She opened up to PEOPLE about the traumatizing memories at Mosaic Foundation’s first annualGala Against Human SlaveryatCipriani 42nd Streetin New York City on Tuesday night.
“I remembered a sexual assault when I was 19 years old. That was the story I knew,” McCord, who first revealed she was raped in an essay forCosmopolitanin 2014, told PEOPLE.
“A year ago, I was in treatment for PTSD and memories of child sexual abuse came back for years all the way until I was 11 years,” theDallasactress, 32, said. “Now I know why this is my life and this is my story because it is so personal to me.”
Growing up, she said that she “believed that sex equated love.”
“Sex and love equaled the same thing,” she explained. “So what did I do? I wanted to be loved. I thought I had to had sex with someone to be able to be loved. It was devastating to my soul as a human being to feel I wasn’t worthy of love unless someone was taking advantage of my body.”
AnnaLynne McCord.Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Now, McCord, who serves as the president of an anti-human trafficking organization calledTogether1Heart, has made it her mission to “make sure every single person in this planet knows what love feels like.”
She added: “To be able to be a part of something where young men and women and boys and girls have been through even worse than what I have been through in my own life [and] to see that they weren’t suicidal like I was, they weren’t cutting up their arms like I was, they were forgiving and loving themselves and those who did that to them, that gave me a way out. They gave me hope.”
In her first-personCosmopolitanessay, McCordwrote candidlyabout her devoutly Christian, physically abusive upbringing, and the night she woke up to find a male friend raping her in her Los Angeles apartment at age 18.
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“The support has been amazing,” she previously told PEOPLE. “You think in your head that the opposite is going to happen. You think that you’ll be shamed and there will be even more degradation, humiliation. And the opposite has been apparent. But what’s even more important than that to me has been the outreach from survivors who are telling me their stories.”
source: people.com
