Amy Schumer Opens Up About Her Abusive Ex & Surviving Sexual Assault: 'I Was Afraid for My Life'
Amy Schumer is happily married and basking in the release of her latest film I Feel Pretty, but the actress has revealed she had to overcome a lot to get to this happy point.
The comedian, 36, told Oprah Winfrey that the abuse she suffered during a past left her “convinced” that she “wasn’t lovable.”
“I got hurt by accident a lot. He didn’t realize how hard he’d grabbed me or shook me or pushed me, and I would fall and hit something then I’d be hurt,” Schumer explained to the host as part of OWN’s SuperSoul Conversations. “I can picture being thrown on the hood of a car like it was an hour ago.”
“And running from him, carrying my shoes and running from him, running into backyards trying to get away from him because I was afraid for my life,” she continued. “It’s so out of body. You think, ‘I’m not this woman, who is this woman? This can’t be me.’ I’m not that kind of woman, and then you realize there is no kind of woman. It happens to all woman.”
The Snatched actress added that she had been “convinced” by her ex that she “wasn’t lovable and he was the only person who could ever possibly love me.”
“And then again I would feel bad for him after he hurt me about how bad he would feel,” she said. “You don’t choose to fall in love with someone who hurts you, and you can be in love with someone who hurts you.”
Schumer also opened up to Winfrey, 64, about losing her virginity while she was sleeping when she was younger, saying the experience affected her so deeply she brought it up in her stand-up routines.
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“I lost my virginity while I was asleep,” she revealed. “So, in my stand-up, I used to talk about — I called it, ‘gray-area rape,’ which was my way of bringing this up in my stand-up… trying to make people laugh while they learned. When we hear about rape when we’re children, it’s about a guy popping out from a bush and this villain. They don’t say it’s probably going to be a guy who you know very well. It could be your husband, your friend. You think when that happens to you, you say, ‘Okay, well this isn’t someone I want to see rotting in a jail cell but what he did to me was wrong and I didn’t consent.'”
“In my stand-up, I would say if she’s asleep that’s a no,” she said, adding her boyfriend at the time had explained that he had thought she “knew” they were going to have sex.
“I didn’t say anything [about consenting]. He was my boyfriend, I loved him, I had to comfort him,” Schumer recalled. “I also felt really angry which… it was just a feeling I had, I felt really angry with him. It’s a rage that’s stayed with me. I don’t think you lose that. As women, we’re trained not to get angry because that makes people dismiss you right away. But I felt — I wanted to comfort him and try to push my anger down.”
Winfrey asked Schumer if she still defined her first sexual experience as a rape, to which the comedian said, “I, personally, feel like I lost my virginity through rape.”
“I didn’t consent, we hadn’t discussed it [having sex],” she continued. “We weren’t there in our relationship, we weren’t at that moment.”
In her 2016 book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, Schumer wrote about the experience saying her boyfriend at the time didn’t ask her or look her in the eyes to confirm she was awake before having sex with her.
“I was confused as to why he would have done this to me in this way, but the most dominant feeling I felt was that the guy I was in love with was upset and I wanted to help him,” she wrote. “I was seventeen years old and wanted my boyfriend to like me.”
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Since then, Schumer has continued with her life and achieved box office success with Trainwreck, Snatched and, more recently, with I Feel Pretty.
She married chef Chris Fischer in February, just one day after Valentine’s Day.
