I was sexually assaulted at 7 and raped at 16: Padma Lakshmi

American author and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi opened up about her sexual assault to explain why women choose to remain silent about their ordeal.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Lakshmi details her being sexual assaulted at the age of 7 and raped by her then boyfriend at 16.

"When I was 16 years old, I started dating a guy I met at the Puente Hills Mall in a Los Angeles suburb. He was in college, and I thought he was charming and handsome. He was 23," wrote the author.

She recounts the horrific incident in her article. "When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother. 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."

"On New Year’s Eve, just a few months after we first started dating, he raped me."

"The two of us had gone to a couple of parties. Afterward, we went to his apartment. While we were talking, I was so tired that I lay on the bed and fell asleep."

"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. I asked, “What are you doing?” He said, “It will only hurt for a while.” “Please don’t do this,” I screamed.

"The pain was excruciating, and as he continued, my tears felt like fear."

"Afterward, he said, “I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep.” Then he drove me home."

"I didn’t report it. Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police. At first I was in shock."

This ordeal haunted her for years to come, and she wrote that the reason she never spoke up about it or even reported it because of the culture of silence associated with sexual assault/rape/harassment. The blame lies on the women.

"I don’t think I classified it as rape — or even sex — in my head. Soon I began to feel that it was my fault. We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: “What the hell were you doing in his apartment? Why were you dating someone so much older?”"

"You may want to know if I had been drinking on the night of my rape. It doesn’t matter, but I was not drunk. Maybe you will want to know what I was wearing or if I had been ambiguous about my desires. It still doesn’t matter, but I was wearing a long-sleeved, black Betsey Johnson maxi dress that revealed only my shoulders," explained Lakshmi.

And this went back to her childhood years when she was "cast out" for speaking up about being sexually assaulted by a relative.

"When I was 7 years old, my stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out."

Read the full article here.