‘Law & Order: SVU’ Actress Mariska Hargitay Reveals That She Herself Is a Rape Survivor
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Mariska Hargitay, whose character Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has investigated rapists for the past 25 years, has revealed that she, too, is a victim of sexual violence. In a new essay for People, Hargitay, 59, wrote that the crime occurred when she was in her 30s and that the man who assaulted her was someone she knew well.
“He was a friend,” she wrote. “Then he wasn’t. I tried all the ways I knew to get out of it. I tried to make jokes, to be charming, to set a boundary, to reason, to say no. He grabbed me by the arms and held me down. I was terrified. I didn’t want it to escalate to violence. I now know it was already sexual violence, but I was afraid he would become physically violent. I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape.”
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Hargitay, who founded the organization Joyful Heart to help survivors of sexual and domestic violence in 2004, wrote that she was in denial for years that she was a victim and had even told people that she was not a survivor. She doesn’t see those statements as untruthful but a reflection of how she saw herself at that time. Her perspective changed in recent years as she spoke about her experience with close friends.
“They were the first ones to call it what it was,” she wrote. “They were gentle and kind and careful, but their naming it was important.” She said they gave her things to think about and process in solitude, telling her, “Here is what it means when someone rapes another person, so on your own time, it could be useful to compare that to what was done to you.” That’s when she came to her own realization.
“Now I’m able to see clearly what was done to me,” she wrote. “I understand the neurobiology of trauma. Trauma fractures our mind and our memory. The way a mirror fractures.”
Elsewhere in the essay, she wrote about how survivors have told her that SVU has helped them process their own experiences with sexual assault. She calls those people a “source of strength” for her.
“I said for a long time that my hope was for people to be able to talk about sexual assault the same way they now talk about cancer,” she wrote. “Tell someone you’ve survived cancer, and you’re celebrated. I want the same response for sexual assault survivors. I want no shame with the victim. The shame of the act belongs with the perpetrator: They’re the ones who committed the heinous, shameful act.”
She now has a “renewed determination” to fight for survivors. As for herself, she wrote that she would like an acknowledgement and an apology from the man who assaulted her. “That is a beginning,” she wrote. “I don’t know what is on the other side of it, and it won’t undo what happened, but I know it plays a role in how I will work through this.”
In 2019, Hargitay explained her commitment to fighting for survivors in a New York Times interview. “I’m more engaged now than ever, and I was pretty engaged when I started this,” she said. “It turned me from sort of actor to activist.”
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