Award-winning Sierra Leonean musician Vida Green has broken her silence in a harrowing public statement, alleging that a man she loved and trusted raped her repeatedly while she was recovering from surgery and warning that if anything happens to her, let it be known that she spoke her truth.
She is one of the most recognisable voices in Sierra Leonean music an award-winning Afropop and R&B artist with tens of thousands of followers, known across the country simply as Vida. On Monday, she used that platform not to promote a song, but to tell the most painful story of her life.
In a lengthy and emotionally shattering Facebook post, Vida Green full name Vida Green alleged that a man she described as someone she had loved deeply, trusted completely, and allowed into her life sexually assaulted and raped her multiple times. She did not name him. But she named everything else: the torn clothes, the ripped underwear, the bruising and biting, the surgery scars she showed him through tears in a desperate bid to make him see her humanity, and his refusal to stop.
“I cried like a child,” she wrote, “because in that moment, I genuinely thought I was going to die.”
The context of Vida’s account adds a particular dimension of cruelty to the allegation. She said she had been recovering from illness and surgery a period she noted that many people around her were aware of and had told the man explicitly that she was not yet ready to be sexually active, that she needed time to recover from her surgical wounds and regain her strength.
“At first, he appeared understanding. I believed him. I trusted him.”
What came next, she says, shattered that trust in the most violent way imaginable. She described showing him her surgery scars through tears, hoping the sight of her wounds would reach him. It did not.
What makes Vida’s statement particularly resonant is not just what she alleges was done to her but her unflinching account of why she stayed silent for as long as she did. She described the specific architecture of fear that keeps survivors from speaking: the terror that no one would believe her, that she would be blamed instead of protected, that she would be met with the familiar cruelty of questions like *why did you go there? and someone like him could never do that.
“I feared being judged more than being protected,” she wrote.
She tried to convince herself it was not real. She tried to bury it. She waited for the memories to fade. They did not.
“Trauma does not disappear simply because we silence it. It lingers. It follows you into your sleep, your thoughts, your body, and your daily existence.”
She described her current mental state in terms that will be familiar to survivors of sexual trauma: emotional exhaustion, disconnection from herself, an inability to sleep or function normally, a constant sense of numbness. “Some days,” she wrote, “I feel like I am existing rather than living.”
The most chilling line in the post was also its last. “If anything happens to me, let it be known that I spoke my truth.” It is the sentence of a woman who knows that speaking out carries risk who has weighed that risk against the destruction of continued silence, and chosen to speak anyway.
She closed with the reason she finally did: “I deserve to tell my truth. I deserve to be heard. And no amount of manipulation, status, charm, or public perception should ever erase the reality of what was done to me.”
Vida’s statement lands in a country where gender-based violence remains a crisis of staggering proportions. An estimated 62 per cent of women aged 15–49 in Sierra Leone have experienced physical or sexual violence, according to the 2019 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey, and in 2024 alone, over 3,000 cases of sexual violence were recorded across seven Rainbo Centres with survivors ranging in age from two months to ninety-seven years.
Sierra Leone has not been passive legislatively. The Sexual Offences Act of 2012 and its 2019 amendment increased the maximum penalty for rape, defined additional offences, and strengthened provisions for prosecution. The 2019 amendment also established the Sexual Offences Model Court to fast-track justice and created government one-stop centres where survivors can receive free treatment and counselling. But as advocates have long noted, laws alone do not change cultures of impunity or dismantle the social architecture of silence that Vida described so precisely.
Reporting remains abysmally low. Many survivors are deterred by social stigma, a lack of faith in the justice system, and the inability to afford legal representation. The questions Vida said she feared: Why did you go there? Why did you trust him? are not hypothetical. They are the actual questions survivors have been asked by communities, families, and in some cases, institutions.
Vida Green is not the first Sierra Leonean woman to speak publicly about sexual assault. She will not be the last. But each time a woman with a public platform chooses to absorb the social cost of disclosure knowing she will be doubted, scrutinised, and in some corners vilified she chips away at the silence that protects perpetrators.
At the time of publication, no arrest had been announced and no individual had been publicly named in connection with the allegation. Ground Report Africa will continue to follow developments as they emerge.
Survivors of sexual violence in Sierra Leone seeking support can contact the Rainbo Initiative, which operates centres in Freetown, Bo, Kenema, Makeni, and other locations across the country, providing free medical treatment and psychosocial counselling.
