Nikki Bella, a former WWE diva who stars on the reality television show “Total Bellas” with her twin sister Brie, shocked her fans on Tuesday when she revealed that she was raped twice as a teenager.
Fox News reported that Nikki opens up about the assaults in her upcoming memoir “Incomparable,” which she wrote with her sister. The 36 year-old wrote that she was first raped when she was 15 years-old by someone she “thought was a friend.” One year later, she was then raped again after being drugged by a college-aged man.
“There is the horrible offense in the moment, and then the shame and blame that follow and feel almost worse than the original pain,” Nikki recalled, according to People magazine. “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.”
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Nikki, who is currently pregnant with her first child, spent years blaming herself as she kept what had happened to her a secret because she was too ashamed to tell anyone.
“And keeping that a secret and blaming myself, I started to lose my confidence,” she said. “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.”
While Nikki said she went to therapy “on and off” for years to deal with the rapes, she wishes she’d “let go” of the emotions surrounding what had happened earlier because “so much would have changed.”
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Nikki is hoping that her story will help others who have gone through similar struggles in life.
“When the #MeToo movement happened, I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh,'” she explained. “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. It wasn’t until I was 28 and in a relationship where someone started to teach me how to respect myself.”
“That’s how long I held on to things and felt I had no boundaries. And I’d always look at Brie like, ‘Oh, she has boundaries, she treats herself with such respect. How do I not have this?’ And I knew why. But I held onto it for so long,” Nikki added. “When I look back at just decisions I made based off of it, I wish I could have heard my words now as a 36-year-old woman then, and be like, ‘You’re going to be OK.'”
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This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.
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