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
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.”