Indian-born actress, model, chef and author, Padma Lakshmi has written her memoir Love, Loss And What We Ate. In her memoir, she spoke about being molested by her relative and her demanding relationship with Salman Rushdie.

Padma Lakshmi (Image Courtesy: Image Collect)
Padma Lakshmi (Image Courtesy: Image Collect)

She spoke about how she lived with her mother in a small apartment in Queens, New York and shared her room with her stepfather’s relative because it was “a state of affair that, to people like us, who were used to living far too many to an apartment in India, seemed relatively normal.”

According to People:

One night, I woke up to his hand in my underpants. He took my hand and placed it inside his briefs. I don’t know how many times it happened before, since I suspect I slept through some incidents. Once you take a girl’s innocence, you can never get it back. What I remember more is telling my mother what happened and her believing me and then she and I telling someone else that it happened and that person not believing me. And then the next week, I was sent to India. In retrospect however, he should have been the one to go. Years later, in tears, my mother would acknowledge this grave mistake.