"Law & Order: SVU" Detective Reveals Real-Life Rape: "He Was A Friend. Then He Wasn’t."

[Ubiquitous]

“Law & Order: SVU” star Mariska Hargitay, who will turn 60 on January 23,
revealed in a stunning first-person essay that she herself was raped by a
former friend when she was in her 30s.

Hargitay, who has played Detective Olivia Benson on the popular procedural
drama for more than two decades, shared her story in a cover-story essay for
PEOPLE Magazine’s latest issue.

“A man raped me in my thirties,” she began. “It wasn’t sexual at all. It was
dominance and control. Overpowering control.”

The actress went on to detail the situation, saying that until that day, she
had considered that man a friend.

“He was a friend. Then he wasn’t,” she explained. “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.
I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to
escape. I checked out of my body.”

For a long time, Hargitay said, she could not even begin to process what had
happened — and so she locked it away and lived as though it never had. She
was not a survivor, she said, because she never acknowledged that she was a
victim.

“I cut it out. I removed it from my narrative,” she said. “I now have so much
empathy for the part of me that made that choice because that part got me
through it. It never happened. Now I honor that part: I did what I had to do
to survive.”

“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,” she added.

Hargitay went on to speak about healing and justice — and said that for every
survivor, those things can look very different.

“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,”
she said. “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.”

Hargitay concluded with her own request for justice — or at least, the first
step toward what it might look like for her.

“For me, I want an acknowledgment and an apology. I’m sorry for what I did to
you. I raped you. I am without excuse. That is a beginning. I don’t know what
is on the other side of it, and it won’t undo what happened, but I know it
plays a role in how I will work through this,” she said.

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Let's go Brandon!