Mariska Hargitay shares experience with sexual assault in emotional personal essay
"Now I honor that part: I did what I had to do to survive," the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star wrote
Aux News Mariska Hargitay
Mariska Hargitay may have years of experience playing a detective who helps seek justice for survivors of rape and sexual assault on television, but until recently she had a hard time processing that part of her own identity. This revelation comes from a personal essay that the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actor penned for People, in which she reveals that she was raped by a man she considered a friend while in her thirties. “It wasn’t sexual at all. It was dominance and control. Overpowering control,” she opens.
After the incident, Hargitay “couldn’t believe that it happened” so she “cut it out” and “removed it from [her] narrative,” she writes. She explains that this conscious denial is what she had to do to survive.
In the meantime, the actor started an organization to help other survivors of assault and abuse called Joyful Heart Foundation. “I was building Joyful Heart on the outside so I could do the work on the inside. I think I also needed to see what healing could look like,” she explains. “I look back on speeches where I said, ‘I’m not a survivor.’ I wasn’t being untruthful; it wasn’t how I thought of myself.”
After years of this work and some gentle help from friends and family to name what happened to her, Hargitay said she was finally able to have “my own reckoning.”
The actor also acknowledges the power of the community that’s grown around SVU and specifically her character Olivia Benson:
Survivors who’ve watched the show have told me I’ve helped them and given them strength. But they’re the ones who’ve been a source of strength for me. They’ve experienced darkness and cruelty, an utter disregard for another human being, and they’ve done what they needed to survive. For some, that means making Olivia Benson a big part of their lives—which is an honor beyond measure—for others, it means building a foundation. We’re strong, and we find a way through.
“This is a painful part of my story. 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,” Hargitay writes in conclusion. “I’m turning 60, and I’m so deeply grateful for where I am. I’m renewed and I’m flooded with compassion for all of us who have suffered. And I’m still proudly in process.”
You can read the full essay here.
If you or someone you know is suffering from sexual abuse, contact the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or go to rainn.org.
16 Comments
It’s always nice when actors turn out to be as awesome as the heroes they portray.
How does being a victim automatically make you awesome?
Go get stabbed in the neck and we’ll tell you.
Not ungreying this dipshit, but having something like this happen to you and being able to talk about it and share it with others does in fact, make you awesome.
Nope. And Yup.
And thanks for responding to that (without ungreying).
Takes too long for some to recalibrate after idiotic comments ring their head like a gong, but the latter half of your sentence sums it up nicely.
Bravo to this. She writes well, clearly and compassionately and exemplifies how women don’t just downplay but downgrade their own experience.
And the more women/people hear this process elucidated –
“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….I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape. I checked out of my body…” –
escape/survival tactics so ubiquitous there might as well be a template to select for anyone taking a report,
maybe the clearer they’ll be that no instinctive action taken to survive can be wrong, nor should ever be judged in the aftermath.
Something the courts need to appreciate.
“No single part of anyone’s story defines them”Tell that to cancel culture crusaders.
If CC were real you’d be long gone. Nerd.
It’s odd that when someone that’s gone through a vicious sexual assault and discusses it so that others know that they aren’t alone, that certain MAGA conservatives feel the need to pipe up and try to pull the person down.
That’s the only card some of them know how to play.
Assault survivor: I can attest (and my sister who was date raped by someone she TRUSTED) that most of us are just trying not be killed. That’s the only thing really going through your mind. How do I survive this? He is going to kill me (because if he’d STILL force you when you’re offering to submit, what WOULDN’T he do?). We survive. We disassociate. And are blamed for that too.
:(ETA: Because the face alone might read as sarcastic–it’s meant to convey “I’m sorry.”
Glad you made it. Sorry you had to go through it. I hope you and your sister are close and can support each other with the terrible understanding acquired through no choice of your own.
But compassion shouldn’t require first hand experience. Others’ wilful (or feigned) ignorance and cruel blindness to this logical, primal awareness:
because if he’d STILL force you when you’re offering to submit, what WOULDN’T he do?is always astounding.
I’ve found many people lack emotional intelligence, empathy and the most important: the imagination required to place oneself in another’s shoes. That’s what’s required to develop the others. And awareness – my sister and I are strong, intelligent women who have access to people and programs others often do not (or don’t know about). It was pointed out to me that because I am (smart, raised to appreciate it, white, educated), I need to check myself when I wonder “why does she stay with him?” etc.My nephew has a needy, very dependent girlfriend who offered that drop of wisdom. So while we wish he’d find someone a bit less of a millstone, she’s not all bad. 😉 (And we need to stop judging her or others with our yardstick).
As much as the writing on L&O has soured in the last decade, MH has always been a strong artist and advocate. Props to her for sharing her personal struggle.