Fran Drescher talks about the ‘traumatising’ 1985 house invasion and rape she experienced: ‘I was shattered,’ she said
Fran Drescher Rape : Fran Drescher is speaking up about a “traumatising” incident in 1985, when attackers entered into her home, blindfolded and tied up her then-husband, then raped and assaulted Drescher and a close friend.
“It’s quite difficult. “I felt like I was shattered in a million pieces,” Drescher said of the incident, which occurred when she and her husband at the time, Peter Marc Jacobson, were having dinner and discussing her girlfriend’s upcoming wedding with a friend of Drescher’s.
Drescher remarked, “It took me at least a year before I even felt close to being myself.”
“I recall being in a restaurant with my manager, perhaps, and we were having lunch when a busboy dropped a tray of utensils, which created a loud noise, and I literally leapt out of my seat and yelled.
And as I [slid] back into my chair, everyone in the restaurant glanced at me.”
While the perpetrators remained at large, the “Nanny” star and executive producer, 62, revisited the terrible occurrence on “Fran Drescher: In My Own Words,” which aired on Aug. 16, and said the experience left her nervous and unable to focus on many things in her day-to-day life.
“You’re tense and irritable, and you’re not yourself.” ‘What if I did this?’ you keep thinking to yourself.
‘Or maybe if I hadn’t gone home that night and was meant to go out for dinner with other people and if only I had done that and blah, blah, blah,'” Drescher continued.
“And, you know, we all went to therapy, which helped because it gave us tools on how to not dwell in the moment of terror and instead walk ourselves – our minds through the process of ‘and then they left and then we lived and then they were caught and now they’re in jail and we’re okay,’ and all of that.”
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“And very frequently when you have a dreadful event, you stay caught in that moment and it keeps reliving in your head like a loop [of] that moment of horror,” the Emmy winner continued.
But you must learn to move your attention beyond that and into the present moment.”
Drescher expressed her sympathy for victims of horrific crimes who never received closure since their perpetrators were never apprehended and prosecuted.
I think we were fortunate in that they were captured and we were able to achieve closure, which is terrible for many victims of violent crimes,” she said.
“And I know that before he was arrested, every time I turned a corner and looked sideways at someone, I wondered to myself, ‘Is that him?’
Is he the one?’ You understand, and it’s only that you’ve been traumatised.
And I don’t think I dealt with it as well as I should have or would have if I knew what I know now about how to cope with my emotions at the time.”
At the time, the comedian and novelist stated her rehabilitation strategy was to “pick myself up, dust myself off, and get on with it, not dwelling in anything, especially my grief.”
Years later, though, Drescher was forced to recreate the event in front of the public when the tale was picked up by a news outlet.
“Then, 10 years later, I’m doing ‘The Nanny,’ and all of a sudden, one of these tabloid magazines – a TV magazine programme – comes out and talks about it like it just happened,” Drescher remembered.
“And people started calling my parents, and they even tried to contact the rapist in prison, but he refused to meet with them.
But the whole event triggered a post-traumatic stress response in me, and luckily, I was in a different level of treatment at the time, so I had a very trained ear – a very serious woman – to help me get through it and feel what I hadn’t allowed us to experience 10 years before.”
During Drescher’s “In My Own Words,” she claimed that her husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, was “extremely loving and accepting of what my experience was through that nightmare” during counselling for the house invasion and rape.
Drescher and Jacobson moved in with close friends Dan and Donna Aykroyd right away, and Drescher and Jacobson resumed their recuperation.
Drescher added, “We were also very fortunate to have really supportive, giving friends and Danny and Donna Aykroyd, who took us in that night.”
“And we lived in their home for about three months healing, and to this day, I’m very security conscious, and if I fall asleep and fail to set my alarm, I marvel at it because it just goes to show how far I’ve come.
But then I jump up and put it on as soon as I remember it,” she continued, laughing.
The paranoia was compared by the “Indebted” co-star to what a serviceman or woman could experience after returning home from battle.
“I don’t believe you’ll ever be the same. “You’ll never be the same,” she stated emphatically.
“And I gained a deeper empathy for people’s suffering and a better understanding of what it must be like to be a prisoner of war or to experience the horrors of war.
The entire experience lasted maybe an hour or an hour and a half for me – something along those lines.”
“It seemed like your whole body – everything – didn’t know whether you were going to be killed or not in that period of time,” she continued.
And you have no idea who will be the first to die. And who will be the last to live but to see the deaths of the other two?
When it’s happening, all of this is going through your head.”
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The physical and emotional scars portray a picture of sorrow and sadness she had never experienced before.
Drescher explained, “I mean, I fried my adrenal glands from that night.” “When you experience great fear, your adrenals get so terrified that they dull for the rest of your life.
They act as if they can’t recuperate from such a primal scream.”
People that go to war for two years or more, it’s no surprise that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which we’re seeing and understanding more than ever with our military,” she added.
“You can’t go through that degree of stress because I just did it for 60 to 90 minutes, but it left scars on me that I’ll carry with me to my grave.”
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