AnnaLynne McCord has talked for the first time about being raped by a friend when she was 18 after moving to LA to become an actress.
The “90210” star, now 26, reveals in the new July issue of Cosmopolitan that a male friend she had known for some time had asked to stay at her home before a big meeting.
She wrote, “We sat on the bed and talked for a while, then I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was inside me.
“At first, I felt so disoriented and numb, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I wondered if I had done something to give him the wrong idea. I felt afraid of making him angry.
“Believe it or not, I didn’t want to offend him. I just wanted it to be over.”
She said that physical abuse she suffered as a child growing up in a conservative family in Georgia — where she was regularly hit with a paddle by her religious parents — suddenly came back to her.
She said of her feelings during the attack, “Because of the physical abuse, I didn’t believe there were borders between other people’s bodies and my own. I didn’t believe I had a voice.
“And then, suddenly, my thoughts took a practical turn: I could get an STD. I could get pregnant. I have a boyfriend. I said, ‘Please, don’t!’ He stopped.”
She said her attacker left early the next morning, and after that, “I began to go dark,” adding that around the time she was cast in “Nip/Tuck,” “Privately, I was reeling. I would drive to a secluded place, park underneath a tree, and write dark poetry on my arm, then slice myself with a massively sharp knife, rubbing in the blood.”
She even describes a time when she contemplated killing herself after a bad breakup. She described how she was sitting on a hotel bed in Madrid with a bottle of pills, before her sister Angel finally intervened.
She said, “I didn’t fear death — it felt like a solution. When you’re in that mode, you don’t think suicide is a selfish thing to do. You think you’re doing everyone a favor.” But then Angel called and said she was getting on a flight to Spain.
While AnnaLynne mostly managed to avoid her attacker, there was a scene when she ran into him at an LA club — and after that, she was able to tell friends he had raped her.
Finally, it was a storyline in “90210,” in which her character was raped by someone she knew, that made her finally acknowledge what had happened to her in real life.
She reveals that when the cameras were rolling on an emotional scene which saw her fighting with an unsupportive friend after the assault, she broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably.
“My castmates thought I had done a great job playing the part. They had no idea that I had actually been sexually assaulted by someone I knew in real life.”
But after years of therapy and coming to terms with it, she has decided to share her experience and encourage other women to come forward.
“You have a voice. Don’t put yourself in a box. Don’t let the polite lies of society silence you,” she adds.