'I was sexually assaulted in an all-boys school': Adeel Hashmi opens up on traumatic experience

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In her recent conversation with the celebrated makeup artist, entrepreneur and philanthropist Masarrat Misbah, actor Adeel Hashmi opened up on his traumatic experience of sexual assault, when he was in a secondary boys school, during the 1980s.

In a heart-to-heart conversation, Hashmi began to share, “I was in grade 7 or 8 and because I was in a public school, my class had many students who had been failing for a couple of years. So they were a lot older than me because they had been in the same class for years and I was just promoted from grade 6.”

“I was also not tall or big. Even behaviorally, I am very skittish, somewhere between a cat and a mouse. And these 8 or 10 students would bully me,” the celebrity recalled. “I can tell you one incident from that time, I’ll likely not tell you all of it and I might even tear up halfway through it. I was sexually assaulted in seventh grade…”

“They would sexually assault me at that time when this wasn’t a [commonly known] concept. And it’s an all-boys school. No teacher, no elder, my brother, my parents could do anything,” Hashmi remembered.

 

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Unsure of how to deal with the situation, the actor divulged that he could never gather the courage to reach out to his parents or teachers, to share his ordeal. He continued, “I remember only one time I said to my brother that there are these hostel kids who bully me, so whether I should tell our father. And he said, ‘No, you must resolve it on your own.'”

Hashmi also added that it is only one such incident of many that he went through, and unlike how everyone wishes to relive their childhood, he is thankful that those are bygone days, and he never wants to think about them again.

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