Junot Diaz Reveals That She Was A Victim Of Sexual Abuse

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot Díaz revealed in an essay on the New Yorker that he was raped when he was eight years old.

The Dominican-born novelist, who has explored the subject of sexual abuse in his fiction, had not spoken publicly about his own experience to date. But in an essay titled The Silence, Díaz addresses a reader who approached him a few years earlier at the signing of a book and asked if he himself had been sexually abused. At the time, Díaz did not respond, he reveals.

"I am still afraid, my fear as continents and the ocean between them, but I will speak anyway," he writes. "Yes, it happened to me. I was raped when I was eight years old. By an adult I really trusted. After he raped me, he said he had to come back the next day or that he would be "in trouble." And because I was terrified and confused, I went back the next day and was raped again. I never told anyone what happened, but today I tell you. And to anyone else who cares about listening."

Díaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, describes his confession as “that shit broke my planet, threw me completely out of orbit, to the lightless regions of space where life is not possible. I can really say that it almost destroyed me.”

The acclaimed author did not tell his family, and his childhood was marked by attacks of anxiety and fury. "As other children explored infatuations and first love, I was faced with intrusive memories of my rape that were so unbearable that I had to bang my head against the wall," he writes.

Díaz writes that she came to “hit rock bottom” after a woman she loved discovered that he had been cheating on her repeatedly, so she went to therapy. Since then, he has told his friends, "even the toughest of my friends," about the abuse; previously, I had been “afraid that rape would have 'ruined' me; fearful of being 'discovered', fear, fear, fear. The 'real' Dominicans, after all, are not raped.”

“I had to lose almost everything and something else. And something else. Before I finally reached out, she writes, to her unidentified reader. “I think of all the years and all the life that I lost in hiding, fear and pain. The mask has more of me than ever. But above all I think about how it feels to say the words - to my therapist - all those years ago; to tell my partner, my friends, that I was raped. And what it feels like to say the words here, where everyone - and maybe you - could hear.”

The revelation comes a month and a few weeks after the writer's first children's book, Lola, was released, which carries a very special message for all racial minority boys and girls, who like its author - who grew up in New Jersey - have been raised outside their country.