United Farm Workers co-founder and labor activist Dolores Huerta went public Wednesday with her own account of being raped by Cesar Chavez, following a stunning New York Times investigation that uncovered decades of sexual abuse, including of young girls, by the civil rights icon.

Prior to speaking with the Times, Huerta had never publicly disclosed the allegations against Chavez, who died in 1993.

Huerta, now 95, said in the statement that she kept the secret for the last sixty years because, “I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

She told the Times about two separate encounters with Chavez that turned sexually violent, one in 1960 and another in 1966. In the first one, she explained feeling pressured to have sex in a hotel during a work trip. In the second, she recounted Chavez driving her to a secluded area, parking, and raping her inside the vehicle. Both instances, Huerta said, resulted in pregnancies.

“I chose to keep my pregnancies secret and, after the children were born, I arranged for them to be raised by other families that could give them stable lives,” her statement, shared on Medium, reads. Huerta added that, over the years, “I have been fortunate to develop a deep relationship with these children.” But, she continued, “no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.”