American model and actor Padma Lakshmi has recently in an opinion piece in The New York Times revealed that she was molested at the age of seven and raped at the age of 16 years. The 48-year old author narrated her experience in reference to the sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The Top Chef host wrote that she was dating a handsome 23-year old college student when she was just 16. After few months of relationship, one night he sexually assaulted her while she was asleep.
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"When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother. He never brought me home late on a school night. We were intimate to a point, but he knew that I was a virgin and that I was unsure of when I would be ready to have sex’’.
On one New Year ’s Eve, she went on night out with him and fell asleep at his apartment.
"The next thing I remember is waking up to a very sharp stabbing pain like a knife blade between my legs. He was on top of me," the star wrote. "I asked, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'It will only hurt for a while’’.
She was not sure whether the incident happened should be classified as rape or sex and revealed to anyone. She would even use to tell her future boyfriends that she was a virgin.
This wasn’t the only incident which broke her down emotionally. She narrated that when she was just seven years old; she was sent to India to live with her grandparents where one of her relative has touched her inappropriately.
In the end, she wrote, "I have nothing to gain by talking about this. But we all have a lot to lose if we put a time limit on telling the truth about sexual assault and if we hold on to the codes of silence that, for generations, have allowed men to hurt women with impunity’’.
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