In his memoir Let Love Have the Last Word, rapper Common reveals that he was sexually assaulted as a child.
“I pushed him away,” he wrote about an incident when he was 9 or 10 years old. “I don’t remember saying a whole lot besides ‘No, no, no,’ I felt a deep and sudden shame for what happened.”
Common said he “buried” the assault (the perpetrator was a non-family member) until only a few years ago.
“It was something that I didn’t know if I wanted to talk about,” he explained during an appearance on Tuesday’s episode of Good Morning America, “but I really believe that in telling my story other people will be OK with talking about that situation.
“And me, I’m a black man, we don’t talk about those issues in ways that we could. So I felt I wanted to create a space for people who have experienced that to be able to share that. That’s part of the healing, to be honest.”