Renee Rapp discussed her experience with sexual assault and the decision to cut out people from her life in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published on Wednesday, February 28. The Mean Girls actress, 24, spoke about how the moment influenced her to write the title track from her album Snow Angel. When asked how she felt getting to share her feelings about sexual assault, she said that she’s still working out her emotions. “I still feel like I’m sorting through those feelings. I do understand that it was an incredibly traumatic experience that I don’t remember at all,” she said.
Renee continued and said that she feels “weird” to talk about it, because it was an experience she doesn’t remember. Still, she said that while she’s been sorting through her feelings, she’s decided to cut out some of the people that were there that night, two years later. “I just recently started to be like, ‘Wait, the people that let this happen to me suck,'” she told THR. “I actually don’t want to follow this person on Instagram anymore because they left me at a club to get drugged.”
The interviewer asked Renee if she’d confronted the people that she was with that night, and she said that she had had a conversation with her then-boyfriend. “I talked to the guy that I was seeing the day after, and I remember he was like, ‘Are you OK? What happened? I guess you went home. Hope you’re OK.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t go home. Don’t be dumb,'” she said.
Renee was also asked whether she felt like she knew that she wasn’t in with a good crowd, and she said that deep down she did. “I knew, but I didn’t know to the extent, and I made a lot of excuses for it, but all my friends knew. [They] were like, ‘What the fuck is going on? You realize you’ve been out every single night and it’s a Tuesday. That’s wild,'” she recalled.
When Renee decided to perform “Snow Angel” on SNL, she did take the opportunity to share her story more through her performance. She said that after getting to share the message, she’s heard from more people who had similar experiences, and she hopes that others can learn from her experience to try to prevent more people from being assaulted.