Ellen Degeneres has decided to share one of the darkest moments of her life in a bid to help others who’ve suffered.
In her upcoming interview on David Letterman‘s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, she opens up about her mother, Betty, marrying a “very bad man” when she was a teenager.
Watch the star in the very first look of her exclusive interview.
Entertainment Tonight reports that Ellen explains that at the time, her mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and had one of her breasts removed.
Ellen recounts how her stepfather used this information to sexually assault her.
“He told me when she was out of town that 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,” she told the former late night TV host.
“I’m angry at myself because, you know, I didn’t — I was too weak to stand up to — I was 15 or 16,” she continues. “It’s a really horrible, horrible story and the only reason I’m actually going to go into detail about it is because I want other girls to not ever let someone do that.”
Ellen hopes her story will inspire other victims of sexual assault to come forward.
“We [women] just don’t feel like we’re worthy, or we’re scared to have a voice, and we’re scared to say no,” she says. “That’s the only reason I think it’s important to talk about it because there’s so many young girls and it doesn’t matter how old you are. When I see people speaking out, especially now, it angers me when victims aren’t believed, because we just don’t make stuff up. And I like men, but there are so many men that get away with so much.”
“It is just time for us to have a voice,” she added.
“It’s time for us to have power.”
Ellen, who is now 61, first shared her story in an interview with Allure in 2005, revealing that after her mother’s mastectomy, her stepfather told her: “He thinks he feels a lump in (my mother’s) other breast, but he doesn’t want to alarm her so he needs to feel mine to make sure.”
She decided not to name the man but told Allure he had since died, said he “made me lie down because he said he felt hers while she was lying down.”
Ellen did not specify how long the abuse lasted, but she said her stepfather once tried to break down her bedroom door.
“I had to kick a window out and escape and sleep in a hospital all night long,” she recounted.
Ellen joins the likes of Kanye West, Tiffany Haddish, Melinda Gates and Formula 1 racer Lewis Hamilton for season 2 of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction which drops on May 31 on Netflix.
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