Gretchen Whitmer: ‘When Something Is Taken From You, What’s Left Behind Has a Purpose’
glamour.comI love listening to music, but there’s one song that I can’t bear to hear: Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U." Hauntingly beautiful, it was a huge hit in 1990, playing on the radio constantly when I was a freshman at Michigan State University.
And that’s why I can’t stand hearing it. Because it takes me right back to the traumatic event that happened to me that year, when I was raped by another student.At first, I didn’t tell anyone.
Not my friends, my siblings, my parents—no one. I felt ashamed, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. The assault rocked my sense of the world and my place in it.
And I was terrified that I might be pregnant with my attacker’s baby. To my immense relief, I wasn’t. But if I had been, I at least knew that the choice of how to handle that situation would have been up to me.Over the years, I revealed the assault only to a handful of partners, including my first husband, Gary Shrewsbury, and the man I married in 2011, Marc Mallory.
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