Tanya Selvaratnam sees the timing of her memoirs publication as serendipitous.

Assume Nothing: A Story Of Intimate Violence , which comes out Tuesday, explores the intimate partner violence that the activist, filmmaker, actor and author experienced during her yearlong relationship with former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. In recent weeks, two other major stories of intimate partner violence have received national attention: FKA Twigs has spoken out about her abusive relationship with Shia LaBeouf, and Evan Rachel Wood has spoken out about the abuse she experienced at the hands of Marilyn Manson.

Selvaratnam believes these stories, as well as her own, speak to how the next wave of the Me Too movement, which kicked off with revelations about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017, will focus on intimate violence in committed relationships. Her memoir explores the ways in which she became entrapped in her abusive relationship, and the steps she ultimately took to extricate herself and share her story publicly.

Part of her story will be familiar to those who followed The New Yorkers reporting in 2018 . Selvaratnam met Schneiderman during the Democratic National Convention in 2016, and it felt like kismet, she had said. Soon, the fairy-tale romance turned darker and led to racist verbal abuse, constant belittling, isolation and physical violence.

Over the course of about a year, I had been broken down by the slapping, spitting and choking that he had inflicted on me during sex, never with my consent, and by his gaslighting, which had destroyed my self-esteem, Selvaratnam writes.

Other things are new. In the book, Selvaratnam reveals that she connected with two other alleged victims of Schneidermans while she was working on her memoir including one woman who told Selvaratnam that she had been involved with Schneiderman and abused by him after The New Yorker piece dropped. This ignited her first bout of true rage toward Schneiderman, she wrote.

Selvaratnam wants her story to help others avoid similar experiences, telling HuffPost that she feels immensely lucky that she had a support network that allowed her to come forward as safely as possible and continue to work and thrive after doing so. She was also able to get some small sense of justice her abuser resigned within three hours of The New Yorker story going live, and was ultimately replaced by a Black woman.

Some people were discouraging me from coming forward because they saw Eric as doing important work, she said. But I knew that there would be a better person who is not an abuser to replace him. And, in fact, we got our first female and Black attorney general, Letitia James. That was not an intended outcome, but its one that made me happy.

Assume Nothing is, of course, about Selvaratnam, but its also about the ways in which intimate partner violence is a national emergency that affects millions of people every year.

A victim looks like all of us, Selvaratnam writes in the introduction. The cycle of violence that permeates every aspect of our lives is an existential and, in many cases, mortal threat to our shared humanity.

HuffPost spoke with Selvaratnam about the next iterations of the Me Too movement, collective healing and why she saw her choice to publicly tell her story as something that was, ultimately, inevitable.

Why did you decide that this was the book you needed to write?

I was inspired to write the book when so many people reached out, sharing their own stories of intimate partner violence and wondering, why arent we talking about these experiences with each other? Why is there so much stigma and shame around intimate violence in committed relationships? Writing it was a way of helping me understand the stages that I went through to get entangled in an abusive relationship. And I wanted to provide [readers] with resources to spot, stop and prevent intimate partner violence.

What was it like to revisit this abusive relationship and sort of excavate your pain during the writing process?

Excavated is exactly the right word. I was excavating not only my memories of abuse as an adult by Eric Schneiderman, but I was also excavating my memories of childhood and witnessing horrific domestic violence. It was healing for me to explore more what my mother went through. I say in the book, I wrote my way out of the darkness.

The book is your story, but it also contains a lot of research about intimate partner violence. Was there anything that you learned throughout the process of researching for the book that surprised you or landed with you in a way maybe you didnt expect it to?

Yes 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 10 men have experienced some form of sexual violence during their lifetime. And of that number, about 11 million women and 5 million men experienced such violence before they were 18 years old. That really saddened me. I have many dream readers, but [one group of people I hope read the book] are high school students, because were conditioned to normalize violence and abuse from the time were born. The other set of statistics that really disturbed me were about how intimate partner violence disproportionately, disproportionately impacts women of color and Indigenous women. Those statistics are devastating.

Devastating is the perfect word.

And the other thing [is] the economic cost. I think about VP [Kamala] Harris amazing opinion piece in The Washington Post about the exodus of women from the workforce and how its a national emergency that demands a national solution. Intertwined with that is the alarming rise of domestic violence during the pandemic , which is also a national emergency. [People] were in lockdown with their abusers and had fewer options to get away and to seek help. The psychological and physiological repercussions are enormous. Trauma sets in at a cellular level. And whether abuse lasts for a few minutes or many years, it creates scars that are markers of time before and after.

Is there anything that you feel like people who havent experienced this kind of trauma firsthand commonly misunderstand about the reality of being in an abusive relationship?

Well, Ive been grateful for Evan Rachel Wood and FKA Twigs sharing their stories of intimate partner violence. I am stunned that these stories are coming out so soon to when my book is coming out. What resonated for me [about their stories] is that we were at different life stages when we were abused. We are separated by generation but united by trauma. And by coming forward, we shift the perception of what a victim looks like. Even fierce women get abused. A victim looks like all of us.

The other thing people dont understand is that perpetrators are of all stripes. And one of the scarier parts about my coming forward is that my abuser was considered a progressive hero and a champion of the Me Too movement. Marilyn Manson and Shia LaBeouf, they were known as troubled people. They were known as misogynists. But Eric was the top law enforcement officer in the state of New York. He was leading the bulwark of Democratic attorneys general around the country against the former administration. And he was publicly a feminist .