Alexia Umansky is so proud of everything she accomplished while competing on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, especially the moment she bravely recalled a past sexual assault.
Warning: Spoilers below from the season 5 finale.
“I never shared it with my parents because I didn’t feel ready, and I care so much about my family,” Alexia, 30, exclusively told Us while marking the hit Fox reality show’s Thursday, November 12, season finale. “I felt like my hurt would become their hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt them.”
She continued, “I definitely feel so much lighter since I’ve shared it with my mom [Kyle Richards] in particular. … It was a weight I didn’t know was pushing on my chest, and telling her was something I didn’t know how much I needed until it was done.”
During the October 8 episode of Special Forces, Alexia opened up about a past sexual assault for the first time on screen.
“Seven years ago, I was on a trip with some friends, and I was with people I trust. I was put to bed because I had a little too much to drink. I woke up, and I could tell something had happened,” she shared. “I felt completely objectified. And I had a lot of pain and anger because of that. At the one-year mark, I decided that happiness is a choice and I was gonna choose to put it away. But it still hurts.”
While some viewers criticized fellow cast member Mauricio Umansky‘s on-camera reaction to the disturbing news, his daughter made it clear that he did nothing wrong.
“Something I would like to say is I feel like a lot of people had a negative reaction to how my dad reacted. A lot of people were like, ‘Didn’t he get up and hug her?’” Alexia told Us. “I just want it to be very known that my dad knows me very well, and I wouldn’t have wanted the hug in the moment, especially in a room full of other people.”
The Agency real estate agent continued, “You can even see he reaches his hand out, and I give my thumbs up because I know if he hugged me, it would have been a much more emotional experience.”
If you ask Alexia, her dad “handled it exactly the way he knew I needed him to handle it.”
“I want people to give him a little more grace for that because he understands me,” she continued. “Just talking about it and having him listen and not making it about himself is exactly the kind of reaction I would have appreciated. He listened, and that’s all I needed from both my mom and my dad. That was very healing for me.”
On Thursday’s episode, Alexia defied the odds when she passed the Special Forces test alongside Candace Cameron Bure and Collin Gosselin. While chatting with Us, Alexia got emotional recalling the moment she told her parents she won.
“The moment I got out of there, I looked for the first person with a cell phone. I said, ‘Please let me call my family. Let me call somebody,’” she recalled. “I just said, ‘I won,’ and everyone started crying.”
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test is streaming now on Hulu.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
