The comedian shared an emotional testimony on the upcoming season of David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction: “The only reason I’m going into depth about that,” she said, “is because I want other females to never, you know, ever let someone do that.”
Ellen DeGeneres opened up about the alleged sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager in a recent interview.
DeGeneres claims her stepfather sexually molested her during an interview with David Letterman for the forthcoming second season of Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, which premieres May 31.
“It’s a very horrific, horrible story, and the only reason I’m going into detail about it is that I want other females to never, ever let someone do that,” DeGeneres said during the episode to Letterman.
“My mother had breast cancer shortly after they married,” DeGeneres explains. “She had a breast removed, and they had a highly sexual connection, which was also quite uncomfortable.”
“When she was out of town, he told me he’d felt a lump in her breast and needed to feel my breasts because he didn’t want to upset her, but he needed to feel mine.”
“He tried to break my door down, and I kicked the window out and escaped because I knew it was going to do—it was going to go more to something,” DeGeneres says of her stepfather’s repeated attempts to feel her breasts.
“And I didn’t want to tell my mother since I was trying to protect her and knew it would ruin her happiness.”
DeGeneres claims she told her mother what had happened after a few years, but she claims her mother didn’t believe her then and stayed with her stepfather for another 18 years. DeGeneres stated that her mother eventually left him “because he’d changed the narrative many times.”
“Most women do this because they don’t feel like they have a voice,” DeGeneres explains. “And that’s the only reason I’ve ever discussed this with anyone other than my pals. We do not believe we are worthy or afraid to have a voice and to say ‘no’…”
“It irritates me when I see individuals speaking out, especially today, and when victims aren’t believed because we don’t make anything up. And I like males, but so many get away with so much. It is simply time for us to speak up. It’s time for us to take control.”
