Sheryl Lee Ralph says 'famous TV judge' sexually assaulted her

"Abbott Elementary" star Sheryl Lee Ralph, who was raised in Hempstead and attended Uniondale High School, says she once was sexually assaulted by "a famous TV judge" whom she was quick to note was "not Judge [Greg] Mathis. I love him; he's a great man."

Speaking Tuesday on the podcast "Way Up with Angela Yee" to promote her memoir "DIVA 2.0," the Emmy Award winner, 66, recalled being "at a very public place" doing promotion for a TV program. Dressed in a suit, "I was handling my business for the television show I was on at that time. He and I were on the same network. This man walked in, grabbed me by the back of my neck, turned me around and rammed his nasty … tongue down my throat. And everybody at the network saw it."

Not only saw it, she said, but asked her to stay silent. "Do you know that they did not want any bad press around their show and did not care what had just happened to me," Ralph continued, mimicking the network people's response: " 'It wasn't so bad after all, was it? … It's not that bad, is it? Please, don't say anything. We don't need the bad press — it's a brand-new show. Yours [also] is a new show.' I was, like, 'Lord have mercy.' "

Ralph added that she reached out at the time to New Orleans’ then-mayor, Marc Morial, not specifying how the two knew each other. “He said, ‘You want me to send the police there right now? ‘Cause we will fix his you-know-what right now.’ " Morial’s two terms ran from 1994 to 2002. During that time frame, Ralph was a star of the 1996-2001 UPN sitcom "Moesha."

She also described an earlier experience that in her book she says involved a "famous promoter” who had seen her in "Dreamgirls," the 1981-85 Broadway musical for which she received a Tony Award nomination for her starring role. The unnamed man took her to lunch "to discuss my future in entertainment," she wrote, but she then found "his hand creeping up my thigh."

"It was, like, the third time something like this had happened to me," Ralph said on the podcast. "And I thought to myself, 'What did I do to deserve that?' My skirt is at my knees; I have on a sweater blouse. What made this man think that he could just come over and put his hands on my body … ?"

Then, years later, "I was in a situation and that man walked through the door. He sat down at the table across from me. He did not remember any of this. But I had to let him know what he did that night. … I had to confront him about it. Do you want to know what was the shocking part? Everybody around the table was appalled that I would stand up for myself. … They told me that I should be ashamed of myself and why would I even bring that up? And at the dinner table."

This, she said, is "the kind of stuff that happens" to women. "That’s what happens. That’s what makes it hard for women to speak up about these things.”

Ralph has not commented further, and her representative did not respond to a Newsday request for comment.