14 DAY TRIAL // At a first glance, AnnaLynne McCord seems to lead an enchanted life: she’s young, she’s gorgeous, she makes good money off TV and modeling gigs, and she’s dating Domic Purcell of “Prison Break” and they’re madly in love. In a heartbreaking op-ed for Cosmopolitan, the star flings open the doors of the closet to let all her skeletons out.
AnnaLynne is very involved in various campaigns fighting for women’s rights but she’s clearly most passionate about helping victims of violence and / or abuse to return to normalcy. Coming from an abusive household, she knows what it’s like to come up in an environment in which you equate pain with love.
In the aforementioned op-ed, the actress talks about being brought up by two very strict parents who thought “discipline” was key in life, with the term understood as corporal punishment. She wasn’t allowed to watch TV and was raised to think she should wait until her wedding day to kiss a man but, while these two things aren’t necessarily that bad, the punishment received for wrongs (imagined or real) was.
Her mother and father would often have her bent over the bed, pants down, and smack her with a ruler for failing to comply with their wishes and demands. When they considered the ruler wasn’t painful enough, they bought a paddle.
“My parents believed in strict ‘discipline,’ as they called it — I would call it abuse. The punishments were painful and ritualistic,” the actress writes.
She moved out of the family home at 16 to pursue a career in modeling and would one day confront her parents to let them know how their upbringing messed her up. McCord described her early relationship with men (none of them consummated) as verging on violence because, after all, this is how she thought of love: it doesn’t exist if there’s no physical pain involved.
At 17, she fell in love with a male model who would become her first man. One year later, she moved to New York to get more modeling jobs, but the plan was that he would join her there later. Before this happened, she was raped by a male friend who had asked to come over to crash on her couch because he need a good night’s sleep and couldn’t get it at his place.
The rape happened as she slept and, AnnaLynne explains, for a very long time, she tried to deny to herself that it ever happened. It wasn’t until she confronted the man (and was told that she was being delusional because “what we had that night was beautiful”) that she realized that she must open up, face her demons and, in the process, help other women in the same situation get over the guilt and the shame, and regain their voice.
“Most of all, I have my message for women and girls: You have a voice. Don’t put yourself in a box. Don’t let the polite lies of society silence you. Honestly, I would endure everything all over again — it has led me to my own revolution,” AnnaLynne concludes her beautiful op-ed.