Fran Drescher believes there’s a correlation between the trauma she suffered when she was raped and having uterine cancer years later.
“A little bit more than 10 years after the rape, I was diagnosed with cancer,” the 59-year-old actress told Australia’s Studio 10 recently. “And that, I think, is a poetic correlation because I didn’t really deal with my pain for many, many, many, many years with the rape.”
The incident occurred when Drescher and then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson were home having a small dinner gathering with a friend when intruders broke into their home.
“They broke the door down, it was locked. Nothing was done wrong,” Jacobson said. “You try to live. You try to get through it alive.”
For quite some time, Drescher says, she didn’t properly deal with the trauma she suffered. “I ended up with a gynecological cancer, so it kind of ends up being poetic in where the body decides to break down and create disease,” she said.
She managed to move forward following the rape, but “you’ll never be the same,” she said.
“But whatever that is, then forge forward with that and turn your pain into purpose, which is what I always do,” she explained.
Beating cancer has been a “colossal learning experience.”
“I’m not glad I had cancer and I don’t wish it on anyone, but I am better for it. Sometimes the best gifts come in the ugliest packages,” she said.