‘I Was Afraid For My Life’ Amy Schumer Shares Sexual Abuse Story With Oprah
Amy Schumer Image by Getty Images
“It happens to all women.”
That’s comedian Amy Schumer’s message about sexual assault, something she has experienced several times, she told Oprah Winfrey. Schumer, newly married and currently promoting her movie “I Feel Pretty,” has a rare ability to navigate the personal, the political, and the comic. On an episode of SuperSoul Conversations through Winfrey’s television network, Schumer spoke candidly about a former relationship in which she endured physical and emotional abuse from her partner. He would hurt her “by accident,” she told Winfrey, violent episodes that live in the forefront of her memory today. She remembers running from him “as if it was an hour ago,” and said she had to physically escape “because I was afraid for my life.”
Recalling these horrific episodes, Schumer told Winfrey that she would think to herself, “I’m not this woman, who is this woman? This can’t be me.” But ultimately, Schumer tried to convey, she realized, “there is no kind of woman. It happens to all woman.”
In painful detail, Schumer spoke to Winfrey about her experience having sex for the first time.
“I, personally, feel like I lost my virginity through rape,” Schumer said. The performer says she was asleep when her boyfriend began to forcibly have sex with her. It’s a traumatic event Schumer has used since her early days of stand-up comedy, describing being raped in her sleep in her sets. She says in doing this she is “trying to make people laugh while they learned.”
“He was the only person who could ever possibly love me.” Schumer said it was this thought about her abusive boyfriend stopped her from leaving him. For all the legitimate criticism of her new movie “I Feel Pretty,” it strikes me that Schumer really was trying to do battle with this sentiment in the movie. Men, Schumer wisely warns, or really any exterior force, are not capable of judiciously wielding the power to tell people when they can and cannot feel “pretty.”
Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
