In reference to the sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that allegedly went unreported for decades, Padma Lakshmi, an American actor and model wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times narrating her experiences of sexual harassment.
The Top Chef host revealed that she had been raped as a teenager. She was 7 years old when she was assaulted for the first time and 16 years old when she was raped. Narrating the incident, Lakshmi wrote that she dated a 23-year-old "charming and handsome" college student when she was 16, who would "flirt" with her at her part-time retail job at a mall in Los Angeles. Just a few months into the relationship, Lakshmi said that he sexually assaulted her while she was asleep. "When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother," she recalled in the piece. "He never brought me home late on a school night. We were intimate to a point, but he knew that I was a virgin and that I was unsure of when I would be ready to have sex." After a night out on New year’s eve three decades ago, she fell asleep at his apartment. "The next thing I remember is waking up to a very sharp stabbing pain like a knife blade between my legs. He was on top of me," the star wrote. "I asked, ’What are you doing?’ He said, ’It will only hurt for a while.’“