“The Nanny” Star Fran Drescher Reveals That She Was Bound & Raped During a 1985 Home Invasion

The Nanny star and executive producer Fran Drescher has opened up about being bound and raped during a 1985 home invasion in her recent interview special, Fran Drescher: In My Own Words, which aired on August 16th.

The 62-year-old recounted the terrifying experience which occurred while she and her former husband Peter Marc Jacobson dined at their home with a friend of hers. The intruders assaulted and bound all three of them before raping her.

“It’s really hard. I felt like I was shattered in a million pieces,” she revealed. “It took me at least a year before I even felt close to being myself. I remember I was once in a restaurant with my manager, maybe, but we were having lunch, and a busboy dropped a tray of utensils, and it made a loud noise, and I literally jumped out of my seat and screamed. And everybody in the restaurant looked at me as I [slinked] down back into my chair.”

The famous actress says that though the night is permanently embedded in her mind, years of therapy have helped.

“You’re really on edge, and you’re not yourself at all. And you keep replaying in your head, ‘What if I did this? Or maybe if I never went home that night and I was supposed to maybe go out for dinner with other people and if only I had done that and blah, blah, blah,'” explained Drescher. “And, you know, we all got therapy, which helps because we got tools on how to not dwell in the moment of horror and walk ourselves – our minds all the way through the process of ‘and then they left, and then we lived, and then they were caught, and now they’re in jail, and we’re okay,’ you know, and all of that.” The Emmy-winner continued, “And very often when you have a horrific experience, you become stuck in that moment and you keep replaying in your head like a loop [of] that moment of horror. But you have to learn how to walk your mind past that and into the present now.”

Drescher also expressed her empathy for victims of violence who never get closure or who’s offenders remain at large.

“I think that in a way, we were lucky because they were apprehended, and we did get closure where a lot of victims of violent crimes don’t have that, which is unfortunate,” she said. “And I know that before the guy was arrested, every time I turned a corner and looked at someone sideways, I thought, ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ You know, and it’s just – you’re traumatized. And I don’t even think that I dealt with it when it first happened like I should have or would have today knowing what I know now about how to deal with my feelings.”

Despite years of mental and emotional recovery, Drescher was forced to relive that night publicly when a news publication obtained the details and reported the story.

“Then, you fast forward like 10 years later, and I’m doing The Nanny, and suddenly there’s one of these tabloid magazines – a TV magazine shows, and they talked about it like it just happened,” Drescher recalled. “And people were calling my parents, and they even tried to get in touch with the rapist at the prison who refused to meet with them. But the whole thing brought on a post-traumatic stress response in me and fortunately, I was in a whole other level of therapy at that point, so I had a very trained ear – a very serious woman to help me through it and actually experience what I didn’t allow us to experience 10 years earlier.”

Luckily for Drescher, her support system, which included her ex-husband and friends of theirs, who allowed the couple to live with them for three months after the assault, is what also helped her to get past the frightening night.

“I don’t think that you’re ever the same. You can never be the same,” she said. “And I developed a deeper empathy for people’s pain and an understanding of what it must be like – the horrors of war or being a prisoner of war. For me, the whole episode lasted about an hour or an hour-and-a-half – something like that.”