Mena Suvari has spoken candidly about being raped when she was 12 years old, saying she saw it at the time as "confirmation that no one was going to save me".
The 43-year-old actress, who is best known for playing Heather in American Pie and Angela in American Beauty, shared her experiences with sexual assault in her 2021 memoir.
Suvari said she had been abused throughout her life and was raped by one of her older brother's friends when she was 12, People reports.
She said he had showered her with attention, penned love letters for her, and persuaded her to engage in sexual acts with him, before raping her on several occasions.
Feeling ashamed, Suvari denied they'd had a sexual relationship when he labeled her a "w***e" to other kids at school.
"I struggled to be seen and heard, engaged with," she told The Guardian. "But I didn’t feel such a loss of sense of self until I was 12. When I was raped."
She added: "That sucked the life out of me. I think that was just excessive confirmation that no one was going to save me, no one was going to do anything for me." Suvari even recalled how a doctor treated her for a bladder infection at 13 and put her on contraception.
Going into detail about the time she was raped, Suvari referred to the individual who assaulted her as "KJ" and explained how he put pressure on her to have sex with him after her family moved to South Carolina.
Per People, she explained how KJ had raped her in a private room at his family's home. "Part of me died that day. He used me, had fun with me and then disposed of me. He called me a w***e," she said.
The actress added: "I never got to have a healthy expression of [sex]. My choice was lost. And that, compiled with already not feeling seen and heard, established a concept that I would have of myself. That that was my value."
She referred to writing her memoir as "cathartic" and revealed she's been to therapy over the years, describing it as a "daily battle".