Busy Philipps tears up while recalling her rape on 'Ellen': 'It's sadly the most unoriginal horror'
Last week, the testimonies of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford resulted in the opening of old wounds for survivors of sexual assault.
Busy Philipps used the opportunity to speak about her own experience, posting on Instagram: “This is me at 14. The age I was raped. It’s taken me 25 years to say those words. I wrote about it in my book.”
A post shared by Busy Philipps (@busyphilipps) on Sep 27, 2018 at 8:52am PDT
Wednesday on Ellen, the writer, actress, and soon-to-be late-night host opened up further.
“When I saw [Ford] standing there, speaking her truth after 30 years, I was like it’s been 25 for me, and I can do this,” she said.
With a giant photo of herself at age 14 projected behind her, Philipps got emotional looking at the girl she once was. “I have a 10-year-old,” she said, on the verge of tears. “So when I look at [myself at 14], I’m like, seeing my kid.”
As Philipps got emotional, Ellen DeGeneres shared her own experience about sexual abuse. “I was 15 and I had something happen to me,” she said. She didn’t explain any further, but the host has previously spoken about being sexually abused by her stepfather while she was a teenager. In 2007, she talked about it with Barbara Walters.
Philipps’s memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, comes out Oct. 16, and she explained how she debated including her attack in her story.
“I’ve struggled with it for so long,” she said. “Even when I wrote the chapter in my book, I had in my head an escape plan, which was that it doesn’t have to go into the book.”
Ultimately, she decided that with the nation openly discussing sexual assault, she had to include her personal perspective.
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