Australian actress Rachael Taylor has spoken for the first time about being the victim of domestic violence.
Taylor, 29, breaks her silence in a first-person account of her experience with domestic violence in the latest edition of The Australian Women's Weekly magazine.
A Sydney court heard in 2011 that Taylor suffered 12 months of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of actor Matthew Newton, following a high-profile incident in a Rome hotel.
The Grey's Anatomy actor, who also starred in Red Dog, doesn't mention Newton in the article or name her abuser but speaks candidly of the anguish she went through.
"I remember looking at a domestic violence poster in a hospital emergency room and on it was a picture of a woman, bloodied and bruised.
"I didn't relate to her, even though I was her. I thought I was the exception to the rule, but I was the rule," Taylor says.
In the piece Taylor talks about her loneliness and anguish at losing her ability to speak up.
"It feels as if all the friends you invited up the coast for your summer holidays vanished inexplicably while you were doing the washing-up," she wrote.
"Then your mobile is lost, your mental road map of how to get back to where you came from is erased and, suddenly, your ATM cards say your money is gone and your car disappears, too.
"In addition, you notice that 'the coast' has now magically splintered off into its own very small, very barren island.
"Worse still, you have lost your voice. Even though there is nobody around to talk to, anyway, your inner voice, the dialogue you can have with yourself, is gone.
"Do you understand? That is my saddest memory, actually. I had lost my voice. It did come back. Sadly, for one woman every week in Australia, the return of her voice is a right she is denied. Put plainly, put shockingly, she is dead," Taylor said
Editor-in-chief Helen McCabe says on the publication's website that it was the star's "express wish that we make no mention of the perpetrator".
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