Mena Suvari Reveals Sexual Abuse and Drug Addiction

WRITTEN WITH STRENGTH –

July 21, 2021 – As Suvari tells PEOPLE, that was also an act — an effort to hide the truth about the trauma she’d been living through. In her new memoir The Great Peace: A Memoir, excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE, “Between the ages of twelve and twenty, I was the victim of repeated sexual abuse.” It began in the sixth grade when she was raped by a friend of one of her older brothers, whom she refers to as “KJ” in the book.

At the time she was feeling a bit lost, “the new girl,” after her family had moved to Charleston, SC. “I was trying to fit in,” she recalls.

That’s when KJ began pursuing her and eventually pressured her to have sex. “No, I don’t want to do that,” she recalls telling him in the book. One day, when she was a month shy of turning 13, he brought her to a private room in his family’s home where he raped her.

“Part of me died that day,” says Suvari. “He used me, had fun with me and then disposed of me. He called me a whore. I never got to have a healthy expression of [sex]. My choice was lost. And that, compiled with already not feeling seen and heard, established a concept that I would have of myself. That that was my value.”