Joni Ernst discussed her marriage and divorce with Bloomberg in August and at greater length in a phone call Tuesday night, when she also first disclosed her rape as a college student. At times as she described her past, Ernst cried so hard that she was barely intelligible.
For most of high school, Ernst says she didn’t date. “I was the smart one, who earned the 4.0, the sweet girl that takes care of everybody,” she said.
She entered into a relationship with someone who was “very abusive. He was physically and sexually abusive,” she said. One night while she was in college at Iowa State University, he raped her at his home, then later threatened to kill himself if she broke up with him, she said. She called the campus sexual assault counseling center’s hotline, and ended the relationship. She didn’t report the attack to police, she said.
Later in life, she volunteered at the counseling center without disclosing that she had once been a client. Her volunteer work was part of her official biography during her 2014 Senate campaign, but when asked about it she said only that she cared for survivors of sexual assault -- not that she was one herself.