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When Brynn Whitfield was 34 years old, she was sexually assaulted by a man she was dating.
The Real Housewives of New York City star, now 37, joins a Zoom call from the Hamptons, where she’s spending Thanksgiving weekend with her found family who has adopted her as one of their own. As she opens up about the harrowing ordeal for the first time with PEOPLE, Whitfield takes a shaky breath before she starts from the beginning.
“[In] my 30s, I had so many problems, things on my mind,” she says, noting that her biggest concerns at the time involved marriage, fertility checkups and getting a mortgage. “There’s all these things I had in my head. I’m privileged, but sexual assault wasn’t one of them.”
“I was fearful of that in college and early 20s, and I would hear stories from my friends,” she continues. “It wasn’t in my brain that that happened to 30-year-old woman living in Manhattan … that fear wasn’t my fear anymore.”
At 34, Whitfield was the chief communications officer at a pet company. “Not to sound like a massive a–hole,” she prefaces, “but that doesn’t happen to me.”
She was used to attending luncheons and fundraisers supporting survivors, and never thought she could become one.
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Then one day, she was sexually assaulted by a prominent man in the New York City social scene that had been “courting” her. She recalls returning home in a blur. Had it been one of her friends confiding in her, she would have instructed them to file a police report after the incident and seek medical attention at an urgent care.
“You just go home, and you just shower, and you just want to pretend like it didn’t happen,” she says as tears fall. “I think my water bill probably that month was like $10,000 … and just there’s not enough soap in the world [to get clean]… You try not to put chlorine in your luxurious bathtub.”
The next day, Whitfield returned to work and didn’t tell anyone for months. She recalls feeling like a “shell of myself.”
“I was hyper-efficient at work, but I didn’t smile, I didn’t laugh, I didn’t bat an eyelash. I didn’t do anything. I blamed myself,” she says, recalling how she isolated herself from friends and family. “I was like, ‘How am I 34-years-old and dealing with this now?’ If you told me I had a chronic illness or something, I would’ve believed that. I just didn’t believe that it happened and it was hard.”
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Whitfield says she became “asexual for months” and felt “literally numb.” When she finally acknowledged what had happened to her, it felt like “a purge” and she slowly learned to let the “people that love me” remind her of who she was.
After getting into therapy and “just taking a risk and sharing,” she picked herself up and rebuilt the part of herself she had lost.
“You have to find reason in everything. There’s a reason I needed to experience this and honestly, it opened me up,” she says of how this experience has changed her outlook on dating.
She now dates with intention. “Now, if I really feel safe with someone, I open up in ways that are like I’ve never opened up or been vulnerable to someone before,” she explains. “Actually, I wasn’t opening my heart before and now oddly enough I can.”
To this day, Whitfield reveals she still runs into her assailant at various events in the city and the Hamptons.
“I put on a brave face and I refuse to cause a scene. I don’t like loudness. I don’t like screaming or yelling because of my childhood,” she says of how she stomachs their interactions. “I pick up the check and I sign. That’s what I do. That’s that.”
“I think that that is the unfortunate reality of so many people. I don’t think that everybody gets their day of justice,” the Bravolebrity continues. “I think this happens frequently. And I think that I’m one of many throughout hundreds, I don’t know, thousands of years that have had to handle it this way.”
Instead, Whitfield says, “I handle it with elegance, and grace, and tact and strength. And the only thing I know about the way I handle it, is that I’m certainly not the first one.”
When it comes to helping other women who have endured the same, the reality star hopes that her story will let people know they aren’t alone.
“If I can help one person feel something, feel how I felt, if I can help one person feel better, then I’ll tattoo it on me. Then it’s worth it, a billion percent,” she says.
