Ms. Wood told Rolling Stone magazine in 2016 that she had been raped: “By a significant other while we were together. And on a separate occasion, by the owner of a bar.”
In recent years, especially after the birth of her son in 2013 and the start of the #MeToo movement, she was galvanized to become an advocate for survivors of domestic abuse, she told The New York Times in a 2018 interview. “If you’re going to be famous, for me it has to mean something, or be used for something, because otherwise it just freaks me out,” she said in the interview.
That February, she testified before Congress about what she had endured as “a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor.”
“So often we speak of these assaults as no more than a few minutes of awfulness, but the scars last a lifetime,” she said in her testimony, in which she detailed an episode in which she thought she might die at the hands of her abuser. “Not just because my abuser said to me, ‘I could kill you right now.’ But because in that moment, I felt like I left my body. I was too afraid to run, he would find me.”
For years afterward, she said, she “struggled with depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors,” and made two suicide attempts; she said she was eventually diagnosed with long-term post-traumatic stress disorder.
Before her congressional hearing about the Survivor’s Bill of Rights, which expanded access to medical care and more for survivors of sexual assault, Ms. Wood said she had hardly uttered the full scope of her trauma to anyone. She had barely processed it herself, she said in the 2018 interview, until she was cast in “Westworld,” the sci-fi drama in which she plays an innocent who slowly awakens to the darkness around her.