Fran Drescher is revisiting the painful memories of a home invasion and rape that took place 35 years ago. "The Nanny" star and her then-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, were at home at the time, having dinner with a friend, when the intruders broke in. They tied up and blindfolded Jacobson and then raped her. After the ordeal, Dresher told Fox News that she struggled to move on.
"It's really hard. I felt like I was shattered in a million pieces," she said in a report published Monday.
"It took me at least a year before I even felt close to being myself," Drescher continued. "I remember I was once in a restaurant with my manager, maybe, but we were having lunch and a busboy dropped a tray of utensils and it made a loud noise and I literally jumped out of my seat and screamed. And everybody in the restaurant looked at me as I [slinked] down back into my chair."
For a long time, Drescher said she felt responsible for the incident and wondered whether it would have still taken place if she had not been home at the time. She was eventually able to work through her emotions, but the past came back to haunt her when she achieved fame.
"Then, you fast forward like 10 years later and I'm doing 'The Nanny' and suddenly there's one of these tabloid magazines — a TV magazine shows, and they talked about it like it just happened," Drescher said, according to Fox.
"And people were calling my parents and they even tried to get in touch with the rapist at the prison who refused to meet with them. But the whole thing brought on a post-traumatic stress response in me and fortunately, I was in a whole other level of therapy at that point so I had a very trained ear — a very serious woman to help me through it and actually experience what I didn't allow us to experience 10 years earlier."
Drescher said that she felt stuck in the past, replaying the incident in her head "like a loop," but through therapy she was able to develop coping mechanisms. She also found closure after the suspects were arrested.
Nowadays she applauds herself for even the simplest of tasks such as turning on the alarm at night, which she said shows how much progress she has made.
"I'm very security conscious," she said, "and if I fall asleep and forget to put my alarm on, I really marvel at that because that just for me, illustrates that I've come a really long way."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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