Kerry Washington Recounts Encountering Sexual Assault In Her Sleep
Scandal star Kerry Washington has reflected on the impact of her experience with sexual assault. During the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California, Kerry shared the lasting effects of sexual abuse during an interview with Erika D. Smith. Kerry’s memoir, ‘Thicker Than Water’ delves into the actress’ journey of self-discovery mostly focusing on her revelation at the age of 41, that her biological father wasn’t her dad.
Regarding the sexual assaults, Kerry didn’t reveal the identity of her abuser but shared that they occurred during sleepovers in the Bronx. Kerry recounted confronting the perpetrators of sexual encounters only to be met with gaslighting which caused a sense of self-doubt that she battled all through her life.
Kerry clarified in her book that the perpetrator of the sexual assaults wasn’t a paedophile but a child himself hence her decision to keep the incidents secret out of compassion. In spite of the trauma, Kerry has wrestled with reclaiming her truth, she stated, “The version of the story that I want to tell is the version of figuring out the truth of who I am and what were the obstacles that got in the way of me being able to know my truth and experience my truth.”
She added, “And one of those things was that I had survived this sexual assault that was happening at night,” and added, “And why it was relevant to the story is because of the ways that I was gaslit that I didn’t know that something, I didn’t know what was happening at night, but I knew that something was happening.”
She further narrated the aftermath of the sexual assaults, stating, “When I approached the person who was doing it, he told me that it was in my imagination and that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I was crazy,” and reflected, “And that became a framework that I found myself fighting against a lot of my life, that if I had an instinctive thought about something, an intuitive idea about something, there was another thread of messaging in my brain that said, ‘You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not really true.‘”
Concluding her thoughts, Kerry Washington shared, “He was not a paedophile The truth remains that there were things done to me — while I was sleeping, and without my consent — but the perpetrator was a child himself. It is partly my compassion for him that has kept these incidents a secret, locked in the vault of my mind.”
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