Actress Jessie Cave - best known for playing Ron Weasley's love interest Lavender Brown in the final three Harry Potter movies - has opened up about being raped by her tennis coach at 14.
The 33-year-old made the revelation on a new podcast on Tuesday, We Can't Talk About that Right Now, alongside her younger sister Bebe.
Thirty minutes into the pilot episode, the two women were joking about who had the worst childhood and it was then that Jessie said: "Come on - I was raped."
"That's true, sure, but that's kind of a little bit of a trump card at this point, you put it out a little bit too much," her sister joked, even though this is the first time that Jessie has spoken publically about the alleged incident.
"I had braces for five years!" she snapped back at her sister's laughs.
"To be fair, acne and braces are bad," Jessie retorted, "but I think rape at 14 is pretty bad. By your tennis coach, who you trusted, a position of power."
Watch the full podcast below:Despite the severity of the revelation, the two women laughed off the ordeal, with Bebe even joking: "Well at least you were an athlete and you had good legs.
"It's true, I was fit and I was very able with a tennis ball. But I was still taken advantage of, and he was sent to jail, so its fine."
"My rape, I think, did mean that I have had a completely different adolescence and early twenties to you, because in retrospect I was still recovering and my sexual journey was a completely abnormal road to yours," she said.
"I think that there are still consequences from that period of time that I'm only realizing 18 years later, and actually, the more time I have away from it - this is going to sound awful - but I do feel quite lucky in so many ways that I had a rape that was actually… it didn't destroy me."
"I think that's something that people don’t talk about enough with sexual abuse and trauma," she added.
"There are some people that are okay after, there are some people that do use it and find a way of living with it and definitely are not defined by it."
In the end, Jessie concluded that while she had a harder time during her adolescence, Bebe was having a rougher ride in her 20s because of the ongoing pandemic and the tragic loss of their brother.
Jessie played tennis at a national level until her career was cut short by an injury at 15, Too Fab reports.
