Amy Schumer Opens up About Surviving Abusive Ex, Sexual Assault

Fresh off her feel-good film I Feel Pretty, a happily-married Amy Schumer sat down with Oprah [...]

Fresh off her feel-good film I Feel Pretty, a happily-married Amy Schumer sat down with Oprah Winfrey to discuss abuse she suffered during her past that she said left her "convinced" that she "wasn't lovable."

The 36-year-old comedian opened up how she thought she would die at the hands of an abusive ex.

"I got hurt by accident a lot. He didn't realize how hard he'd grabbed me or shook me or pushed me, and I would fall and hit something then I'd be hurt," Schumer explained to the host as part of OWN's SuperSoul Conversations. "I can picture being thrown on the hood of a car like it was an hour ago."

"And running from him, carrying my shoes and running from him, running into backyards trying to get away from him because I was afraid for my life," she continued. "It's so out of body. You think, 'I'm not this woman, who is this woman? This can't be me.' I'm not that kind of woman, and then you realize there is no kind of woman. It happens to all woman."

She said that she had been "convinced" by her ex that she "wasn't lovable and he was the only person who could ever possibly love me."

"And then again I would feel bad for him after he hurt me about how bad he would feel," she said. "You don't choose to fall in love with someone who hurts you, and you can be in love with someone who hurts you."

The Snatched actress also told Winfrey about losing her virginity while she was sleeping when she was younger, saying the experience affected her so deeply that she refers to it as "gray-area rape" in her stand-up routines.

"I lost my virginity while I was asleep," she revealed. "So, in my stand-up, I used to talk about — I called it, 'gray-area rape,' which was my way of bringing this up in my stand-up… trying to make people laugh while they learned. When we hear about rape when we're children, it's about a guy popping out from a bush and this villain. They don't say it's probably going to be a guy who you know very well. It could be your husband, your friend. You think when that happens to you, you say, 'Okay, well this isn't someone I want to see rotting in a jail cell but what he did to me was wrong and I didn't consent.'"

"In my stand-up, I would say if she's asleep that's a no," she said, adding her boyfriend at the time had explained that he had thought she "knew" they were going to have sex.

She said that she didn't object or stand up for herself right away because she loved him.

"I didn't say anything [about consenting]. He was my boyfriend, I loved him, I had to comfort him," Schumer recalled. "I also felt really angry which… it was just a feeling I had, I felt really angry with him. It's a rage that's stayed with me. I don't think you lose that. As women, we're trained not to get angry because that makes people dismiss you right away. But I felt — I wanted to comfort him and try to push my anger down."

Winfrey asked Schumer if she still defined her first sexual experience as a rape, to which the comedian said, "I, personally, feel like I lost my virginity through rape."

"I didn't consent, we hadn't discussed it [having sex]," she continued. "We weren't there in our relationship, we weren't at that moment."

Schumer wrote about the experience in her 2016 book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, saying that her boyfriend at the time didn't ask her or look her in the eyes to confirm she was awake before having sex with her.

"I was confused as to why he would have done this to me in this way, but the most dominant feeling I felt was that the guy I was in love with was upset and I wanted to help him," she wrote. "I was seventeen years old and wanted my boyfriend to like me."

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