“I have made a lot of progress since the event occurred, but I won’t pretend it isn’t something I struggle with,” she wrote in an Instagram post Sunday. “I still have flashbacks, I still get nightmares, I still jump when somebody touches me unexpectedly, even if it’s my best friend tapping me on the shoulder.”
PTSD, which can cause symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, avoidant behaviors, flashbacks, and feelings of guilt or shame, is typically associated with military veterans, but about 70 percent of sexual assault victims experience the condition. (The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs points to research that found 94 out of 100 women who were raped suffered from PTSD symptoms in the two weeks immediately following the rape, and 30 percent were still suffering nine months later.)
Abigail wrote the post in response to an Internet troll who commented in her original post about her rape that “reported rapes are the only rapes that count.” The actress says she never reported the rape to police because she “didn’t want to view myself as a ‘victim’ so I suppressed it and pretended it never happened.” Abigail also says she was in a relationship with her alleged rapist and didn’t think anyone would believe her. She also worried that he would do something else to hurt her, and revealed that she wanted to spare her loved ones the pain of knowing what she’d been through. “I knew how hurt my family and friends would be after finding out and I didn’t want to put them thru that,” she wrote.
Learn what it's really like to deal with depression and mental illness:
In a previous post, Abigail shared disturbing data from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, detailing how few rapes are actually reported and prosecuted:
Breslin also had this to say: “To say that rapes reported are the only rapes that count contributes to the ideology that survivors of unreported rape don’t matter. It’s unfair, untrue, and unhelpful.”