Terrified that a child molester might escape punishment for driving a young girl to suicide, “Desperate Housewives” star Teri Hatcher told cops the secret that tormented her for three decades: This monster had molested her, too.

Thanks to Hatcher’s testimony, her former uncle, Richard Hayes Stone, is now serving a 14-year prison sentence, prosecutors said. Hatcher said opening up about the abuse that began when she was just 5 and seeing Stone go to jail has empowered her.

“I’m 41 years old and it’s time for me to stop hiding,” she said in an unflinching interview in Vanity Fair. “I don’t want to pretend it never happened anymore.”

Hatcher’s buried memories began surfacing three years ago when she learned that Stone – long divorced from her mother’s sister – was accused of molesting 14-year-old Sarah Van Cleemput of Sunnyvale, Calif.

The most damning evidence against Stone, then 64, was the suicide note the teenager wrote before blowing her brains out with her father’s gun.

“You’re probably thinking a normal teenager doesn’t do this, well ask Dick,” Sarah wrote. “Please forgive me.”

Hatcher told the magazine she “freaked out” when she read about Sarah’s death.

“It struck me so strongly that – oh, my God, he’s been doing this for 35 years! Who else has he done this to?”

Desperate

Meanwhile, the prosecution’s case was unraveling.

Stone had admitted to a “passionate kiss” with Sarah when she was 12 but “there was no independent evidence that a molestation of Sarah had occurred,” Chuck Gillingham, a Santa Clara County prosecutor, told Vanity Fair. And while cops believe Stone abused three other girls, none would testify against him, not even the 12-year-old girl with whom Sarah had made a suicide pact.

Hatcher admitted she didn’t immediately call the cops or go public because she was terrified she’d be branded “as tainted goods” just as her acting career was rebounding after years of frustration and as she was getting over a messy divorce.

“Here’s what I anticipated: He did this, he gets off and Teri ends up on the cover of a tabloid,” she said.

But Hatcher was “haunted” by Sarah’s story and felt increasingly guilty about staying silent, especially because her daughter, Emerson Rose, is about the same age she was when the alleged abuse by Stone began.

Finally, two days before the hearing to dismiss the Stone case, Hatcher sat down with cops and related in graphic detail what he allegedly did to her.

“My memories have been with me forever, right down to the details of the color of the carpet in the car,” she said.

Hatcher also agreed to testify against Stone, but her statement was enough to persuade Stone to plead guilty to four counts of child molestation.

Hatcher said she didn’t mention the abuse in her autobiographical book, “Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life,” because she didn’t want to admit it might be behind the intimacy issues that sabotaged her marriage to actor Jon Tenney and other relationships.

While calling herself “a strong chick,” she admits, “It has not been easy for me to trust or commit to men, or to anyone, really.”