Junot Díaz | Sexual abuse revealed in essay to newyorker
Photo Credit: Wikimedia.org “I was raped when I was 8 years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted,” he wrote. Rutgers graduate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, recently revealed a secret he hid from the world all his life — his experience as a victim of sexual abuse. In the piece titled, “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” published by The New Yorker, he details the experience of being raped at the age of 8. Diaz explained that his rape completely and irrevocably changed his way of life, ceasing any opportunity to live normally. He read a lot at spare moments when the rape didn’t haunt him. Díaz made one final suicide attempt for a while, he wrote, before he entered Rutgers University, the only school that issued him an acceptance letter — and something he credits with saving his life.