“Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi says she was raped when she was 17 and sexually abused by her stepfather’s relative when she was seven years old, and that she understands “why a woman would wait years to disclose a sexual assault.”
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Lakshmi explained that she worked at a high-end men’s store in Los Angeles when she started dating a “charming and handsome” man who was 23. He knew she was a virgin, but she says he raped her on New Year’s Eve, just a few months after they started dating.
Lakshmi, now 48, said that she has “been turning that incident over in my head throughout the past week,” and shared her story after two women came forward with accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Christine Blasey Ford said he climbed on her and covered her mouth during an attempted rape when they were both in high school, and Deborah Ramirez said he exposed himself to her when they were in college,” Lakshmi said.
“On Friday, President Trump tweeted that if what Dr. Blasey said was true, she would have filed a police report years ago,” she continued. “But 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. On Friday, I tweeted about what had happened to me so many years ago.”
As for her personal story, Lakshmi wrote: “The two of us had gone to a couple of parties. Afterward, we went to his apartment. While we were talking, I was so tired that I lay on the bed and fell asleep. 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. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘It will only hurt for a while.’ ‘Please don’t do this,’ I screamed.”
Afterward, she said, he drove her home and said, “I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep.”
Lakshmi said she didn’t report it to anyone, not even her mother or her friends.
“Soon I began to feel that it was my fault,” she wrote. “We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: ‘What the hell were you doing in his apartment? Why were you dating someone so much older?’”
Lakshmi initially didn’t classify the incident as rape, “or even sex,” and thinking about it now, she realizes that by then, she “had already absorbed certain lessons.” That’s because, she says, when she was seven, her “stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis.”
“Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out,” she wrote. “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’s revelation comes in the midst of many people taking to Twitter to share why they didn’t immediately report sexual misconduct at the time of the abuse. The hashtag “#WhyIDidntReport” trended on the platform Friday after President Trump cast doubt on Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Ford because she did not immediately report the alleged sexual assault at the time of the “attack” she said took place decades ago.
Lakshmi closed her essay out by saying: “I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls’ bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences.
“Those messages should be very clear as we consider whom we appoint to make decisions on the highest court of our land.”
On Wednesday, attorney Michael Avenatti identified a third woman who said she witnessed Brett Kavanaugh participating in sexual misconduct as a teenager, including the drugging and “gang rape” of high school girls.