Mariska Hargitay has a partner she can always count on.
Over a year after the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit star first shared that she was raped in her 30s, she revealed that it was her husband Peter Hermann who helped her come to terms with the traumatic experience.
“So many people blame themselves, myself included,” Mariska said of sexual assault during the June 25 episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast. “I couldn’t process that I couldn’t get out of it. I have gotten out of so many things through my intellect, through comedy, through just outsmarting it.”
“I couldn’t get out of this,” she continued. “That just lived in me, and so I blamed myself. Then it got to the point where it just became so clear what happened.”
The 63-year-old admitted that she was in denial for a long time before she told Peter—whom she wed in 2004—about the attack.
“I told my husband, and he said, he looked at me like, ‘Mariska, you said that you were never sexually assaulted. You were,’” Mariska, who emphasized her shock, recalled. “That’s why I understand about denial and dissociating.”
Although it took her time to come to terms with the assault, she explained to host Alex Cooper, “I’m grateful for that part of myself that kept me safe, for that part of myself that said, ‘You’re not ready to deal with it.’”
“There’s no blame,” she added. “We have to support ourselves. We have to be ready. We have to build an infrastructure within ourselves and external support, so that we know that we’ll be heard and that we’ll be understood and that the timing is right.”
The Emmy winner believes that fans likely project Detective Olivia Benson—whom she’s played for over 25 years on SVU—onto her, believing that “it could never happen to her.”
She countered, “Well, guess what? It did and there was nothing I could do about it.”
Mariska—who shares kids August, 18, Amaya, 14, and Andrew, 13, with Peter—revealed that learning about “trauma in our body on a cellular level” and “understanding how the body keeps score” was necessary for her to be able to talk about it.
Eventually, she was ready to pen her emotional essay in People last January, detailing the rape.
“I was just ready and that felt like a gift,” she explained to Alex of her decision. “There was no shame. There was no stigma. There was no fear. I was unencumbered because of the work that I had done on it. I had some work to do to process it and I was so happy to.”
