Glenn Beck revealed generations of sexual abuse had occurred within his family as part of an emotional response to a video posted on his website last week that critics said made fun of college rape victims.
“Rape is not a laughing matter. Nor it is a matter that you lie about. You don’t cheapen the real horror of rape,” Beck said on his radio show Thursday.
“My family has experienced rape firsthand multiple times over multiple generations now, and I have worked hard in my personal life to stop the effects of this over the last ten years,” he added. “It has changed my life. It has changed the lives of my sisters.”
Beck shared the story of his father, who turned a childhood of sexual abuse and rape by older men in his life into physical abuse of his children. The horrors of that kind of sexual abuse, Beck said, are cheapened by what he feels are misleading definitions of rape, which were illustrated in a segment posted on The Blaze last week.
That segment called into question two surveys that provided the statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while at college. In the video, Blaze commentator Stu Burguiere argues misleading questions and “absurd” definitions of rape wildly overstate the number of sexual assaults on campus.
The video included a sketch in which a man dressed as a woman and presented several situations that Burguiere said would qualify as rape using the standards of the two studies.
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Blogs like Salon and Slate excoriated the sketch as “gross and misleading.” In his response Thursday, Beck said he initially planned to ignore the “abusers,” but instead took the opportunity to share the story about his family to defend his point of view on the study.
“Rape certainly is not about someone asking for sex too many times and then being sad when you turn them down,” Beck said Thursday. “If you had the facts on how brutal rape is, it shows how awful your peer reviewed study questions really are.”
Watch the original segment here: