“When I started the show, I wasn’t aware of how deeply it would go into me,” Hargitay said in a recent interview with “SVU” fan Selena Gomez published Monday in Interview magazine. ...

She continued, “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.”