It is difficult for rape victims to talk about their ordeal, but actress Tiffany Haddish is opening up for the second time about when she was raped at age 17 by a police cadet. In a podcast interview on the Hustling With Vivica A. Fox last Wednesday, she spoke up further about her past experiences with the police.
The Girls Trip actress first narrated her ordeal to Glamour Magazine in 2018 and while on Fox’s show, she spoke about how the experience altered her life and haunted her for years because to date it has affected her interactions with the police.
According to Haddish, the incident took a “little bit of [her] soul” and the kind of support she needed at the time was never given to her.
“I dated a police officer, a judge, a lawyer. I dated several different kinds of dudes, thinking, ‘Oh if I date them, they’ll love me, and they’ll try to help me with my crusade of getting justice for my family and myself.’ But they were like, ‘Nah,'” she said.
That lack of support now affects her relationships and continues to haunt her.
“I had to learn revenge is not really where it’s at. Really the true revenge is in your success,” she shared. “I don’t know why I thought these police would do something to this other police officer because he took advantage of me — like I wasn’t even taken advantage of, that motherf**ker just took me,” Haddish told Fox.
“I had to learn revenge is not really where it’s at. Really the true revenge is in your success.”
Some of her subsequent encounters with the police have also gone south. In one incident, she was pulled over by the police and given a ticket for smoking weed in her car, Stylist reported.
The comedian said before the ticket was given, she tried to get the situation under control by cracking some jokes to defuse the tension.
“I didn’t make no fuss about it or anything. I just was letting them know I was scared, that I’m not doing anything wrong. The more that I talked to them, I was trying to crack jokes to try and lighten the mood even though I was super afraid for my life,” she said.
The police issued her a ticket for possession of weed, but later took it down a notch to a ticket for disturbing public peace. To this day, Haddish still feels she was not in the wrong and gets frustrated thinking about the incident.