It’s been two years since “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi revealed to the world that she was raped when she was just 16 years-old. Now, the popular television personality is opening up about what the trauma from this experience was really like.

“Sometimes your own survival — mental, physical, economic — propels you more than doing what’s right,” Lakshmi told Artful Living. “It doesn’t mean that what happened to you is any less devastating or traumatic or completely life-altering. I know for a fact that I would have been much less insecure, that I would have conducted my life in a different way had that not happened to me.”

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She went on to say that she is “tired” of society placing a man’s life at a higher priority than a woman’s.

“At that time, people were saying horrible things like, ‘You’re going to ruin a man’s life for something that happened when he was in high school?’ But what about her life?” Lakshmi said. “There’s not one day that you don’t think about it. It never goes away. It’s like an iron shackle on your soul.”

She added that society still treats rape “like it’s nothing serious” despite it being “the most serious of crimes.”

“It is literally the murder of your innocence. Because once you are violated physically, you are never the same. You are never totally relaxed. You are never totally free in the way a person who hasn’t had that happen to them is,” Lakshmi said. “There’s always this lingering fear in the back of your mind, even if it’s not conscious anymore, about every date you go on, about every person you’re interested in, that affects the way you move through the world at night, that affects the way you talk to your child about sexuality.”

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This comes after Lakshmi revealed that she was raped as a teenager in a New York Times op-ed in which she said she began dating a 23 year-old man when she was 16. The television host said she was raped by him on New Year’s Eve after they had been dating for a few months, explaining that they had gone to a few parties before returning to the man’s apartment, where the assault occurred.

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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