Ellen DeGeneres revealed that she was Sexually Assaulted by Her Stepfather when she was a teenager.
The 61-year-old TV host shared her story to help other victims. In an interview on David Letterman‘s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, she told her mother married to a “very bad man” when she was a teenager.
According to Entertainment Tonight, she explained her mother, ‘’Betty married this man, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had one of her breasts removed. Ellen says her mom’s then-husband used this information to sexually assault her on several different occasions.’’
Ellen told: “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,”
“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.”
“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,”
“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,”
“It’s time for us to have power.”
Ellen shared her story first time with Allure magazine in 2005 telling, when she was 16 or 17 and her mother, Betty, had a 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 didn’t tell the name of that man and said, “made me lie down because he said he felt hers while she was lying down.”
Ellen didn’t reveal how long the abuse lasted but told that once her stepfather tried to break down her bedroom door.
She said: “I had to kick a window out and escape and sleep in a hospital all night long.”