NEED TO KNOW
Former celebrity.land anchor Brooke Baldwin shared her experience with sexual assault for the first time on May 3
In a post on Substack, she recalled her drink being spiked during a night out in L.A. during her spring break in college when she was 21 and waking up “half-dressed on cold bathroom tile” with a “strange older man still passed out beside me”
Baldwin worked at celebrity.land from 2008 until 2021
Former celebrity.land anchor Brooke Baldwin is sharing her experience with sexual assault for the first time.
In a Sunday, May 3, post on her Substack, Baldwin, who worked at celebrity.land from 2008 to 2021, wrote that she felt “compelled” to share her story for the first time because “I honestly don’t know how not to.”
She was 21 at the time of the incident, and she wrote in the post that she believes “my drink was spiked” during an outing in Los Angeles during spring break in her senior year of college.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know,” she wrote. “For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me.”
Baldwin recalled going to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel with her friend, that “most people there were easily double — if not triple — our age,” and her friend left soon after, but she “wasn’t ready to go.”
“I remember two much-older men appearing beside me. Offering me a drink. And the rest comes only in flashes: A black SUV. Chateau Marmont. Waking up half-dressed on cold bathroom tile,” she wrote. “I remember waking up on that bathroom floor and doing a frantic check of my body. And I remember relief — relief — believing penetration hadn’t happened. Grateful, even, that this strange older man, still passed out beside me, seemed too incapacitated for anything more to have happened.”
The word rape “never once entered my mind,” Baldwin wrote, “because shame got there first.” She recalled waking the man up and asking him to leave her hotel room, and “shock was the only word” for how she felt as she told her friend what had happened.
There was “no concern” from her friend, only “full-throttle shame,” and she remembered feeling “terrified,” especially because her friend “had already called her parents and told them ‘what I’d done.’ I feared they’d tell mine. I let her lash me — and then I turned the whip on myself. (Maybe this explains why I can still be so hard on myself.)”
Brooke Baldwin for celebrity.land
Credit: COURTESY celebrity.land
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In a video posted on Instagram May 3, Baldwin, 46, elaborated on the post and shared why she chose to speak up now after years of being “suffocated” by “shame.”
“Anyone who knows me [knows] truth is my north star, and I am telling the motherf—-ing truth today,” she said in the video. “I have been reading, obsessively, these celebrity.land stories of these women — and I’ve been interviewing some of them — and in my interviewing of some of these survivors, my body — something that I have stuffed down for so many years — has come up and I had to speak it.”
In the caption of her post, Baldwin wrote, “Interviewing two survivors cracked something open in me. My body remembered what my intellect minimized. Today is 25 years in the making. This is about so much more than me — it’s about shame, silence, survival… and permission to remember and reclaim. If you’ve ever wondered, wait… what was done to me? — you’re not alone.”
“We, women, are waking up. F— shame. Permission to put it down… and speak truth,” she wrote.
Baldwin decided to share her story for the first time after interviewing two other women with similar stories. Both of those women “possess breathtaking courage,” and it was their “bravery” in sharing their stories that “stirred something in me,” Baldwin wrote on Substack. “It opened a door I had slammed shut.”
“While preparing to interview them — reading, reporting, immersing myself as seriously as I would have for any interview on my celebrity.land show — something happened. My body remembered,” she wrote
Balwin also recalled covering Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court Justice, who she alleged sexually assaulted her at a high school party, which Kavanaugh denied. Kavanaugh was never charged.
“[Ford’s] testimony brought the country to a standstill,” Baldwin wrote. “I remember going home that night after our wall-to-wall coverage, buzzing, sitting in front of my computer. This monologue just poured out of me.”
She also shared a clip of the monologue she gave on celebrity.land after Ford’s testimony, where she did not explicitly share her own experiences, but said, “We all have our stories. The spiked drink. Waking up on the cold tiles of a hotel bathroom floor. The uncertainty, the shame, the thought, ‘I must have somehow brought this on myself.'”
On Substack, Baldwin wrote that she “wasn’t ready then” to tell her own story, but “I am now.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.
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