Evan Rachel Wood, star of Westworld, told Rolling Stone she had been raped in her distant past but offered few details. Now she’s offering more specifics, in a lengthy confessional she posted on Twitter.
“Well, since everything is out in the open now, figured I would share the confession letter I wrote to @RollingStone in its entirety. #notOk,” she said in her tweet.
Well, since everything is out in the open now, figured I would share the confession letter I wrote to @RollingStone in its entirety. #NotOk pic.twitter.com/0FSP1gsE36
— #EvanRachelWould (@evanrachelwood) November 28, 2016
Wood, 29, sat for an interview with Rolling Stone recently to promote her HBO series inspired by the 1973 film of the same name about a Western theme park of the future populated by human-like androids. Wood plays one of the artificial beings.
“Evan Rachel Wood: How wild past, personal demons prepped her for ‘Westworld,’ ” the headline read.
She told the magazine reporter that she had suffered “physical, psychological (and) sexual” abuse in the past but didn’t elaborate. On Nov. 9, she wrote the reporter a letter expanding on that revelation, which was partially quoted in the interview.
On Monday, she posted the entire letter on Twitter.
Toward the end, she gets to the point: “Yes. I have been raped,” she wrote. “By a significant other while we were together. And on a separate occasion, by the owner of a bar.”
She said she didn’t want to talk about these episodes before because she didn’t want to make it a “sob story” about herself. She questioned whether one encounter was actually rape. She didn’t want to be blamed.
And who would believe her anyway, she thought.
Now she’s over all that. “I will not be ashamed … I don’t believe we live in a time where people can stay silent any longer,” she wrote. “I certainly can’t. Not given the world we live in with its blatant bigotry and sexism.”
It was all years ago, she wrote, and now she knows neither encounter was her fault, neither was OK. She tried to commit suicide years later and she’s sure the encounters were factors.
“There you have it,” she concluded.
Wood has been open about her sexuality: She came out publicly as bisexual in 2011 and has called herself “gender-fluid.” She was married to actor Jamie Bell and has a son with him, born in 2013.
In her interview, she attributes her vulnerability to her sexuality.
“You know, bisexuality is worthy of eye rolls,” she said. “And I didn’t realize how damaging that was until I tried to have healthy relationships as an adult and realized that there was still all this shame and conditioning and stigma around my sexuality that was really affecting the way I related to people.
I think I was taken advantage of because someone knew there was something about me that they could exploit.”
