Mariska Hargitay says she was 'definitely a victim of secondary trauma' from “Law & Order: SVU” stories

She has played Olivia Benson in creator Dick Wolf's ripped-from-the-headlines franchise since 1999.

Mariska Hargitay couldn't have known that playing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit protagonist Olivia Benson would hit her hard. But it did.

"When I started the show, I wasn't aware of how deeply it would go into me," Hargitay explained in an interview with SVU fan Selena Gomez published Monday in Interview magazine. "My husband Peter is always like, anytime I go anywhere, my first question is, 'What's the crime rate here?' So it's on the brain. There's been times when I didn't know how to protect myself, and I think I was definitely a victim of secondary trauma from being inundated with these stories and knowing that they were true. Those were the parts that I didn't know how to metabolize, just because of the sheer volume of it."

Indeed, Hargitay's character is constantly bombarded with, as the beginning of each episode says, "especially heinous" crimes.

The awful statistics she learned on the show drove her to found the Joyful Heart Foundation. Started in 2004, the foundation's mission is "to transform society's response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, support survivors' healing, and end this violence forever."

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That way, Hargitay said, "I would feel like, well, at least I'm doing something about it."

One of the foundation's goals is to make sure that the backlog of rape kits across the country are tested. After a Michigan prosecutor found more than 11,000 untested rape kits on an office shelf, Hargitay worked to help the county raise the funding to test them. As NBC journalist Andrea Canning reported in August, "they found 22 serial rapists among these kits."

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Speaking to Gomez, Benson noted that, when she started on the show, things were "so different."

"I was not the boss and I had no power," Benson said. "I was also overwhelmed and scared and kind of looked up to everybody. It was more of a patriarchal society 25 years ago. They set the rules in their universe and we just showed up in it. But as I grew and evolved, both as Mariska and as Olivia Benson, I think my favorite part is that as I evolved, I didn’t give away pieces of myself."

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Now, she's "in this very unique place of being a total badass, I know my worth, I know my power, I know what I have to offer, and I’m totally comfortable with my vulnerability, with all the ways I still feel like a little girl. That's a really peaceful place to be."

Hargitay and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit return for a 26th season on Thursday, Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. Central on NBC.

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