Anna Sale: If you feel like you have been harassed, if you feel like you have been violated, if you have been grabbed, if you have been raped, if you've been assaulted and you feel comfortable, on the count of three lets say me too together. One, two, three. Gabrielle confronted the news head-on. Gabrielle described how she was raped when she was 19, by a man who came into the Payless shoe store where she was working. Gabrielle writes about recovering from the trauma of sexual violence in a new collection of essays.
She also describes breaking out in movies like Bring It On , getting divorced in her mid-thirties, and raising a family with her second husband, NBA star Dwyane Wade. I got to talk to her about all of this, over a glass of wine, on stage in San Francisco, at an event hosted by InForum at the Commonwealth Club. AS: You have written a book that is profoundly honest about your family and growing up, about the family you've made, the boys you are raising, about trauma you survived, about the life you've built GU: Oh, the 45 part, that's good.
I feel so solid. I've never felt more whole and healed and connected and present and beautiful and powerful and legit, I've never been more in demand in my entire career that I have been at this moment in time.
So that is great. In the last week since the book has been released, in the midst of the And it's awful to say it's nice to have this community of people who are finally sharing their pain, but it is nice to know that I'm not alone, I'm not on an island, I'm not I just feel finally very connected and rooted and okay.
AS: You also write about growing up, a young black girl in Pleasanton, California--who's from Pleasanton? Not far from here. AS: And you also spent summers in Omaha, Nebraska visiting your grandmother, where you were in a community surrounded primarily by black people, and you would go back and forth between these two places. When you would come back to Pleasanton after spending the summer in Omaha, how would you feel about your blackness? GU: In the beginning, it felt like I was an animal that just got put on display at the zoo.
