AOC Talks Sexual Assault, Liability on GQ Cover

Since September’s theme is America (at least according to some magazines), and possibly because of the upcoming midterm elections, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on the cover of GQ this month. In interviews conducted shortly after the Supreme Court gutting Rowe v. Wadethe congresswoman discussed her decision not only to participate in protests, but also to publicly address her experiences with sexual assault.

“The most powerful and persuasive things a person can say about an issue is to share their personal experience and personal story,” she said.

That’s why she spoke about this particular story at an abortion rights rally on June 26 in Manhattan’s Union Square. During her early 20s, she told the crowd that she had been raped. “I felt so alone that I had to take a pregnancy test in a public bathroom in midtown Manhattan,” she said. “And as I sat there waiting to see what the outcome would be, all I could think about was, Thank God, at least I have a choice.” In her GQ profile, she offered a few more details: “It was someone I was dating that I wasn’t sexually active with that forced himself on me.” And when she confronted him about it, he denied raping her — “broken line,” she said, “with the experiences of other women, friends I’ve had, or just pretending that what very clearly happened didn’t happen.”

“It is also an assertion of power,” the AOC added, “and so that assertion of power and dominance over others is not limited to the actual physical fact, but how things are dealt with afterwards.”

The AOC first referred to the incident after the riot on January 6, responding to fellow Republicans who advised her to walk away from her “very close encounter” with the rebels, in which she said she felt like she was “going to die.” . At the time, she drew a parallel between the suggestion that she had simply put the assault behind her and the response survivors often get when they talk about assault – “that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what happened”. Speaking of GQ, Ocasio-Cortez said, “I couldn’t really adequately convey what that experience was without giving people the context of what I had experienced and what was being repeated, because a lot of it was about resonance and fear of something that wasn’t it was theoretical, but a fear of something I had experienced. Echoing what she said when she first shared her experience, AOC also pointed to acknowledgment and accountability as two real ways people can begin to process trauma: “Confronting the fact that we as humans are capable of causing harm , but we are also able to heal from harm.

Read the full interview here.