnson maxi dress that revealed only my shoulders.”

5. WHY WE NEED TO BELIEVE SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT

She also drew parallels to her story and the story of survivors in the Kavanaugh case by addressing the allegations made by President Trump against Professor Christine Blasey Ford.

Trump tweeted on September 21, “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place! (sic)”
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