14 DAY TRIAL // Vanessa Williams is opening up on Oprah’s Master Class on how she was abused when she was only 10 years old by a much older girl, during a summer vacation with family friends in California. She believes the untimely and very inappropriate experience turned her more promiscuous in her teen years.
Below is a segment of the Oprah show in which the actress and former Miss America details the traumatizing experience.
She explains that she went to California for the summer, happy to spend time with family friends and their much older and “cooler” daughter. Vanessa was 10 and the other girl was 18 and, because of the age difference and the coolness factor, the latter would always dictate what the former should do.
Vanessa would not even think of saying no, whether she was asked to smoke a cigarette or do something she knew she wasn’t supposed to. However, she explains, at that age, she had no definite idea of what was right or wrong, so when the older girl came into her room one night, she was shocked as much as she was confused.
“She came into the room where my friend and I were sleeping and she told me to lie down on the floor. She took my bottoms off and she said, ‘Be quiet,’ and she went down on me. And at 10 years old, I had no idea what it was, but I knew it felt good and I knew I shouldn't be saying anything, and I didn't tell anyone. It felt good but also something that was not supposed to be happening,” Vanessa explains.
She believes her troubled teen and young adult years would have been different without this experience, because it opened the door to sensations she should not have been feeling, not at such a young age.
She knew something was not right and, Williams insists, she wanted to speak to her parents about what had happened to her, but she never got the chance. Because of this, she got to live with the consequences.
“Had that not happened in my life and had I had an opportunity to have a normal courtship with a boyfriend at 16 or whatever... there wouldn't have been that shame that was always haunting me. It made me more promiscuous and more curious at a younger age than I should have been,” the star says.
As shocking as this is, this isn’t the first time that she talks about the experience: in 2012, she included it in her autobiography and detailed it in the TV appearances she did to promote the book.
No word on why she’s rehashing it now, but one thing is clear: her admission on camera is again opening the discussion on abuse, especially female abuse, and the consequences it has in the long run.