‘I was sexually abused as a child’ – Vanessa Williams

By Osagie Alonge
Culled from THE NET

Williams at the 43rd NAACP Image Awards Nomination announcement, Jan 2012

US pop-R&B recording artist, producer, dancer, model and actress, Vanessa Williams has revealed that she was sexually abused as a 10-year-old girl.

Williams who’s now 49 revealed the shocking news in her new book ‘You Have No Idea’ and believes the experience which she describes as ‘traumatizing’ might have caused her to be ‘highly sexualized’ at a very young age.

‘It happened one night where she told me, ‘come over here,’ I didn’t know that it was wrong, but I knew that it wasn’t right because I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody’, Williams narrated her experience.

‘I think I was highly sexualized because I was in fifth grade and I had this experience. Because it feels good, you’re like, OK, well this is supposed to be normal. That’s not normal for a 10-year-old to be seduced’.

The mother of four also reveals in her book that ‘she had an abortion during her high school years … but kept it a secret from everyone, including her mother, because she was scared’.

Williams has been married twice – to her former manager Ramon Hervey II, from 1987 to 1997 and former NBA basketball player Rick Fox from 1999 to 2004