Meredith Vieira recently opened up about her own history of being a victim of domestic abuse on her talk show and explained why it was so hard to leave.

Meredith Vieira On Domestic Abuse

Vieira, 60, admitted on The Meredith Vieira Show that before she married her husband of 28 years, Richard Cohen, she was in an abusive relationship. She explained that she had loved this man and endured his abuse as it went from a rough arm grab, to throwing her into a shower with scalding water before locking her out of the apartment.

“It started out, we'd have a fight and he'd just sort of grab my arm. I didn't think a lot about it, and then it turned into pushing me into a wall and then it went beyond that, to (his) actually taking his hand and grabbing my face and saying, 'I could ruin your career if I wanted to and no one would watch you,’” said Vieira. “There was the night, we shared an apartment, and he threw me into a shower, naked with scalding water, and then he threw me outside into the hallway. We lived in an apartment building, and I hid in the stairwell for two hours until he came again, crying, 'I promise I won't do this again.’”

Vieira endured the relationship until she was offered a new job that took her to another state and away from her abuser. When reflecting on why it took her until that point to escape, the talk show host can only surmise that it was fear and possibly a sense of guilt.

“I'm a smart woman … (and heard) a lot of people say, 'Well, who would stay in that situation?' Somebody who doesn't have the wherewithal to get out, the means to get out. (But) I had that. I had a job at the time, and I kept in this relationship. I've done a lot of thinking about why, and I think part of it was fear. I was scared of him,” admitted Vierra. “I was scared if I tried to leave something worse could happen to me. Part of it was guilt, because every time we would have a fight he would then start crying and say, 'I promise I won't do it again,' and I would feel like maybe I contributed somehow to this.”

Vieira opened up about her own experience with domestic abuse in light of the incident involving Baltimore Raven’s Ray Rice, who punched his then-fiancé, now-wife Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City hotel elevator. Though Rice has not been charged for the assault, the video that catches him knocking Palmer unconscious has sparked debate about domestic violence and what needs to be done to curb its prevalence in our society. As Vieira points out, domestic violence is far more than an NFL issue.

“I know [domestic violence] is rampant in this country, and we all have to accept the fact that it's not just an issue with the NFL – it's an issue with all of our lives,” Vieira said in closing. “And until we take it seriously, more and more women are going to get abused."