Mariska Hargitay has said she was raped by a man she considered a friend when she was in her 30s. Hargitay said she tried several ways to get out of
Mariska Hargitay has said she was raped by a man she considered a friend when she was in her 30s.
Hargitay said she tried several ways to get out of the situation: joking, being charming, setting a boundary, reasoning with him, and saying no. She said he then held her down. She described becoming terrified and going into a freeze response.
For years, she did not understand herself as a rape Survivor. She said she essentially removed the event from her personal narrative because she couldn’t process what had happened. She even told her husband that what happened to her wasn’t rape.
This is Mariska Hargitay, a woman who has played Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU since 1999, trained as a rape crisis counselor in preparation for the role, founded the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004, and spent years advocating for Survivors. Yet knowledge about sexual violence did not automatically produce immediate recognition of her own experience.
That is actually quite common.
Because it destroys a quiet assumption we haven’t addressed strongly enough:
“If it were really rape, I would know.”
Not necessarily.
Even a woman immersed professionally in the language of sexual violence can have difficulty applying that language to herself.
And her description of trying to joke, charm, reason, establish a boundary, and prevent further escalation also gives us a much richer understanding of what resistance can look like. Resistance isn’t limited to punching, kicking, screaming, and running. Sometimes a frightened human being is attempting to manage another person’s behavior because she is trying to get out safely.