Alison Daddo 'I've found my voice!'

EMPOWERED BY AGE, THE AUTHOR TALKS FOR THE FIRST TIME ABOUT BEING ATTACKED AS A TEEN MODEL

- Naomi Toy

As Alison Daddo was writing her book about the life-changing experience of menopause, she knew there was one very personal story that she would have to share for the first time if she was to be “honest about who I was”.

But after 35 years and quite a few therapy sessions, Daddo felt she was in a place of enough strength and power to finally open up about the traumatic sexual assault she endured as a teenage model. “I've never talked about it before," she shares with WHO. "It was a big decision... but I felt like it played such an integral part of who I was as a young girl that I had to write about it.

"I had silenced myself in so many ways from a young girl into my 20s and into my 30s as well, but once I hit 46, 47, 48, I thought, 'I actually can't put a stopper in this anymore.”

The former Dolly cover girl, who every Australian woman of a certain vintage grew up with, decided to open up about the brutal rape as she penned her first book, Queen Menopause: Finding Your Majesty in the Mayhem.