“I want this violence to end.”

It’s the start of a new year, and actress Mariska Hargitay has a lot to say. In a a powerful personal essay she penned for PEOPLE, the Law & Order: SVU star opened up about experiencing sexual violence in her own life.

“A man raped me in my thirties,” Hargitay wrote. “It wasn’t sexual at all. It was dominance and control. Overpowering control.”

It’s a huge moment for any woman to share this intensely private information on such a public platform, but it’s especially meaningful for Hargitay, who’s spent the majority of her career playing a character (Olivia Benson, of course) who investigates sexual crimes and pursues justice above all else. Here’s a closer look at what she had to say.

Mariska Hargitay shares moving essay about being raped in her thirties

“He was a friend,” Hargitay shared, in the opening lines of her essay for PEOPLE. “Then he wasn’t. I tried all the ways I knew to get out of it. I tried to make jokes, to be charming, to set a boundary, to reason, to say no. He grabbed me by the arms and held me down. I was terrified. I didn’t want it to escalate to violence. I now know it was already sexual violence, but I was afraid he would become physically violent. I went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape. I checked out of my body.”

It took many years for Hargitay to reckon directly with what happened, she said. “I couldn’t believe that it happened…So I cut it out. I removed it from my narrative.”

Instead, she directed her focus towards helping other survivors of sexual assault, both through her on-camera work on Law & Order: SVU, and through her off-camera work building the nonprofit Joyful Heart, a “leading national organization with a mission to transform society’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, support survivors’ healing, and end this violence forever.”

During this period of willful compartmentalization, Hargitay said, her friends and family worked to gently push her towards facing the truth — and the trauma — of her rape. “They were the first ones to call it what it was,” Hargitay wrote. “They were gentle and kind and careful, but their naming it was important. It wasn’t a confrontation, like ‘You need to deal with what happened,’ it was more like looking at it in the light of day: ‘Here is what it means when someone rapes another person, so on your own time, it could be useful to compare that to what was done to you.’”

It was this kind of support that allowed Hargitay to reckon with her assault. “Now I’m able to see clearly what was done to me,” she said. “I understand the neurobiology of trauma.”

These days, Hargitay is putting her time and effort towards a gargantuan task: working to curtail the prevalence of global sexual violence. “I want this violence to end,” she shared. “Sexual violence persists not because of something unchangeable in our human condition, it exists because power structures are in place that allow it to happen… The violence ends when the power structure changes.”

Mariska Hargitay explains why she’s glad she had children later in life

Hargitay’s personal essay is only one piece of her PEOPLE cover story, and we’re fascinated by what else she shared.

“I’m so grateful that I’m an older mom,” Hargitay said. Now 59, she married fellow actor Peter Hermann when she was 40 years old, then gave birth to their first child, August, when she was 42. She and Hermann have since adopted two more children, Amaya and Andrew. Hargitay said she was also “grateful” that she became successful later in life; she landed her career-defining role as Law & Order: SVU’s Benson when she was 35.

“I don’t know if I could have handled it when I was younger,” Hargitay went on. “When I was younger I wasn’t as present, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to accept and appreciate. And now I’m going to savor this moment. I want to share my lessons and where there is pain that I can fix that really inspires me to lighten the load.”

There is, of course, a natural question you might want to ask any actor who has remained in the same role for so many years: Is she sick of it yet?

It doesn’t seem like Hargitay is. “It’s been such a privilege to live with [Olivia] and have this character as a beacon,” she said. “Olivia is so many things that I’m not, and yet she has a clarity and north star to justice, and what seems to be an inexhaustible well of perseverance towards that goal.”

Hargitay went on, “I lived this perfect feminist story. I lived it in many ways on SVU and in my own life. And I’m just so grateful and I want to pay it forward.”

With the return of Law & Order: SVU for a 25th season, the iconic show is now the longest-running drama series in television history — and Hargitay’s character, Benson, is now the longest-running character in a prime time drama series. Perfect