Kerry Washington is opening up about her sexual assault.
The 47-year-old Scandal star, who opened up in her 2023 memoir Thicker Than Water about the experience, spoke at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on Saturday (April 20) in Los Angeles.
At the event, she explained that she revealed she was sexually assaulted in the book because it was an example of the truth being withheld from her.
“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 said, via People.
Keep reading to find out more…
“And one of those things was that I had survived this sexual assault that was happening at night. 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.”
Kerry does not reveal the identity of her alleged abuser in the book, but wrote that the assaults happened during sleepovers that she went to as a child in the Bronx. One of the boys in her neighborhood would allegedly touch her and then denied it.
“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,” she said at the event.
“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.’ ”
“And so that’s what I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to beat back — the messaging that I don’t know my own truth,” she went on to say.
“He was not a pedophile,” she wrote in the book.
“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.”
Find out what she recently said about why she’s not drawn to political work.