‘I blamed myself’
Nikki Bella opens up about sexual assaults in new memoir
Wrestling star and reality TV favourite Nikki Bella is reliving the painful details of her sexual assaults in her new memoir.
The pregnant Total Bellas star, who co-wrote the book with her twin sister Brie Bella, reveals she was raped at the age of 15 by a fellow high school student she thought was “a friend” and then a year later by a drug addict.
“There is the horrible offence in the moment, and then the shame and blame that follow feel almost worse than the original pain,” she writes in Incomparable. “When something like this happens to you, you understand the blame-the-victim mentality, how easy it is to feel shame rather than anger, how easy it is to feel like you could have stopped it yourself.”
The 36 year old admits she blamed herself for years.
“When that happened to me, I immediately just felt so ashamed and blamed myself, and that’s what made me want to keep it such a secret,” she adds. “And keeping that a secret and blaming myself, I started to lose my confidence. I started to disrespect myself. And then the relationships I got into at a young age, I let other people disrespect me and felt like, ‘That’s OK. This is what I deserved.’ ”
Thankfully, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, she has since found a way to use her experience to help others.
“When the #MeToo movement happened, I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” she recalls. “I feel like if I’m having these younger women look up to me, maybe I can help them and have them not hold onto this as long as I did.”