Mariska Hargitay is candid about her experience with sexual assault in moving essay

In her iconic role as Captain Olivia Benson in the long-running TV series, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” actress Mariska Hargitay fights to bring justice to women who are the victims of sexual assault. This work has, through the years, been taken up off-screen, having founded the Joyful Heart Foundation, which provides support to people who have found themselves in similar situations depicted on her show and, as she reveals in a moving new essay written for People Magazine, in her own life.

Under the title “A Rape. A Reckoning. A Renewal,” Hargitay is candid about a rape she experienced in her thirties by a man whom she’d believed to be a friend, writing:

It wasn’t sexual at all. It was dominance and control. Overpowering control. 

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. I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape. I checked out of my body. 

Now almost 60, she goes on to write that while this is a painful part of her story, it does not define her, adding, “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.”