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Padma Lakshmi: I Was Raped at 16 and Didn’t Report It

“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...”

In an op-ed published Tuesday by The New York Times, author and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi discussed her own sexual assault—which she revealed on Twitter for the first time Friday—and divulged her own reasons for staying silent for so long. “When I was 16 years old, I started dating a guy I met at the Puente Hills Mall in a Los Angeles suburb,” Lakshmi began, before explaining how the 23-year-old man raped her at a party months later, on New Year’s Eve, by forcing himself on her while she was asleep. “I have been turning that incident over in my head throughout the past week, as two women have come forward to detail accusations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh,” she wrote, later adding that “I understand why both women would keep this information to themselves for so many years, without involving the police. For years, I did the same thing.”

Lakshmi then detailed sexual abuse at the hands of a stepfather’s relative—which she also didn’t report. “It took me decades to talk about this with intimate partners and a therapist,” she added. “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,” Lakshmi wrote. Before concluding the op-ed, Lakshmi said that “Now, 32 years after my rape, I am stating publicly what happened. 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.”