When Mariska Hargitay sat down with Glamour, she spoke about the “frozen place,” her way of describing that place we all can find ourselves in when we’re going through something incredibly traumatic — no matter what it is. “I clearly was in that frozen place for a lot of my childhood — of trying to survive, actually trying to survive,” she said. When she started on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” she discovered something terrible: She wasn’t alone.
Instead of the typical fan mail, she started getting letters from sexual abuse survivors who felt comfortable sharing their own trauma with her. It led — in part — to the development of her Joyful Heart Foundation, started in 2004 to support survivors. Hargitay explained: “Normally, I’d get letters saying, ‘Hi, can I please have an autographs picture,’ but now it was different: ‘I’m fifteen and my dad has been raping me since I was eleven and I’ve never told anyone.'” She remembered her visceral reaction of shock and horror at the sheer number of stories, and stories of women who put the blame squarely on themselves: “I went, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.'”
In a piece for The Hollywood Reporter, Hargitay revealed that the letters were so many and so powerful: “The themes of the letters were shame and isolation and so much suffering — private, excruciating suffering alone. I have boxes full of them. I actually hired rape crisis counselors to help me respond,” she said.
