Selling Sunset’s Mary Fitzgerald says she is ‘still haunted’ by sexual assault: ‘It will never 100 percent go away’

Selling Sunset’s Mary Fitzgerald Bonnet said she is still traumatized by the sexual abuse she experienced ten years ago.

The 44-year-old reality star shared her heartbreaking story in her new memoir, Selling Sunshine.

In the sixth chapter of her autobiography, Rock Bottom, she describes the attack that occurred 10 years ago over Memorial Day weekend, after she accepted an invitation from a friend of her friend Amanza Smith, long before they became colleagues at the Oppenheim Group.

A man she calls Joe invited her to his apartment in Los Angeles. Another friend she knew better would join them, and they would meet with a larger group of friends.

But when she got to Joe’s, it was just the two of them. He handed her a glass with “bright blue liquid” in it, claiming it was a vodka cocktail, which quickly caused her to pass out.

“When I woke up, I was lying on Joe’s bed, my arms pressed against his mattress and my pants around my ankles,” she wrote. “He was on top of me and inside me.”

Mary said she ran out of the apartment “crying and shaking” and went into “total survival mode.”

After recalling the attack, she writes about how she coped with it and how she learned to deal, if not completely, then at least with the effects the attack had on her life.

“The aftermath of that night still haunts me,” she wrote. “I will never go to houses of people I don’t know. I will not be alone with a man I haven’t been friends with for at least five years or who is 100 percent gay so I know I’m safe.”

After the attack, she was helped by her friends, such as Amanza, who was in a relationship with Taye Diggs at the time.

“I ended up leaving and going straight to New York with both of them,” she said. People.

“They just knew I needed to get out of there, needed a new environment and wanted to feel safe.”

Jason Oppenheim, with whom she was already in a relationship at the time, also played a major role in her recovery.

“When I told him, he was such a good friend, so comforting and protective,” she said.

She eventually told her husband Romain Bonnet, 29, about the attack, who said he was “shocked.”

“He was like, ‘Oh honey, I’m sorry you went through that,'” she recalled. “I mean, well, any good husband would. He’s just been so supportive.”

She continued: ‘If I have problems, for example with sex, I get a subconscious and involuntary shock when I’m touched and I don’t expect it, he’s very supportive. He tries not to take it personally and understands that it’s just a trigger.’

“I still have it,” Bonnet admitted. “It’s something that will probably never go away 100 percent.”

The hardest part was that I blocked a lot of it [for] “I wanted to survive, so I had to go back, relive it, talk about it and try to remember how I felt,” she explained.

Ultimately, Mary hopes that by exposing the difficulties she has endured, she will show others that “there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

“There were so many days where I just cried and thought, ‘Why does it have to be so hard?’ But I just didn’t give up,” she said. We weeklyand added: ‘I wanted to give other people hope.’

In the book, Mary also writes about her recent fertility struggles, after suffering a miscarriage last year. She says she wants to “help other people with the bad things that happened to me.”

Although she was very candid in her memoirs, she still left out a number of things.

“There were a few things that I left out that really made an impression on me,” because she “didn’t want to hurt or embarrass anyone I love” — especially her son Austin, 27.

Mary became pregnant at age 15 and writes about being ostracized by people in the Indiana town where she grew up.

“Things happen for a reason,” she said.

‘Everywhere I went, I was a baby with a baby, and I was being judged. It was really painful. [but] That’s how I can deal with the criticism that we get on the show. I didn’t know then that it got me into trouble and made my skin thicker.’

Fans of Selling Sunset know that Mary and Romain have been trying to have a child for a while now. They suffered a miscarriage and underwent multiple IVF treatments.

As for the message she hopes her fans take away from her book, she says she hopes they know to “keep moving forward.”

“Whatever you go through, you’ll get through it, just like everything else in life. Just keep believing in yourself, because I never believed I would be where I am today,” she said.

“Stay positive. Pick yourself up and be happy. Appreciate all the good things — because they will come.”

Selling Sunshine: Surviving Teenage Motherhood, Thriving in Luxury Real Estate, and Finally Finding My Voice will be available in bookstores from September 24.