Total Bellas' Nikki Reveals She Was Raped Twice as a Teenager in New Tell-All Memoir
As WWE superstars Brie and Nikki Bella landed in the spotlight thanks to wrestling. When they joined Total Divas, their fame shot to another level. They were so popular that they got their own reality TV show. On Total Bellas, they shared even more with their fans. They have been so open about their romantic relationships, family struggles, and their post-wrestling career moves.
The twins have a clothing collection. They have their own line of wines. The two of them host a podcast. Nikki even competed on Dancing With the Stars, where she met her fiance Artem Chigvintsev. Another one of the Bellas' projects is a tell-all memoir called Incomparable, which Brie and Nikki authored together. In the book, Nikki opened up about two traumatic experiences that she had as a teenager.
In the book, Nikki reveals that she was raped two different times when she was in high school. Entertainment Tonight shared some excerpts from Incomparable. Instead of "losing" her virginity, Nikki said that her "virginity was stolen" from her. She wrote, "I was raped, by a guy I thought was a friend, while I was passed out at a party. I’d had too many beers, and maybe some shots of hard alcohol, and I only woke up because my stomach hurt." After she pushed him away and ran out of the room, he asked if that meant they were "boyfriend/girlfriend." She recalled, "It is f*cked up - shocking in retrospect - that it never occurred to me to call the police. I didn’t even tell my sister because by admitting that it had happened, it became true, it became fact." She also admitted that she never told her mother and that she would find out when she read the book herself. Nikki wrote, "I had never even seen a penis, yet I was no longer a virgin."
A few months later, then-16-year-old Nikki was raped by a college-aged guy who shays drugged her and friend in a hotel room. She revealed, "One of the guys followed me in and bashed my head against the bathroom sink." The reality star shared, "I had clearly been roofied - I was groggy, and I couldn’t see straight, but I could see four condom wrappers littered across the bathroom floor and realized that I had been raped." Nikki explained, "When something like this happens to you, you understand the blame-the-victim mentality, how easy it is to feel shame rather than anger, how easy it is to feel like you could have stopped it yourself."
While it may have been difficult for Nikki to open up about these tough experiences, making herself vulnerable in this way is incredibly brave. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who relate to what she has gone through because they've been through similar pain. Writing the book may have been a therapeutic experience for the Total Divas star, but she will probably help more people than she could ever imagine by being so raw and honest about her sexual assault.
Source: ET