Nikki Bella opens up about getting raped twice during high school years

American wrestler Nikki Bella recently shared her harrowing account of getting raped twice during her teenage years.

The former star of WWE, opened up about the appalling time in her new memoir Incomparable that she co-wrote with her sister Brie Bella.

According to Us Weekly, Bella writes: “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.”

She further detailed how she had found the alleged rapist had taken advantage of her while she was unconscious.

“I 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.”

This however, was unfortunately not the end of it, as she recalls getting raped once more by a college-aged man, at age 16.

“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,” she writes.

“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.”

She further added that she came to terms with speaking up about her abuse courtesy of the #MeToo movement.

“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. 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,” she said.

Bella had been in a relationship with John Cena from 2012 but their engagement hit the rocks in April 2018, and that is when the two parted ways. She is currently expecting her first child with fiancé Artem Chigvinstev.

Bella also said that she admires her sister for always “treating herself with respect.”

“'How do I not have this?' 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.'”