Mariska Hargitay On The Impact Of Starring In ‘Law & Order: SVU’: “I Was Definitely A Victim Of Secondary Trauma”

Mariska Hargitay has been the star of Law & Order: SVU since its premiere in 1999, and playing Olivia Benson has had a significant impact on her.

The actress has starred in the procedural drama, which has more than 550 episodes, and knowing about all the cases covered on the show has affected Hargitay personally.

“That’s been a process. When I started the show, I wasn’t aware of how deeply it would go into me,” Hargitay told Selena Gomez for Interview magazine. “My husband Peter [Hermann] is always like, anytime I go anywhere, my first question is, ‘What’s the crime rate here?’ So it’s on the brain.”

She continued, “There’s been times when I didn’t know how to protect myself, and I think I was definitely a victim of secondary trauma from being inundated with these stories and knowing that they were true. Those were the parts that I didn’t know how to metabolize, just because of the sheer volume of it. That’s also why I started Joyful Heart [Foundation], so I would feel like, well, at least I’m doing something about it.”

Hargitay also told Gomez that starring in SVU has given her knowledge “about sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, than I ever had thought about.”

“And quite frankly, before I started the show, I didn’t know a lot about it,” she added. “When I read the script, I thought the show was so progressive, that they were willing to take on this subject matter.”

“During the first year, Dick Wolf got an award from the [Mt. Sinai] Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program, and it was actually that night that I learned the statistics of sexual assault. I learned that one in three women will be assaulted, and one in six men. That’s what started the foundation for me,” she said. “That’s when I started going, ‘I have to do something,’ because the show was obviously tackling the subject matter, but when I learned the statistics, I said, “Why isn’t everyone talking about this?” And if I didn’t know, I figured nobody knows what an epidemic violence against women is.”