Singer Halsey Reveals She Endured Multiple Sexual Assaults in Powerful Poem at the Women's March
Halsey has opened up about her own experiences with sexual assault in a powerful and honest poem.
The star read the poem at the Women’s March in New York City on Saturday and it is now going viral, inspiring others who have had similar experiences and encouraging people to stand up for Planned Parenthood.
“It’s 2002 and my family just moved and the only people I know are my mom’s friends, too, and her son,” Halsey said. “He’s got a case of Matchbox cars and he says that he’ll teach me to play the guitar if I just keep quiet. And the stairwell beside apartment 1245 will haunt me in my sleep for as long as I am alive and I’m too young to know why it aches in my thighs, but I must lie, I must lie.”
She continued, “It’s 2012 and I’m dating a guy and I sleep in his bed and I just learned how to drive and he’s older than me and he drinks whiskey neat and he’s paying for everything, this adult thing is not cheap.”
“We’ve been fighting a lot, almost 10 times a week and he wants to have sex, and I just want to sleep,” she added. “He says I can’t say no to him, this much I owe to him. He buys me dinner, so I have to blow him.”
Halsey also recalled a recent sexual assault, saying it occurred last year by someone she trusted.
“It’s 2017 and I live like a queen and I’ve followed damn near every one of my dreams,” she said. “I’m invincible and so f—— na?ve. I believe I’m protected ’cause I live on a screen, nobody would dare act that way around me.”
“Until a man that I trust gets his hands in my pants but I don’t want none of that, I just wanted to dance,” she continued. “And I wake up the next morning like I’m in a trance and there’s blood. Is that my blood?”
“You see I’ve worked every day since I was 18. I’ve toured everywhere from Japan to Mar-a-Lago,” she continued. “I even went on stage that night in Chicago when I was having a miscarriage. I mean, I pied the piper, I put on a diaper and sang out my spleen to a room full of teens.”
She also touched on suffering a miscarriage in 2015, “I even went on stage that night in Chicago when I was having a miscarriage I mean, I pied the piper, I put on a diaper,” she told the crowd.
Halsey previously opened up about the miscarriage to Rolling Stone in an interview in 2016.
Halsey told the publication she discovered she was having a miscarriage hours before her performance at the 2015 VEVO Lift Live event in Chicago. She said she screamed in shock when she found herself bleeding from the waist down in her hotel bed.
Her first thought, she said at the time, was “‘I have to cancel the show.'”
In the end, Halsey asked her assistant to buy adult diapers from a drugstore. While no one forced the singer to go onstage, she said she put on a diaper and took two Percocet to perform.
“It’s the angriest performance that I’ve ever done in my life,” she told the magazine. “That was the moment of my life where I thought to myself, ‘I don’t feel like a f—ing human being anymore.”
The singer also spoke about taking her friend to Planned Parenthood as a teen after her friend was raped by an older man.
Toward the end of her poem at the Women’s March, she gave credit to women who have spoken of their own experiences recently, saying it gave her the courage to stand up for herself and come forward with her story.
“It’s 2018 and I’ve realized nobody is safe long as she is alive,” Halsey said. “And every friend that I know has a story like mine. But then heroes like Ashley and Simone and Gabby, McKayla and Gaga, Rosario, Aly, remind me this is the beginning, it is not the finale.”
“And that’s why we’re here. And that’s why we rally. It’s Olympians and a medical resident and not one f—ing word from the man who is President,” she continued.
“Love your neighbor, please treat her kindly, ask her story and then shut up and listen,” Halsey added. “For the people who had to grow up way too young, there is work to be done. There are songs to be sung. Lord know there’s a war to be won.”