Actor and stand-up comic Amy Schumer has revealed that she was raped by a former boyfriend, someone she "really trusted", when she was young.
The 36-year-old actor opened up about the experience to media mogul Oprah Winfrey and said her comic skits often reflected her life story where she would say if a woman is asleep, one cannot asssume to have the consent to engage in a sexual act with her.
"When we hear about rape when we're children, and we're being warned about it, it's about a guy popping out from a bush... and some villain. They don't say it's probably gonna be a guy you know really well. It could be your husband. It could be your friend. And so you think, when that happens you, you say, 'OK, this isn't someone I want to see rotting in a jail cell, but what he did to me was wrong, and I didn't consent.'
"And for me, I lost my virginity while I was asleep. And that's not OK. So, in my stand-up I would say, 'If she's asleep, that's a no.' Just hoping that a couple guys would see that and it would be met in that moment, like, 'This is a no. I heard that somewhere'," Schumer said, according to Jezebel.
The "I Feel Pretty" actor said when she confronted her then boyfriend about her sexual assault, "The first thing he said was, 'I thought you knew.' I didn't say anything yet, and he says, 'I thought you knew.'"
To this Winfrey said, "What's interesting about that is that you then were feeling bad for how he would feel the next day."
The actor said she loved him and it was her training as a woman that she did not want to "get angry" as it pushed people away.
"There's sort of no place for that anger. But I felt I wanted to comfort him because he felt so bad and he was so worried. And I just tried to push my anger down," she added.
Schumer said she and her boyfriend eventually started having consensual sex, but pointed out that it does not negate the initial assault.
When Winfrey asked her how she would sum up the incident in retrospect, the actor paused and replied, "I personally feel like I lost my virginity through rape. I didn't consent. We hadn't discussed it. We weren't there in our relationship. We weren't at that moment. And we talked about things.
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