Valerie Bertinelli reveals public response to sexual trauma revelation – 'My heart broke'

Valerie Bertinelli talks to us about her love of family, friends, cats and herself - and how she's perfectly content.

Valerie Bertinelli knows you might be judging her.

She couldn’t care less.

“If someone wants to spend months writing and lying about me, they can, because it doesn’t define who I am,” Bertinelli tells USA TODAY. “It doesn’t change who I am. I know who I am … I want everybody to say to themselves in the mirror: You are a good person. Get used to it.”

Bertinelli, at 65 and perennially adorable in a beret, glasses and comfy striped sweater, is chatting from her bedroom, sipping from a mug and sharing unvarnished insights about love, self-acceptance and moving beyond traumas that might otherwise define us.

Those are the tenets of her new book, “Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect” (HarperCollins, out now). But they’re not merely armchair psychiatry topics. This is a woman who has lived through heartache, struggled with anxiety, loved and lost, and endured the raw grind of intense therapy to land at her current state of self-acceptance.