Nikki Bella reveals she was raped twice in teen years

Former WWE star Nikki Bella opens up about being raped twice in her teen years in her new memoir, “Incomparable.” 

The book which is co-written by her twin sister Brie Bella revealed that she was first assaulted at the age of 15 by a fellow student she “thought was a friend.”

“My virginity was stolen from me, without my consent. I was raped, by a guy I thought was a friend, while I was passed out at a party. I’d had too many beers, and maybe some shots of hard alcohol, and I only woke up because my stomach hurt — I came to, and this guy was both on top of me and inside of me.” she writes, according to Us Weekly, “ pushed him off and ran out of the room — he followed me down the hall and asked me if this meant we were now boyfriend/ girlfriend … I had never even seen a penis, yet I was no longer a virgin.” 

Nikki Bella, then aged 16, was raped again by a college-aged man whom she says drugged her.

According to People, she wrote, “There is the horrible offense in the moment, and then the shame and blame that follow, and feel almost worse than the original pain. When something like this happens to you, you understand the blame-the-victim mentality, how easy it is to feel shame rather than anger, how easy it is to feel like you could have stopped it yourself.” 

Bella says she blamed herself for the sexual assaults, keeping it a secret and how it affected her for years to come.

“And keeping that a secret and blaming myself, I started to lose my confidence. I started to disrespect myself. And then the relationships I got into at a young age, I let other people disrespect me and felt like, that’s okay, this is what I deserved.”

The 36-year-old reality star added that she turned to therapy “on and off” to try to cope with her struggles. 

“I feel like, if I’m having these younger women look up to me, maybe I can help them and have them not hold onto this as long as I did,” Total Bellas star continued to write, “It wasn’t until I was 28 and in a relationship where someone started to teach me how to respect myself. That’s how long I held on to things and felt I had no boundaries.”

The #MeTooMovement and her platform as a WWE star helped her to “let go”

“How do I not have this?,” she wrote, “And I knew why. But I held onto it for so long. When I look back at just decisions I made based off of it, I wish I could have heard my words now as a 36-year-old woman then, and be like, ‘You’re going to be okay.'”

Nikki Bella began dating fellow WWE star John Cena in 2012. The pair were engaged to be married but split up in April 2018. With fiancé Artem Chigvintsev, she welcomed her son Matteo Chigvintsev on July 31, 2020.

John Cena went on to marry Shay Shariatzadeh in October 2020.