Fran Drescher, who is best known for starring on the sitcom “The Nanny,” just spoke out to recall the “traumatizing” home invasion and rape that she experienced back in 1985.

“It’s really hard. I felt like I was shattered in a million pieces,” Drescher told Fox News of the incident, which happened when she and her husband at the time, Peter Marc Jacobson, were at home with a friend discussing her girlfriend’s impending wedding.

“It took me at least a year before I even felt close to being myself,” Drescher continued. “I remember I was once in a restaurant with my manager, maybe, but we were having lunch and a busboy dropped a tray of utensils and it made a loud noise and I literally jumped out of my seat and screamed. And everybody in the restaurant looked at me as I [slinked] down back into my chair.”

Drescher went on to say that the experience left her skittish and unable to focus on her day-to-day life while the perpetrators remained at large.

“You’re really on edge and you’re not yourself at all. And you keep replaying in your head, ‘What if I did this? Or maybe if I never went home that night and I was supposed to maybe go out for dinner with other people and if only I had done that and blah, blah, blah,’” Drescher explained. “And, you know, we all got therapy, which helps because we got tools on how to not dwell in the moment of horror and walk ourselves – our minds all the way through the process of ‘and then they left and then we lived and then they were caught and now they’re in jail and we’re okay,’ you know, and all of that.”

“And very often when you have a horrific experience, you become stuck in that moment and you keep replaying in your head like a loop [of] that moment of horror,” she added. “But you have to learn how to walk your mind past that and into the present now.”

Drescher said that she has been left with a great deal of empathy for victims who never get the justice they deserve.

“I think that in a way, we were lucky because they were apprehended and we did get closure where a lot of victims of violent crimes don’t have that, which is unfortunate,” she said. “And I know that before the guy was arrested, every time I turned a corner and looked at someone sideways, I thought, ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ You know, and it’s just – you’re traumatized. And I don’t even think that I dealt with it when it first happened like I should have or would have today knowing what I know now about how to deal with my feelings.”

After the rape, Drescher and her husband moved in with close friends Dan Aykroyd and Donna Aykroyd for months.

“We were also very blessed to have very supportive, generous friends and Danny and Donna Aykroyd, who took us in that night,” said Drescher. “And we stayed in their home for like three months recovering and to this day, I’m very security conscious and if I fall asleep and forget to put my alarm on, I really marvel at that because that just for me, illustrates that I’ve come a really long way. But then as soon as I realize that, I get up and put it on.”

“I don’t think that you’re ever the same. You can never be the same,” she added. “And I developed a deeper empathy for people’s pain and an understanding of what it must be like – the horrors of war or being a prisoner of war. For me, the whole episode lasted about an hour or an hour-and-a-half – something like that.”

“It seemed like in that amount of time, your whole body – everything – you don’t know whether you’re going to be killed or not. And you don’t know who is going to get killed first,” Drescher said. “And who’s going to be the last to live but to see the other two die? All of this stuff is running through your mind when it’s happening.”

She concluded by comparing what she went through to the PTSD that many veterans suffer from.

“People that go to war for two years or more; I mean, no wonder they have some kind of post-traumatic stress that we’re seeing and understanding what’s happening now more than ever with our military,” Drescher said. “You can’t undergo that level of stress because I only did it from maybe 60 to 90 minutes and it has left imprints on me that I’ll take to my grave.”

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

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