WASHINGTON (Reuters) – TV presenter and actress Ellen DeGeneres has revealed that she suffered sexual touching from a stepfather when she was 15 years old, newspaper USA Today reported today.
According to DeGeneres, his mother was once married to a man who took advantage of the days when his wife was out of town to make touches to the current presenter.
“She told me, when she was out of town, that she had noticed a lump in her chest and needed to touch my breasts because I did not want to worry her, but I needed to feel mine,” the television star said during an interview on the show “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction “, which Netflix will premiere completely next Friday.
DeGeneres also indicated that her stepfather, after having convinced her, tried to touch her breasts “over and over again”.
This is not the first time that the presenter remembers the sexual abuse that she suffered in adolescence, to which she referred in 2005 in an interview with the magazine “Allure”.
As he related, the touching “came to more” and his stepfather, now deceased, tried to access his room.
“He tried to enter my room, I jumped out the window and ran because I knew he was going for something else,” he said.
The television star acknowledged that he “did not want” to tell the incident to his mother, who was ill with cancer, because “he was protecting her and knew that it would ruin her happiness”.
With her story, DeGeneres said that she intends to inspire other women to lose their fear “to have a voice and say no”.
“That’s the only reason why I think it’s important to talk about this, because there are a lot of young girls and no matter how old they are,” he continued.
“When I see people talking,” he added, “especially now, I get angry when you do not believe the victims, because we just do not invent things, and I like men, but there are many men who get away with it.”
DeGeneres said publicly that she was a lesbian in 1997 and after the 2005 interview said that the incidents had nothing to do with her sexual orientation.
“The people I’ve trusted about this before say, ‘Oh, that’s why you’re a lesbian,'” she said, “but before that I was a lesbian, my first memories are like a lesbian.” (EFEUSA)
