Jeannie Mai emotionally reveals she was sexually abused by family at age 9

After numerous women bravely opened up about their traumatic sexual abuse experiences to rally around Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's accusers, Jeannie Mai did the same.

During one sensitive discussion on "The Real", the 39-year-old co-host revealed that she was a victim of sexual assault for four whole years. What made matters extremely worse, was that it was a family member that has been abusing her since she was just nine years old.

While speaking about Brett Kavanaugh's current case of sexual assault allegations, she said:

“As a person who was sexually assaulted at a young age by somebody very close to me, I remember the trifecta that I would continuously process which is: fear, anger shame, fear, anger shame. Fear: What’s going to happen to our family if I say something and out this person? Anger: Why did you just sit there? Why did you let this go on for four years? What’s wrong with you?”

Sharing more about the traumatic experience, she said that she did not tell anyone about it because the abuser was someone she cared about it.

“[I] didn’t tell anybody because this was somebody I really cared about. And there’s a little bit of a Stockholm Syndrome in there too because if somebody who’s a stranger did it to me, oh I know what to do. I know how to wile out, I got that down. But when it’s somebody you trust, somebody you know that you actually are supposed to love or believe in, you just freeze.”

After it went on for four whole years, it took two years after that for her to find the courage to say something about it. However, she says that whether it took two or twenty years, it does not invalidate what happened to her.

She did not go on to state who exactly her abuser was, but while speaking to her co-host Adrienne Bailon, she confirmed that it was a family member.

This isn't the only issue that Mai had to face this week, as she got into a heated argument with her co-host Tamera Mowry over "Sesame Street" characters.

After there were rumors that surfaced that two of the characters, particularly Bert and Ernie, were gay. Mowry shared how she's not sure what the show was trying to teach her children, while Jeannie argued that the issue wasn't in the show and the lessons they teach the kids, as she herself learned from "Sesame Street", but the fact that they had to clarify that the two were not gay instead of leaving the homosexuality rumor as an open-ended question.