Related Articles
Mariska Hargitay spoke about how her years of playing Detective Olivia Benson and acting out stories centered on sexual violence on Law & Order: SVU helped give her the “deep compassion and empathy and understanding” to finally talk about her own experience with sexual violence.
In an essay for People last year, Hargitay revealed for the first time that, when she was in her thirties, a former friend had sexually assaulted her. In the piece, as well as in her new interview on Call Her Daddy, Hargitay explained how she was long in denial about what had happened to her, and for years declined to call herself a victim or survivor.
Speaking with Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper — who recently opened up about her own experience with sexual harassment — Hargitay explained how she contended with that tension within herself. “So many people blame themselves — myself included,” she said. “And I couldn’t process that I couldn’t get out of it. I had gotten out of so many things through my intellect, through comedy, through outsmarting, through physically. And I couldn’t get out of this, and I couldn’t metabolize it.”
For a long time, Hargitay said, she lived with those feelings until she finally reached a point where “it just became so clear what happened.” And when she was ready to speak about it publicly, Hargitay said she was “excited” to share her story because of the way people associate her with Olivia Benson.
“I know that people project on me and think, ‘She’s so this, she’s so that, it could never happen to her,’” she said. “Well, guess what? It did. And there was nothing I could do about it.”
Throughout the conversation, Hargitay spoke about all the work she had to do to reach this point and understand how the body and mind respond to and process trauma. Which was why she also expressed a kind of gratitude for her years of denial and “for the part of myself that kept me safe, for the part of myself that said, ‘You’re not ready to deal with it.’”
She continued: “There’s no blame, there’s only integration. We have to scaffold ourselves, we have to support ourselves, we have to be ready, we have to build an infrastructure within ourselves, and [with] external support.”
