Actress Gabrielle Union Talks About Being BRUTALLY BEATEN And SEXUALLY ASSAULTED
As a 19-year-old college student, she was raped at gunpoint and beaten beyond recognition during a night shift working at a Payless ShoeSource. “I blanked out and had an out-of-body experience, like I was hovering above seeing this horrible thing happen to someone else—not me,” says Gabrielle, who got through the trauma partly because of an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show she had seen days before on victims of violent crimes.
After her ordeal, she immediately turned to UCLA’s Rape Treatment Center. “It gave me my life back,” she says. “My dignity and self-esteem were gone and they helped me find them again.
That’s why I now lobby for state legislatures across the country to help raise funds and awareness for rape crisis centers, and I speak to college girls about what happened to me. My goal is to never hear the words ‘me too’ from someone after I say ‘I was raped.’ ”
