On the upcoming season of David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the comic gave an emotional testimony:
She explained that she was talking in detail about it mainly to urge other women to never, ever let such behavior.
In a recent interview, Ellen DeGeneres spoke candidly about the alleged sexual abuse she experienced as a teenager.
“It’s a very horrific, horrible story, and the only reason I’m going into detail about it is that I want other females to never, ever let someone do that,” DeGeneres said during the episode to Letterman.
“My mother had breast cancer shortly after they married,” DeGeneres explains. “She had a breast removed, and they had a highly sexual connection, which was also quite uncomfortable.”
“When she was out of town, he told me he’d felt a lump in her breast and needed to feel my breasts because he didn’t want to upset her, but he needed to feel mine.”
“He tried to break my door down, and I kicked the window out and escaped because I knew it was going to do—it was going to go more to something,” DeGeneres says of her stepfather’s repeated attempts to feel her breasts.
“And I didn’t want to tell my mother since I was trying to protect her and knew it would ruin her happiness.”
After a few years, according to DeGeneres, she told her mother what had happened, but she claims that she wasn’t believed at the time and continued to live with her stepfather for another 18 years. He eventually lost her mother, according to DeGeneres, “because he’d changed the narrative many times.”
“Most women do this because they don’t feel like they have a voice,” DeGeneres explains. “And that’s the only reason I’ve ever discussed this with anyone other than my pals. We do not believe we are worthy or afraid to have a voice and to say ‘no’…”
“It irritates me when I see individuals speaking out, especially today, and when victims aren’t believed because we don’t make anything up. And I like males, but so many get away with so much. It is simply time for us to speak up. It’s time for us to take control.”
