Saraya Knight Shares Gut Wrenching Rape Details, Opens Up About Paige’s Past Battles W/ Suicidal Thoughts

Knight opened up about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own stepfather:

“I was 8 years old and it started off where he was paying me more attention because I was a really good runner….by that age they knew I was very sports oriented and I was quite an affectionate and loving child. I wasn’t worried about going up and giving somebody a hug because everybody knew everybody where I grew up. It wasn’t frowned on and I never felt unsafe. Then my stepfather, as I was getting older, he’d buy me the best of everything and he wouldn’t for the other kids. They were jealous about it; but, they didn’t realize what I had to go through to get that pair of…running spikes or the latest track suits that the England runners were wearing. The rest of the kids were so jealous; but, they didn’t understand that my stepfather was abusing me. From the age of 8 to the age of 15 – I ran away at 15 because I couldn’t handle it, the arguments. My mom didn’t know anything about it, so my mom couldn’t understand why I was being a complete bit*h. As I was getting older, I was starting to react different to the abuse I was suffering.”

Knight’s mother didn’t know about the abuse and would often encourage her young daughter to spend more time with her stepfather:

“We had to stay at his mother’s house and my room was up in the attic and it was very easy access to get to me up into the attic.”

Knight further detailed the abuse:

“I wet the bed until I was 11 or 12 years old because I was too afraid to go down….I’d rather wet the bed and suffer the consequences from my mom because that’s where he used to spend a lot of his time.”

After Knight ran away at 15, she lived on the streets and life didn’t get any better. She finally met someone she considered a friend; but, the woman was only setting her up to be brutally gang raped.

Knight details an occurrence where the woman laced her coffee with a powerful drug:

“I spent three days in an abandoned house being gang raped, over three days. It was horrendous. The whole thing was a ploys. My brain worked; but, the body doesn’t. It just doesn’t. I remember being put into the back of a car, not being able to move. It’s like you’re paralyzed; but, your brain still works….they took me out of the car and put me in a room upstairs and then they just come and go. I got kicked and urinated on. It wasn’t good. They kept me drugged up and when they got their fill of me, they put me in the car and through me on the side of the road.”

The difficulties didn’t end there for Knight, who eventually found employment as a waitress and was raped once again:

“The manager took a shine to me and I was raped by the manager. By the time I was 18, I had been raped twice, gang raped once, and then sexually abused my stepfather. My life as a general – I thought was over. I tried to commit suicide. I’d taken pills and knocked it down with cough mixture. I’d taken everything and always somebody managed because I didn’t tell anybody – somebody always managed to get me and I’d wake up in a hospital….someone out there definitely wanted me to survive.”

Knight learned something from the experience and the years of emotional turmoil that ensued:

“I’m not gonna feel guilty for other people’s sins. What happened to me was somebody else’s choice. I was a part of that choice; but, I did not have a choice and I’m not gonna spend my life regretting what I could, or should, or would have done. At the time, I couldn’t do anything about it. There was nothing in my life that could have made it stop. It was the card that I was dealt.”

Knight credits her husband, whom she calls her ‘savior,’ as one of the major stabilizing factors in her life.

Despite her tragic circumstances, she’s also wholeheartedly committed to her family:

“My focus is my husband and my kids and my grand kids, so I don’t have room for anything else because I have to work. So it’s work/family….I work my ass off to make sure my kids and my husband – I will be with my husband until the day that I die literally. There’s no splitting for my feller and my kids, there’s no way on this earth that I’d ever allow my kids to never talk to each other. They can fall out. They can fight; but, they can’t blank each other. I will not stand for it. We’re a family unit and we do everything together.”

Knight closed with some advice of her own:

“Everyone’s got a past. Everyone’s got a cross to bear. It’s how you deal with it. You can either make it empower you or you can make it break you. You can either be a victim or you can be an aggressor. I chose to march forward and make sure that it never happens to me again. Now I have a choice. I’m an adult and I’m a woman. I’d never put myself in a situation that I did when I was a child, so it’s given me hindsight which is valuable, so for all of Saraya’s tribulations that she’s going through all the bad stuff – it’s a story, it’s a memory, it’s also an empowerment. It’s a very very valuable lesson. It’s a life lesson and there’s not many times in life where you’ll actually learn a life lesson. When you do, you take it with both hands and you never allow that situation to happen again and that’s what she needs to do. The big catastrophes that happen in her life, they’re there for a reason. They’re there to knock her onto the right path and she has to learn from them. That’s what I say to her and that’s what I say to anybody that’s going through it. Please, just ride it. Time is a great healer. It also speeds stuff up. It doesn’t matter what you’re going through at the minute. You can stop it. You can prevent it. You can deal with it. Then you can talk about it and it empowers you. You have to take the negative and make it into a positive and Paige will do that.”

Readers interested in listening to the full episode of Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia may do so below:

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