Westworld‘s Evan Rachel Wood has announced she’s taking a break from Twitter just a day after she used the platform to describe how she was raped twice, and how the assaults have left their mark on her life.
Before Westworld premiered, critics decried the inclusion of scene very early in the pilot in which the show’s female lead, Dolores (Wood), is dragged by the hair into a barn and raped. Wood has defended the show’s depiction of sexual violence, pointing out that there are no actual rape scenes.
Earlier this month, in a Rolling Stone profile, Wood revealed she had been raped twice, once by a significant other and once by a bar owner. The profile’s author, Alex Morris, notes that she was initially vague about the abusive behavior that contributed to her suicide attempt at age 22, but was “less circumspect” the day after the presidential election, when she emailed him and stated explicitly that she was raped. “I don’t believe we live in a time where people can stay silent any longer,” she wrote in the email. “Not given the state our world is in with its blatant bigotry and sexism.”
On Monday, Wood posted a lengthy note on Twitter — the whole “confession” that she had previously shared with Morris. “I started questioning my reasons for staying vague about my experience as a girl growing up in America,” the note begins. “I think, like a lot of women, I had the urge to not make it a sob story, to not make it about me.” The tweet has been shared over two thousand times as of this posting.
On Tuesday morning, Wood tweeted that she will be “taking a break from social media for the time being. Thank you for all your support and courageous stories. xo.” (Confusingly, she’s since retweeted an inspirational tweet from author Neale Donald Walsch and an article on C.S. Lewis by Maria Popova.)
In the Rolling Stone profile, Wood told Morris that Westworld has helped her cope with some of her own “demons.” “I mean, your demons never fully leave,” she said. “But when you’re using them to create something else, it almost gives them a purpose and feels like none of it was in vain. I think that’s how I make peace with it. Westworld? Good God. I left so much in that first season and never looked back.”