Woman Lost Her Hair After Her Sexual Assault
Two days before Stephanie Giorgi's 27th birthday, she was sexually assaulted by someone she didn't know. It was a normal night of going out with her friends, and she started drinking in the afternoon.
"I became that girl that nobody wants to be – a mess, a hot mess – to which point, the friends that I was with were like ‘Stephanie needs to go home,'" Giorgi says. Her friends called her a car.
"I was sexually assaulted by the service driver," she says. "Between the time that I was taken home and the time that I had woken up, I was sexually assaulted."
She says she doesn't remember the drive - only getting into the car, arriving at her house and starting to converse with the driver. It wasn't until the next morning when it started to hit her. "I got the first flash of what might have happened. I started thinking, did I know the person? No."
But instead of discussing what happened with the people around her, Giorgi wanted to ignore it.
"The people who would try to talk about it with me, I would dismiss it right away," she says. "I was afraid that, because of the way that society is, that they would think I had something to do with it."
But then on July 18, she was taking a shower, and she noticed it - her hair was starting to fall out. As more and more hair started to fall out, she could tell it wasn't normal.
"My body cried, for me," she says. "My body was telling me, ‘Hey, you’re right to think that it wasn’t OK. And if you’re not going to think about it, we’re going to give you something else to think about.’ My body was talking to me."
After going to see a doctor, Giorgi found out that her body was reacting to the trauma.
"It makes me sad, and the fact that all my blood work was normal means that this person more or less made it happen," she says. "I wasn’t in control of it. I would have loved to tell you that I shaved my head and rocked it like Amber Rose, but that wasn’t the case."
My body was talking to me.
On Sept. 29, Giorgi shaved her hair so that she could fit properly into a wig.
"It was like a breath of fresh air," she says. "I could breathe again 'cause I didn’t have to see my hair fall out anymore."
Now, looking back at what happened to her, Giorgi says she would've told herself something different:
"If I could whisper in my ear the next morning, and speak to myself, I would tell myself to stand my ground and defend yourself. What happened was not OK. I wish I could just tell myself no, it’s not OK, and go tell someone right now."
Giorgi says that she's come to accept what happened, but she knows that it wasn't her fault. And she wants any girl out there who is going through something similar to know that she's not alone.
"If no one else believes you, I believe you," she says. "And it’s not your fault. And you are beautiful ... you are strong. Just because you are weak right now doesn’t mean that you’re not strong anymore. You want your happily ever after, and you can still get it."
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