“It’s a miracle that I wasn’t trafficked,” Judd opened up.
Hollywood actress and activist Ashley Judd revealed while visiting India that she had been sexually abused more than once, since she was as young as seven.
The 48-year-old actress arrived in New Delhi on Saturday night after spending a couple of days in Kolkata and spoke at the World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Women and Girls on Sunday.
“I was molested when I was seven years old. I was raped at 14, and then I was raped in 1998. It’s a miracle that I wasn’t trafficked,” Judd opened up about her personal experience.
She recounted instances of having been sexually abused as a teenager, and gender violence on social media.
“I had to learn to trust my body and to trust the power or my emotional responsiveness to situations and to people. Once I began to trust myself I could then with more confidence say to another girl or woman ‘I believe you.’ My mother recently mentioned to me how I was sexually assaulted at a store which we used to visit when I was between 11 and 14 and I froze with the mention. A man tried to grab me and kidnap me, I was skinny but I fought and slipped under his arms. My mother pressed charges and that man is a registered sex offender, but I have no conscious memory of that event,” Times of India quoted Judd.
She added that there are severe flaws in law on violence against women across the world, and the move for the abolition of trafficking would end harassment.
“If us as survivors can come together, we can create change. The onus of the crime should only go to the perpetrator. And laws should give women and girls exit strategies to get out of trafficking,” Judd said.
In 2015, the actress revealed that she had been sexually harassed by a Hollywood studio executive, whom she did not name. The incident happened when she was filming ‘Kiss The Girls’ and the executive – one of Hollywood’s top bosses – summoned her to his hotel room and asked her to watch him shower.
Judd, who started her speech on lighter note by greeting the gathering with a ‘Namaste’, urged everyone to rise against sexual exploitation, and decriminalizing prostituted women and girls. “Ab samjhauta nahi,” she said.
Last week, Ashley made headlines worldwide through her speech against President Donald Trump at the Women’s March in Washington DC. She was last seen in 2016’s ‘Good Kids’ and her recent film appearances include ‘Olympus Has Fallen’, ‘Tooth Fairy’, ‘The Divergent Series’ and the ‘Dolphin Tale’.
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