Valerie Bertinelli Reveals She Was Sexually Abused at Age 11: 'I Was Just a Little Girl'

Valerie Bertinelli surprised herself when she decided to include her childhood sexual abuse story in her upcoming memoir, Getting Naked.

The actress admitted she originally "had no plans" to include that in her tome — out on Tuesday, March 10 — as the memoir "was going to be a book about teaching people how to love themselves. I did not know that I would go this far."

"I guess because I'm healing from it, it’s not so scary anymore," she said in a new magazine interview. "I can say it out loud. I was sexually assaulted. It doesn't feel like it owns me anymore."

The cookbook author went on to call herself "a survivor."

The chef, 65, included a photo of herself at age 11 within that chapter of the book. "I loved to color, read, play with my Barbies and ride my bike around the block. I loved my cats," the One Day at a Time star recalled. "I was just a little girl."

"It boggles my mind that this little girl was taken advantage of that way," she said. "It boggles my mind because it’s still happening ... and I’m furious about it. And we need to start speaking up and saying, ‘Enough.’"

The mother-of-one admitted it took at least "10 years" for her to reveal the incident to her therapist.

"The very first time I said it out loud to my therapist, I thought, 'I’m going to feel better now.' It got worse before it got better," Bertinelli remembered. "I maybe ate a little bit more, drank a little bit more. When you stop eating things for comfort, stop drinking alcohol, it exposes your feelings. You can deal with them or not. And I chose to deal with them."

"I don't feel shame about it anymore," she shared. "I’m pissed off that it happened. Nobody deserves that."

Bertinelli said the "trauma" from her childhood led to her feeling shameful about her body, something she struggled with for decades.

However, these days, she felt confident enough to pose in her birthday suit for her memoir.

"It’s about getting naked with who I am, emotionally, physically," the Kids Baking Championship alum explained of the title and cover image. "It was really about getting to the nitty gritty and getting to the parts that I thought were shameful and come to find out they’re not. They're all kinds of different facets of what makes us who we are."