[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Reneé Rapp got real about a very hard moment in her life.
In a new interview published on Thursday with The Hollywood Reporter, the Mean Girls star opened up about how her track Snow Angel was inspired by an “incredibly traumatic experience.” As in, the time someone sexually assaulted her at a hotel in Los Angeles two years ago. Whoa. Reneé told the outlet she had been out with friends at a bar at The Beverly Hilton one night and got drugged. The next thing she knew, she woke up seven hours later alone in a bathroom with blood on her pants, having been sexually assaulted.
Related: Reneé Rapp Claims Broadway Producers Said ‘Vile F**king Things To Me About My Body’
To this day, the 24-year-old singer does not remember the attack at all. And now, she said she is still “sorting through” all of her feelings about the incident. In fact, it was only recently she even realized how terrible her friends were to leave her at the hotel by herself. Reneé even shared that she blames them for what happened:
“I do understand that it was an incredibly traumatic experience that I don’t remember at all. And it feels weird to talk about because I don’t remember it. I just recently started to be like, ‘Wait, the people that let this happen to me suck.’ I recently was like, ‘I actually don’t want to follow this person on Instagram anymore because they left me at a club to get drugged.’ God knows what happened to me. And it happened two years ago. I woke up on a bathroom stall, face up in The Beverly Hilton with blood on my pants. And had been left alone at that point for like seven hours.”
So, so awful…
As for whether she’s ever had a tough conversation with those pals about her assault? Reneé revealed she only spoke with the guy she was dating at the time the day after the incident — and it did not go well. She recalled:
“I talked to the guy that I was seeing the day after, and I remember he was like, ‘Are you OK? What happened? I guess you went home. Hope you’re OK.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t go home. Don’t be dumb.’”
Oof. Although Reneé fully cut off her former pals recently, she noted she “always knew” they were never good friends to her. She added:
“I had just gone through a really difficult breakup. I also think, in hindsight, I was really struggling with my sexuality and I was like, ‘OK, well, this boy is kind of giving me validation, and this is a straight group of people.’ I knew, but I didn’t know to the extent, and I made a lot of excuses for it, but all my friends knew. [They] were like, ‘What the f**k is going on? You realize you’ve been out every single night and it’s a Tuesday. That’s wild.’”
Two years after the incident, Reneé hopes her music, especially the song Snow Angel, will “start conversations” about sexual assault — and help other survivors know they’re not alone. And looking back, the Sex Lives of College Girls alum told the outlet she wishes she knew “how to handle” the assault at the time instead of blocking it out:
“I think that if I was taught and spoken to about what assault is — obviously it’s really difficult to prevent that or prevent being abandoned by a group of friends at a hotel bar — [but] I would love to have had more emphasis on what assault was and how to handle it. Because in hindsight, I think the next day going to the hospital would’ve probably been [smart]. But I was just like, ‘Nope, I’m going to block it out.’ I think I went to a [recording] session the next day.”
OMG. This poor woman. We are sending love to Reneé. We cannot imagine how difficult it has been for her to open up about this awful, awful situation.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence and would like to learn more about resources, consider checking out https://www.rainn.org/resources.
[Image via Paramount Movies/Late Night with Seth Meyers/YouTube]
Source link
Perez Hilton
