Mariska Hargitay Reveals She Was Raped By A Friend In Her 30s
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay is opening up about a very personal story of sexual violence.
In an essay published today in People, Hargitay reveals she was raped in her 30s by a man she considered to be a friend.
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“It wasn’t sexual at all. It was dominance and control. Overpowering control,” she wrote. “He was a friend. Then he wasn’t. I tried all the ways I knew to get out of it. I tried to make jokes, to be charming, to set a boundary, to reason, to say no. He grabbed me by the arms and held me down. I was terrified.”
“I didn’t want it to escalate to violence. I now know it was already sexual violence, but I was afraid he would become physically violent,” she writes.
“I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape. I checked out of my body.”
Hargitay says she tried to push the assault to the back of her mind so she could “get through” the trauma.
“It never happened. Now I honor that part: I did what I had to do to survive.”
She revealed she even told her husband, Peter Hermann, “it wasn’t rape” because she knew the assailant.
“Then things started shifting in me, and I began talking about it more in earnest with those closest to me,” she says. “They were the first ones to call it what it was. They were gentle and kind and careful, but their naming it was important. It wasn’t a confrontation, like ‘You need to deal with what happened,’ it was more like looking at it in the light of day: ‘Here is what it means when someone rapes another person, so on your own time, it could be useful to compare that to what was done to you.’ Then I had my own realization. My own reckoning.”
Hargitay portrays Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU, in part a role in which she attempts to help victims of sexual and domestic violence heal their trauma. While on SVU, she founded Joyful Heart, a foundation to help victims of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. She says her work through the foundation helped her to come to terms with her own healing.
“This is a painful part of my story,” she writes. “The experience was horrible. But it doesn’t come close to defining me, in the same way that no other single part of my story defines me. No single part of anyone’s story defines them.”
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