Lenny Kravitz's unwanted sexual encounter was an 'experience and a lesson'
Lenny Kravitz views an unwanted sexual encounter he was subjected to as "an experience and a lesson", not an assault.
The 'Fly Away' singer revealed in his 2020 memoir, 'Let Love Rule', that a friend of his babysitter came into his room and began touching him while he was in his bed as a teenager, but he's insisted he wasn't "traumatised" by what happened.
Asked if he considers what happened to be sexual assault, he told Esquire magazine: “It was an experience and a lesson.
"Everything doesn’t have to be so... I’m not saying that there aren’t things that deserve to be addressed - maybe somebody would say it should have been addressed and that it was, whatever, but that’s the time it was.
"I lived, and I learned. I wasn’t traumatised.”
In the early days of his fame, the 59-year-old star had an open house for friends, but Lenny admitted he "got burned" by people taking advantage of him.
His 34-year-old daughter Zoe Kravitz - who came to live with him when she was 11 - recalled: "It was absolutely insane.
“It was like living in a mall or an airport, where people are just constantly coming in and out.”
And Lenny admitted: "I got burned. Completely. I put it all out there, and I put it all out there in a way for people to take advantage of it. I was an empty vessel.”
But the 'American Woman' hitmaker - who had Zoe with ex-wife Lisa Bonet - was forced to rethink his generous ways when his daughter was around 15 and she and a friend came home to find a woman sitting in the kitchen eating pie.
The teenagers assumed she was a friend of Lenny, but when he came home and asked to be introduced to Zoe's other friend, the pair froze.
Zoe said: "She ended up being some unwell person who found their way into the house. We realised, we need to button this up a little bit.”
But Lenny admitted he wasn't at ease with being less hospitable.
He said: “Saying no is very difficult for me. I was like that from childhood. My mom used to call me the Pied Piper. I’d bring everybody home. Just met them a few hours ago? I bring them home. I love people. I always have loved people.
“Being Black in America at that time, everybody’s sticking together. Everybody’s helping each other. There’s always an extra seat at the table. There’s always extra food.”
