BOLDLY SHARING HER STORY
Padma Lakshmi visits MIT
When Padma Lakshmi picked the topic for her talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — connecting by sharing your stories — she had no idea how relevant it would become.
In the days leading up to the “Top Chef” star’s call to campus as a visiting scholar on Friday, she had revealed her experiences with sexual assault that she had kept hidden since her youth, first via Twitter and then The New York Times.
“When last (Friday‘s tweets) happened, there was just something very deep in me that felt really angry — not on a political level,” she told the intimate audience gathered at MIT for the fourth annual Open Endoscopy Forum. “If we don’t share our stories with each other, we don’t get to the truth.”
The 48-year-old, who spent her day at the local university touring labs and engaging with students, shared her own story on Tuesday, when she penned an opinion piece titled “I Was Raped at 16 and I Kept Silent: I understand why a woman would wait years to disclose a sexual assault.”
In the article, which she wrote in light of last week’s testimonies from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, she gave a detailed account of the alleged assault for the first time ever, 32 years after the fact.
“Over the weekend, I had second thoughts (about writing it),” she said. “I had decided to write it and then actually pulled back and I said, ‘You know, I don’t think I can do this. This is so horrible.’ ”
However, Lakshmi said that as she was putting her 8-year-old daughter to bed, she felt a rush of renewed fervor that made her move forward, despite any second-guessing. “When I think back on the things that I regret in my life — luckily there are not too many — they’re never the things that I’ve done. They’re always the things I should have done, that I would have done, that I wish I had had the guts to do,” she said.
“I haven’t processed yet what happened this week, but I am very glad that I did it. And the stories that women and men — fathers — have shared with me have become some of the most moving things that I’ve read, felt, discussed in my life.”
Lakshmi, who’s also an author and the co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, cited a few of the many emotional testimonies she’s received from fellow survivors of sexual assault and their families since her story was published. For example, a woman approached her as she was waiting for the Acela train en route to Boston. The stranger thanked the Bravo celeb, explaining that the boy who assaulted her in high school emailed her the link to Lakshmi’s article, admitted that he now knows what he did was wrong and apologized for hurting her.
“To me, that’s what sharing our stories is about,” Lakshmi said. “It’s about finding meaning, giving larger, greater, deeper context.”