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(WARNING: Please note this article contains content around the subject of rape that might be triggering to some.)
The Bella Twins' new memoir was released on Tuesday – and with it came a few shocking revelations.
"And so, at a young age, Brie and I decided we did not want to be victims," Nikki says, in an audio recording of Incomparable, shared by E! News. "Instead, we wanted to be survivors, the heroes of our own stories, to take control and responsibility for our lives.
"It's a fine line and hard to do – acknowledging that you have been a victim, that you have been wronged, but at the same time not letting the victimhood continue to take your life hostage."
In an emotional chapter, Nikki goes on to share that she was sexually assaulted twice when she was a teenager.
"I was raped, by a guy I thought was a friend, while I was passed out at a party," she wrote. "It is fucked up – shocking in retrospect – that it never occurred to me to call the police. I didn't even tell my sister because by admitting that it had happened, it became true, it became fact."
She tells another story of when she was 16 and had her head bashed into a bathroom sink at a party in a hotel room. "I had clearly been roofied – I was groggy, and I couldn't see straight, but I could see four condom wrappers littered across the bathroom floor and realised that I had been raped," she wrote.
Nikki recently spoke of the incident in an interview with People saying she felt "ashamed" so she ended up keeping what had happened to herself. "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 said.
Now, Nikki hopes to help others who may be in the same situation that she was.
"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," she tells the publication.
"When I look back at just decisions I made based off of it," she added, "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.'"
The Bella Twins are currently self-isolating together with their families in Arizona, as they both gear up to welcome new life into the world – and they're due just two weeks apart!
