NOTE: This article contains sexual language and may be triggering for some readers. Please read at your own discretion.
Padma Lakshmi opened up about being raped at 16 years old in an essay published Tuesday for The New York Times.
In reference to the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, who has denied all claims, Lakshmi took to social media to participate in the trending hashtag, #WhyIDidntReport.
She revealed that she had been seven years old the first time she was sexually assaulted.
Women all over the world have been using the hashtag to explain why they did not report their assaults to authorities.
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The Top Chef host’s essay began with explaining that she met her 23-year-old boyfriend at a mall in a Los Angeles suburb.
“When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother. He never brought me home late on a school night. We were intimate to a point, but he knew that I was a virgin and that I was unsure of when I would be ready to have sex,” she wrote.
She revealed that he raped her on New Year’s Eve, a few months after they began dating. She said that she fell asleep at her boyfriend’s apartment after going to a couple of parties with him.
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“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,” she wrote. “I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘It will only hurt for a while.'”
“‘I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep,'” she recalled him saying to her.
She said she did not report what happened and felt like it was her fault. “Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police. At first, I was in shock. That evening, I let my mother know when I was home, then went to sleep, hoping to forget that night,” she said.
“Soon I began to feel that it was my fault,” she wrote. “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?'”
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Lakshmi said that she doesn’t think she classified it as sex in her head and continued to tell boyfriends that she was a virgin. “Emotionally, I still was,” she wrote.
“When I think about it now, I realize that by the time of this rape, I had already absorbed certain lessons. When I was seven years old, my stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis,” she revealed. “Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out.”
She said that the experiences affected her ability to trust other people.
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She wrote that the assault has been present in her mind recently due to Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez’s allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh.
“On Friday, President Trump tweeted that if what Dr. Ford said was true, she would have filed a police report years ago. 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,” she wrote. “On Friday, I tweeted about what had happened to me so many years ago.”
She continued: “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.”
“Now, 32 years after my rape, I am stating publicly what happened. I have nothing to gain by talking about this,” she wrote. “But we all have a lot to lose if we put a time limit on telling the truth about sexual assault and if we hold on to the codes of silence that for generations have allowed men to hurt women with impunity.”
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“I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls’ bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences,” she concluded. “Those messages should be very clear as we consider whom we appoint to make decisions on the highest court of our land.”
Lakshmi posted the Op-Ed on Twitter, writing, “I wrote an Op-Ed for @nytimes about something terrible that happened to me in my youth, something that happens to young women every day. We all have an opportunity to change the narrative and believe survivors.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse or is involved in an abusive situation, please visit the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime for help. They are also reachable toll-free at 1-877-232-2610.
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