Within the past year, victims of sexual assault and harassment have been motivated by the #MeToo movement to come forward with their stories. Actress and Top Chef host, Padma Lakshmi, is the latest brave voice to speak up.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, titled “Padma Lakshmi: I Was Raped at 16 and Kept Silent,” published on September 25, Lakshmi details the encounter she had with a college student who took her on a date and later raped her in her sleep. She was too stunned by the assault to even want to speak about it. “I didn’t report it,” Lakshmi said. “Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police. At first I was in shock. That evening, I let my mother know when I was home, then went to sleep, hoping to forget that night.”
She also regrets not coming forward about her assault as soon as she could have. “I think if I had at the time named what happened to me as rape—and told others—I might have suffered less. Looking back, I now think I let my rapist off the hook and I let my 16-year-old self down.”
Lakshmi’s article debuted in response to the stories of Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward against to tell how she had been assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a teenager. Kavanaugh supporters, including President Donald Trump, claim that if Kavanaugh had “actually” raped Ford, she would have come forward years ago. The response also started a popular Twitter hashtag, #WhyIDidntReport, in which victims of sexual assault share stories about why they kept silent.
Lakshmi holds Kavanaugh and his supporters to task for looking to excuse his behavior: “Some say a man shouldn’t pay a price for an act he committed as a teenager. But the woman pays the price for the rest of her life, and so do the people who love her.”
The essay makes a bold and important statement that we shouldn’t have to still be making by now. Padma Lakshmi was very brave and noble for sharing her story, but how many rape victims must speak explicitly about their darkest, most traumatic moments before people can finally empathize with them?